Who would have thought that 44% of organizations still avoid using VMs for mission-critical apps? We found this out recently from a survey that we ran and about a week ago we released this “first annual report” about the impact of virtualization on data protection and we made it available for free on our website at www.veeam.com/survey.

As we were talking about SureBackup back in March, a lot of the analysts were asking us if recovery verification was really an issue…How many backups actually fail? How many backups are actually tested? To find out some of these answers as well as answers to other questions, we hired Vanson Bourne which is an independent market research company to perform a survey of 500 CIOs from organizations across the US, UK, Germany and France.

Here are a few of the many interesting insights that were revealed in this survey:

• 44% of CIOs say they are avoiding using virtualization for certain mission-critical workloads due to concerns about backup and recovery
• Currently organizations only back up 68% of their virtual machines
• It takes about 5 hours to recovery a virtual machine
• 61% of enterprises using physical-based tools for backup and recovery will now change their approach specifically because of virtualization
• 63% experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server
• The average cost of failed recoveries is close to $400k
• Only 2% of all backups are tested annually (see below)

Want to see more? Download the full survey results here www.veeam.com/survey and please post in the comments about what you are seeing in your organization.

External Sources who posted about this survey and report:

“Data protection fears stifling mass virtualization adoption” by Mark Cox
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=26300

Businesses still wary of virtualization, study reveals by Wewick Ashford, Computerweekly.com
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/11/03/243736/Businesses-still-wary-of-virtualisation-study-reveals.htm

“Virtualization ‘held back’ by backup fears” by Andrew Charlesworth, Computing.co.uk
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2272633/virtualisation-held-back-back

“Virtualisation adoption slowed by backup and recovery concerns” by ComputerworldUK.com
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/infrastructure/3246803/virtualisation-adoption-slowed-by-backup-and-recovery-concerns/

“Virtualisation being held back by lack of trust?” by Steve Evans, Green IT
http://greenit.cbronline.com/news/virtualisation-held-back-by-lack-of-trust-011110

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.