A question commonly asked is how can you quiesce MySQL databases when running on a Linux VM? Since Linux doesn’t have a VSS mechanism like Windows does, it’s not as straight forward as a Microsoft SQL quiescence. On of Veeam’s Systems Engineers, Ricky El-Qasem, has written a white paper on the subject and it’s available now for download from the Veeam website. The white paper describes 2 different options/methods for running pre and post snapshot scripts using VMware tools installed on the Linux VM.

Here’s a quick preview:

Option 1. Suspend MySQL service

The MySQL service is stopped for a few seconds while the snapshot is created then
started again and is described in Method 1.

Advantage: It’s quick and easy and will allow you to take a transaction of
all databases without additional disk usage local to the MySQL server.

Disadvantage: For a brief period of time no databases running on the
MySQL server will be available which may not be suitable for applications
that need 100% uptime.

Option 2. Use Online Dump

An online dump of each database is taken using the mysqldump command which
copies a database to storage accessible from the MySQL server and is described in
Method 2.
Advantage: The dumped databases are in a transaction consistent state
and this is achieved without stopping the MySQL service and allows for
100% uptime.
Disadvantage: Extra storage space is required to maintain a second copy
of the database and process may take a considerable amount of time to
achieve depending on the size of your databases.

VMworld is fast approaching and of course Veeam has a few announcements to make. The big announcement for us this year is Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0. While this version won’t be publicly available until sometime after VMworld, we will be demoing it at the Veeam booth (#1202) during VMworld. We know other vendors have done this in the past and not stuck to their release dates, but I’m pretty confident that Veeam Backup and Replication 4.0 will ship in Q4 2009 and not Q3 2010.

To keep tabs on Veeam Backup & Replication and find out what’s new in 4.0, sign up here. There’s also a Flash video that yours truly recorded the audio for, we’ve put it on YouTube as well, enjoy:

You may have noticed that Veeam announced a new program today. Essentially Veeam will allow anyone to upgrade their current VMware backup product to Veeam backup for 50% off the list price.

In these difficult economic times it’s good to see that we’re offering a break to people who want to move up to the #1 Backup for VMware!

Everyone at Veeam is excited about VMworld Europe this year in Cannes (well, at least everyone that gets to go). Besides having live demos of all our products, including just released Veeam Backup 3.0, we’ll have a few cool announcements too (I hope).

What else can you expect from Veeam at VMworld Europe? Apparently Gabrie over at GabesVirtualWorld is doing some detective work and has come up with this interesting video. If you don’t get it, that’s because you’re not on Twitter with the rest of the Virtual Twits.

Also, if you’re in Cannes on Sunday night, stop by the Veeam Party, it’s on a boat, yes, a Mother F#$%!ing boat. Here’s the details for the party, be there or be vSquare! Space is limited so there may be a line, VIP passes have gone out to a select few, otherwise show up w/ your VMworld badge for entry…

Today Veeam released a free version of it’s VMware monitoring tool, Veeam Monitor 3.0 Free Edition. There are plenty of other places where you can go and read all about it, including the product site. I’d rather take this space to thank all of those who have helped make this product launch a success. Thanks to the power of Twitter and the great bloggers out there, word of this release spread quickly and our marketing department did an excellent job of putting out just enough information to keep everyone interested. The following list may not be complete, if I have forgotten someone please let me know in the comments and I’lll update the post…

Scott Lowe
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/12/new-tool-from-veeam/
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/22/free-veeam-monitor/

Rick Scherer
http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/12/12/free-holiday-gift-from-veeam/
http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/12/18/someone-unwrapped-their-present-from-veeam/

Rich Brambley – he really got things rolling thanks to this tweet from me
http://vmetc.com/2008/12/12/guess-what-free-tool-from-veeam-will-be-available-on-dec-22/
http://vmetc.com/2008/12/16/unwrapping-the-free-tool-from-veeam/
http://vmetc.com/2008/12/19/my-guess-on-what-veeam-has-nworks-for-vi-admins-on-dec-22/
http://vmetc.com/2008/12/22/veeam-monitor-free-version-now-available/

