vmware

White Papers Galore!

Feb 12th

Posted by vmdoug in Veeam Backup & Replication

No comments

Over the past few months Veeam has commissioned a number of white papers from various industry specialists. There’s a lot of valuable information in these white papers, not just about Veeam but about virtualization backup and recovery in general.

OpenBench Lab Report: Better Data Protection for VMware vSphere

By Jack Fegreus Managing Director openBench Labs.

System and storage virtualization introduces multiple levels of logical abstraction and resource redirection that can obscure and complicate important IT operations. Among the hardest hit IT operations are those associated with file-level data protection.
Read this white paper by industry expert Jack Fegreus to learn how you can:

  • Minimize vSphere disk risk with backup and replication – combine backup and near-CDP-level replication to unify both data protection processes for IT with a synthetic backup process and consistent process wizards.
  • Maximize backup performance with deduplication and compression – how you can reduce the footprint of full VM’s backups by 3 – 9 times with data deduplication, compression, and recognition of thin provisioning.
  • Leverage full support for ESX and ESXi without VCB – fully utilize the new vStorage API or VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) when performing backup or replication, allowing SMB sites with or without shared storage to fully leverage ESXi, including the ability to replicate VMs to an ESXi host.
  • Dramatically increase full and incremental backup speed and reduces storage requirements by utilizing new vSphere Changed-Block Tracking and thin provisioning.
  • Higher RPO support via Virtual CDP with replication – leverage inline data deduplication and compression to provide near continuous data protection (CDP) with replication.
  • Ensure transaction consistency at VM and application levels – ensure VM transaction consistency and Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for VSS-aware Windows applications such as Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange.

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure better VMware vSphere data protection through unified backup and replication.

http://www.veeam.com/go/better-data-protection-vsphere

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

By Eric Siebert

VMware vSphere™, the industry’s first cloud operating system, leverages the power of virtualization to transform datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud-computing infrastructures. VMware vSphere includes many new features and technological enhancements that can benefit you. While there are several reasons to upgrade to vSphere, this white paper focuses on how VMware vSphere and its vStorage technologies improve data protection and disaster recovery.

Read this white paper by industry expert Eric Siebert to learn how you can leverage vSphere to achieve:

  • 30% average reduction in storage space
  • 50% average increase in backup speeds when performing full backup
  • 90% average increase in backup speeds when performing incremental backups
  • 80% lower cost for near continuous data protection (CDP)
  • Increased reliability

About the Author
Eric Siebert is a 25-year IT veteran whose primary focus is VMware virtualization and Windows server administration. He is one of the 300 VMware vExperts for 2009, author of the book “VI3 Implementation and Administration” and a frequent TechTarget contributor. In addition, he maintains vSphere-land.com, a VMware information site.

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp

How Virtualization Cuts CDP Costs by 80%

By David Davis Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com

Until recently, CDP has been used only by the largest enterprise companies and only for their most critical data. For small and medium businesses (SMBs)—it was simply cost-prohibitive.
Thanks to virtualization, advanced disaster recovery methods that result in fast recovery and low system downtime are now available to all organizations, from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, for a very reasonable cost.
This white paper compares 3 different options of implementing CDP:

  • “Legacy CDP” or Classic SAN-based CDP
  • Software-based Server Replication
  • Virtualization-enabled “Near-CDP”

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure business continuity and enable disaster recovery at an affordable price

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware_vsphere_continuous_data_protection

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VMware Partner Exchange – See you there?

Jan 25th

Posted by vmdoug in PartnerExchange

1 comment

One of my favorite events is just around the corner, VMware Partner Exchange 2010, Feb 8-11 in Las Vegas. I like PEX because it gives me a chance to meet old friends, new friends and new and current Veeam partners. I also get to attend sessions exclusive for VMware partners and get the inside scoop on new VMware technology (all under NDA of course).  Veeam will have a booth again this year and as a special bonus, we’re going to be giving away a Kindle DX Global Edition to one lucky person who registers at our booth.

KindleDX

So if you’re going to be at PEX, be sure to stop by the Veeam booth. Also, feel free to find me on Twitter as I’m sure someone will be organizing a TweetUp or 2.

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Veeam Backup & Replication 4

Nov 22nd

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

3 comments

A few weeks ago Veeam released Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0. I should have written a post the week it was released but I’ve been pretty busy and I also wanted to wait and get some of our customer’s reactions before writing about it. Our 4.0 release is a major milestone for us since it provides full support for the vStorage APIs for Data Protection. There appears to be a bit of confusion with some on what the vStorage APIs for Data Protection really do, especially when compared with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). As VMware states on the vStorage page, the vStorage APIs for Data Protection are the next generation of VCB. For a good explanation on the differences, check out my friend @Gostev’s blog over at vNotion “What is VMware vStorage API?”