Jason Boche – Jason got the last clue which Rich used to figure out the gift
http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=686
http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=716
http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=734

Eric Sloof – Eric did a quick Jing video in his “First Findings” post
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/822-Rich-Brambley-unwrapped-Veeams-holiday-gift.html
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/829-Heres-your-free-gift-from-Veeam!.html
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/830-Veeam-Monitor-3.0.2-First-Findings.html

Alan Renouf AKA Virtual-Al
http://teckinfo.blogspot.com/2008/12/veeam-monitor-30-free-edition.html

Rodney Haywood – thanks Rodos for giving us marketing cred over VMware
http://rodos.haywood.org/2008/12/from-kl-to-vi4-to-vsphere.html

Mike Laverick – A longtime friend of Veeam
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=780
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=778

Jim Kenzig – Go Indians!
http://kenzig.blogspot.com/2008/12/download-pick-veeam-software-vmware-vi3.html

Kevin Goodman – Great guy, follow him on Twitter
http://blog.colovirt.com/2008/12/22/344/
http://blog.colovirt.com/2008/12/22/veeam-free-tool-for-the-holidays/

Jon Owings of 2 VCPs and a Truck – Yes, we all love free stuff!
http://www.2vcps.com/2008/12/veeam-monitor-free.html

Rod Trent – of myITForum fame
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rtrent/archive/2008/12/19/get-a-free-christmas-gift-from-veeam-learn-about-a-new-tool-releasing-december-22nd.aspx
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rtrent/archive/2008/12/22/veeam-monitor-free-edition-http-tinyurl-com-a4t.aspx

Gerben Kloosterman from Getronics
http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl/2008/12/veeams-christmas-gift-veeam-monitor-302-for-free/

Updates: 12/26/08

Rynardt Spies of VirtualVCP.Com has a nice review up
http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/61/1/

Get more from Veeam Change Management Reports!

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 is a very robust reporting tool for you VI environment utilizing Visio, Excel, Word, and PDF formats. One specific report that has had a big impact for VMware administrators is the Excel Change Management report. This report allows administrator to compare their VI environment from two points in time by an ad-hoc method or have changes e-mailed to them automatically when they occur. Within the Change Management report there are four worksheets (Summary, Virtual Machines, Storage, and Data.) The first three worksheets are cut and dry as they show exactly what you would expect them to from their title. The fourth (Data) worksheet is where the true hidden power of this report exists. At first glance there is a copious amount of data that can be initially intimidating but once administrator understand how the data is presented and how it can be manipulated the reporting possibilities are limitless. Below is a walkthrough of how to generate a Datastore capacity trend report from the information contained within the data tab. Once this process and methodology is understood you’ll be generating crucial reports in no time. Also, everything that is outlined here can also be applied to the Raw Data Analysis report within Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 to extend your reporting capabilities even further!

The first step is to log in to the Reporter Enterprise 3.0 GUI and generate a Change Management Report.

Now you have an excel document for the baseline of this report. Click the “data” tab and let’s begin!

In the “data” worksheet the columns can be sorted to reveal the exact data needed for the Datastore trend report. Click the object type column and then select only the sharedstorage field. Then click the Property name column and select Free Space (GB) numeric.(While sorting the columns take some time to work with these fields to explore some of the possibilities you can get from this report.)

Once the sorting has been done the worksheet will look similar to this:

The next step is to create new worksheets for the expanded report. I have created two worksheets and imported the sorted data into one of the new worksheets (SCT DATA). (I have also sorted a specific Datastore COLDEM03 out by selecting it in the NAME column.)

Now in the other empty worksheet (SCT REPORT) insert a pivot table using the data from the other newly created data worksheet (SCT DATA)

Once the pivot table has been created in the report worksheet (SCT REPORT) open the PivotTable Field List and sort the fields as shown below.

Thus giving you a pivot table that looks like this.

Create a Line chart from the pivot table data and you’re almost done!

Now you have a Line chart that you can edit and format it to clean up its view and you’re done with a similar result to what’s pictured below.

Now that you have seen an example of how you can utilize the data that Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 provides, sign up for an evaluation and try it for yourself! Many of our current users are working with these reports and have created their own report to suite their company’s needs with reports ranging from ones like this to customized chargeback reports.

Just wanted to say Hi to the VeeamMeUP community and just say a few words about myself:

I work under Doug Hazelman @ Veeam, I’m married with 1 beautiful daughter, Iam a virtualisation evangelist, X VMware instructor and maintain my own blog www.virtualizeplanet.com I have a plethora of qualifications and always happy to help.

Hey World

Recently, Vizioncore announced the next version of what they claim to be an industry-standard backup and restore solution. It is not known yet when this release is going to be available, but what’s more interesting is the feature set of this planned future release. When reading the announcement, I simply could not drive away a feeling that I was reading a data sheet for the already generally available Veeam Backup 2.0 product. In fact, Veeam Backup has had yet another minor update since the release of 2.0 at the end of July.

Quote from Vizioncore’s original newsletter:

vRanger Pro v4.0 is Vizioncore’s next generation industry-standard backup and restore solution with increased speed and scalability. vRanger Pro 4.0 also shrinks the storage requirements for backups by introducing incremental support. This version will also deliver near instantaneous restores of files, finally eradicating the reason for procuring file level agents, as well as a simplified UI, upgraded reporting capability, improved load balancing, and platform support for ESXi.

Let’s take a look at all the pre-announced features one by one and compare them with the current generally available version of Veeam Backup.

• Increased speed and scalability. Check! Veeam Backup 2.0 is several times faster than the current version of vRanger Pro, according to reports from our customers.
• vRanger Pro 4.0 also shrinks the storage requirements for backups by introducing incremental support. Check! Veeam Backup has had this feature since version one.
• This version will also deliver near instantaneous restores of files, finally eradicating the reason for procuring file level agents. Check! Veeam Backup has offered lightning-fast file-level recovery since version one. Vizioncore has talked about having fast file-level restore, but so far has not delivered anything other than vague descriptions, like this one, for instance.
• As well as a simplified UI. Check! Veeam Backup has it already. And the interface blows vRanger’s away, according to a vRanger customer’s post on their support forum (the post looks a bit confusing because Vizioncore’s fair-competition principles allow ninja-editing of all mentions of “Veeam” on their forums). Here’s a quote of this post (since I suspect it may get deleted):

I agree this [ESXi support] should already be in place. We’ve waited long enough for vcb diffs among things. [MISSING WORD] supports 3i (can’t restore though but you could restore to a regular 3.x host and vmotion it over to 3i) but still for a newer company they are coming up with great new features (and no I don’t work for them!) They have backup and replication combined, vss support and consistent restores for databases, support for 3rd party tape backup, supposed de-dup etc… and the interface blows vranger away (start/end time, performance metrics! Ever since vizioncore was “acquired” or whatever, the support has gone down the tubes and the releases have become less impressive. I think [MISSING WORD] is the up and coming company and I’d love to hear the comparisons between the 2 companies and what they have to offer. I love the posts that state “oh that’ll be released next quarter” and then it’s always delayed quarters past that.

Moreover, an Information Week reviewer’s conclusion is the same.

Bottom line, vRanger’s application interface flow, inability to preserve settings, and lack of a Windows service on which to operate will hinder it in enterprise data centers. If you can master the CLI you can effectively eliminate the GUI, but most folks won’t go this route. That makes improving the interface all the more imperative.

• Upgraded reporting capability. Check! Veeam Backup 2.0 already provides comprehensive reports with thorough job statistics.
• Improved load balancing. Check! See speed/scalability above. By the way, since vRanger Pro currently has no load balancing whatsoever, so I fail to see how it could be “improved.”
• And platform support for ESXi. Check! Veeam Backup 2.0 supports ESXi.