So why do we still have support for VCB? The simple answer is that we have a number of current customers that are using VCB and have not switched over to vSphere yet. We could have dropped support for VCB but then that would require us to maintain both 3.x and 4.x releases. Since 4.0 is an built upon 3.x and not a complete re-write of the software, we left VCB support in for our customers. The benefit is that our customers have a choice of how to process their backups: vStorage APIs, VCB or Veeam’s Service Console or Network modes. Of course I do recommend that customers use the vStorage API methods, it gives you the best performance and is also built specifically for vSphere.

Up to 10x Faster

Yes, it’s really true and our customers have posted as much on our forums. We’ve consolidated this feedback into a handy PDF document INSANE BACKUP SPEED, it’s not us saying this, it’s real people using our 4.0 product.

How is it so fast? One of the biggest reasons is Changed Block Tracking (CBT) which is included in the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). With CBT enabled for VM’s running on ESX or ESXi 4.x, VMware actually tracks the block level changes made to the VMDK. This way, when software like Veeam Backup & Replication takes a Snapshot, VMware returns a list of what blocks have changed. This significantly increases backup speed as we no longer have to try and determine the changes ourselves, VMware tells us in a matter of seconds.

The Critics

Of course anytime a vendor releases software that’s cutting edge and ahead of the rest of the field, others will try and knock it down. This recently happened on a blog sponsored by one of our competitors, claiming Veeam Backup & Replication was corrupting data. Of course when I first saw this I was a bit alarmed, but since they included a link to our forum where a user was reporting the problem, I followed the link and realized they were just sensationalizing something for their own apparent gain. Since this particular blog decides to heavily moderate comments, I thought I would post the facts here, lest any other competitors decide they want to sensationalize this non-issue.

The Facts

Taken from the Veeam Forum post:

  1. Backups are NOT corrupted.
  2. You can only run into this issue with NON-DEFAULT restore mode, in 1 restore mode of 3 existing modes.
  3. Despite what competition may be claiming, there is no actual user data loss or corruption – VM will still boot and work.

The only real issue is OS and file system check tools complaining about unexpected content of the unused disk blocks. Linux ext3 file system and disk test tools merely suspect a problem seeing unused blocks being non-zeroed, and warn about this. This is specific to certain file systems only, for example, Windows NTFS considers this situation absolutely normal.

Of course every software has bugs, the example above is a bug in our software when using 1 particular recovery method and we have a fix available and it will be included in our next release. The important piece of information is that NO DATA WAS EVER CORRUPTED, just an issue on recovery and zero byte blocks. We are very thankful to our active forum  community and for bringing this to our attention. Veeam’s motto after all is “Listening to You, Building the Tools You Need”, it’s on the back of all of our business cards. I’d like to point out the below points about our user forum:

  • Our forum is one of our greatest resources where people share their experience, best practices and getting support from Veeam and the community
  • We understand that our competitors are so desperate that they will continue using our own forum to try and fool the community
  • We will continue to be honest and direct with our customers in our forum vs. ending all the threads with ‘please contact our support’
  • User feedback: The quality and effectiveness of this Forum alone would be enough to justify switching to Veeam, even if the product wasn’t superior to its competition (as it is at the moment). It seems just too good to be true… I hope it will continue this way!

Conclusion

Sorry to waste so much space on this post answering the competition. If they would allow comments on their own blog I would have written it there. In closing I just want to say that we encourage everyone to evaluate our software and make decisions for themselves. Put us in the lab and you will see, others promise, Veeam delivers!

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Long Distance vMotion?

Aug 25th

Posted by vmdoug in Software

No comments

While I generally reserve this blog for all things Veeam related, I saw something today that I just had to write about. There’s a software solution called HyperIP from NetEx that makes vMotion of VM’s possible over WAN connections. “Too good to be true” you say? Well, I’ve seen it and we’ve also done testing ourselves and with some of our partners and not only is vMotion possible, but if you’re using Veeam Backup & Replication you can get a significant performance increase in copying data over slow or high-latency connections. If you’re considering “the cloud” you really should check out HyperIP combined with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Check out NetEx’s press release here and also check out their YouTube video below. You can download a 10 day free trial of HyperIP and also a free trial of Veeam Backup & Replication to test it out on your own.

You can follow both @HyperIP and @Veeam on Twitter.

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VMware Certified Professional: VI3 Edition

Jun 18th

Posted by nikkilav in Guest Post

No comments

This post will include information on the VCP VI3 certification offered by VMware.

To become a VCP VI3 you need to do three things:

1. You have to take the VMware authorized course.  No if, ands, or buts! The classes are instructor led and will allow you to get your hands dirty with VMware. There’s three courses you can take.