You might ask now, so what is the difference between Veeam Backup 2.0 and vRanger Pro 4.0? Veeam Backup 2.0 is nice, but vRanger Pro 4.0 seems to have almost all those “sexy” features too, except may be just a few (like built-in deduplication)?

The answer is easy – the only difference is that Veeam has all of these now, and it is all working. While Vizioncore is essentially saying “buy now, and we will have this soon…”

But… how long is soon? Is it like ESXi support, which Vizioncore initially promised to deliver in Q2 2008, and with the current schedule this has already slipped to Q4? This is half a year slip (all provided dates are according to what they have been posting on their internal support forum). And think about this: since all of the features above were clearly not planned in advance, but rather added into the dev plans after the release of Veeam Backup 2.0 (end of July), I would guess that we may not be seeing vRanger Pro 4.0 for six to eight month from now!

Finally, where is the guarantee that these features will work as advertised? Or maybe it will be the same story as the incomplete VSS support Vizioncore introduced earlier, which simply does not work because VSS is only leveraged to perform freeze and nothing else? No wonder vRanger restore is done incorrectly from such VSS backups, killing Domain Controllers, Exchange Servers and other applications featuring multi-master replication functionality upon “recovery”. In my opinion, it would be better to have no VSS support whatsoever, than a fake implementation that gives your customers a false sense of security.

Alright, so let’s imagine that we have finally got to the point where vRanger Pro 4.0 works and has all the required updates available, and all features are working as advertised. How much more advanced will Veeam Backup be compared to vRanger Pro by the time they finally release a version that catches up with our current version? Needless to say, Veeam Backup will be a few steps ahead at that time, as Veeam already has many innovative features in our lab, just waiting to be incorporated into the next releases. Features which are not even promised by Vizioncore to be available “in the next version”.

And there is one single reason behind the fact that Vizioncore will always be trying to catch up with Veeam from now on: Vizioncore was acquired by Quest Software. Quest has already shown their heavy hand over Vizioncore by re-creating their vCharter product into vCharter Pro, built on their fledgling monitoring product, Foglight. Also in this newsletter is
the announcement that vCharter Pro will be rebranded as vFoglight. It’s always interesting when a company takes a product with brand recognition and rebrands it to a product with no brand recognition, especially in the virtualization space. What’s next for Vizioncore? Will it remain independent as they say, or will they fall into the black hole of so many other Quest-acquired companies?

To wrap up, I want to note this quote from the same Vizioncore newsletter:

vRanger Pro v4.0 is Vizioncore’s next generation industry-standard backup and restore solution.

Based on all of the above, I wonder who the real industry leader is now, to afford claiming such a thing. And why we have so many customers switching from the industry-standard backup solution to ours?!

The way Veeam’s Synthetic Backup works is that after the first full backup, all subsequent backups are incremental, meaning just the changes from the last backup run, forever. Veeam Backup “injects” the changes into the full recovery file (.VBK) and then also saves any data replaced during this process into the reversed incremental changes file (.VRB). The .VBK file is always a full recovery file and the largest file in the directory. The .VBK file also has the most current modified date as it gets updated after each backup cycle.

The .VRB files do not change, as they contain the .VBK data blocks which were replaced by incremental data for that particular incremental backup run. To restore or roll-back to a particular date/time, all related .VRB files are applied to the .VBK file in the required order to get you back to that point-in-time.

The retention policy specifies how many of the .VRB files you want to keep, this also then corresponds to how “far” you can roll-back. If the retention policy is set to 14, then the 15th time the backup job runs it will delete the oldest .VRB file.

Veeam utilized the same metholody for it’s Replication except that the changes get “injected” into the .VMDK file on the target, there is no .VBK file. There are .VRB files and this is what allows for replication roll-back.

If you archive the .VBK and associated .VRB files as a set to tape, you can recover them back to disk if needed and import them into Veeam Backup 2.0 to roll-back or recover to any point in time in that set.