  • VMware Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure V3.5
  • VMware Infrastructure 3: Deploy, Secure and Analyze V3.5
  • VMware Infrastructure 3: Fast Track V3.5

2. Get hands on experience with VMware. What’s the point of trying to get a VCP without using it!?

3.Sign up and pass the exam: http://www.pearsonvue.com/vmware

Now that doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, I wouldn’t say taking IT exams is easy. (Unless, you’re dumping, which I completely do not agree with.) Usually the hard part of getting a VCP is money. $2500-$3000 a course seems a little steep for a lot of people.(Although, Fast Track = $5495 but includes the exam) I see where VMware is coming from, especially due to the current state of IT certification. (i.e. people cheating/dumping exams.) Also, with the course you receive a VMware messenger bag, I mean, that’s totally worth $3000, right?

After you have passed your exam, you will receive a complimentary license of VMware workstation, a $175 “savings”. Interesting that the course itself costs about the same.

So, why get your VCP? Why does anyone get IT certifications? We all have different reasons, career advancement, your employer requires you to, or you just like to learn. Whatever your reason may be, getting certified in a technology is always beneficial.

Below are some resources you can use to learn more about VMware certifications:

VMware Education Services

TechExams.net Virtualization Forum

The Value of the VCP (VMware Certified Professional)

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New Veeam Essentials Bundle

Jun 10th

Posted by vmdoug in ESX

2 comments

While there’s been a lot of talk this past week on Free ESXi (more on that later) I wanted to take some time and explain the new Veeam Essentials bundle and our reasons behind it. We view our Veeam Essentials bundle as a great entry bundle for the small business just getting into virtualization using VMware vSphere. As you may know, VMware has introduced a very attractively priced vSphere bundle called VMware vSphere Essentials, this gives you vCenter and up to 6 sockets (3 hosts) for just shy of US $1,000. If you think about it, that’s a lot of power for not a lot of clams. Think how many physical servers you can virtualize on 3 ESX(i) hosts…way more than 3. For more information, check out VMware vSphere Pricing.

So, for just shy of 1K you get fully licensed vSphere. This is great but it still leaves you without an efficient backup and recovery tool, single pane of glass monitoring or detailed reporting…enter Veeam Essentials bundle…offering Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter for around US $2,000 (Americas pricing). The Veeam Essentials bundle is fully functional licensed versions of those 3 products for 6 sockets (3 hosts).

Of course Veeam is placing some limits on this bundle…

  • Must be purchased with VMware vSphere Essentials (or proof of VMware vSphere Essentials must be given)
  • Each bundle will only support 6 sockets. This means that even if you purchase multiple bundles, each Veeam product will only work on 6 sockets, you’ll need to install other instances with the other license(s) to manage the other VMware vSphere Essentials vCenters.
  • Each bundle is 6 sockets, no less (sorry folks, you can’t get it cheaper for only 4 sockets)

What does all this mean? For just under US $3,000 (hardware not included) you get 6 sockets of VMware vSphere, 6 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication, 6 sockets of Veeam Monitor and 6 sockets of Veeam Reporter. That’s 3 servers with up to 8 cores (2×4) and 256GB RAM each running VMware ESX(i). Couple that with a free iSCSI solution such as Starwind and now you’re talking 2 TB of shared data for free (hardware and Windows licensing not included).

I did not include Support and Subscription (SnS) above because for VMware vSphere Essentials it’s optional (it’s not optional on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus). Veeam’s Essentials bundle includes 1 year of support and upgrades in the list price.

Now, let’s discuss a few things about the Free Version of ESXi. We’ve gotten a number of questions on this since we released the “news” and the Essentials bundle on the same day. Below is a simple table explaining what is and isn’t supported:

Table of compatibility:

ESX Version

Current Customers As of June 3, 2009

Future Customers
ESX/ESXi 3.x licensed

+

+
ESX/ESXi 4.x licensed

+

+
ESXi 3.5 free

+

-
ESXi 4.0 free

-

-

+ = supported/usable
-  = not supported

Now please note that Veeam will not be supporting ESXi Free 4.0 at all. If you’re a current customer using Veeam Backup & Replication for ESXi Free 3.x, please contact your Veeam ProPartner or sales person for vSphere options.

While I don’t endorse or condone any of the following, I thought I would be doing an injustice if I did not include links to the community’s reaction to our announcement regarding dropping ESXi Free support. The list below is just some of the reaction, be sure to read the comments in each as well.

Rick Vanover at Virtualization Review

Rich Brambley at VMETC

Eric Scholten at VMGURU.NL

Gabes Virtual World

Search Server Virtualization’s Alex Barrett

Rich Brambley at VMETC again after Alex Barrett’s post

Search Server Virtualization’s Eric Siebert

Edward L Haletky’s The “soon to be launched” Virtualization Practice

The comments to my post on the original announcement

Update: June 12, 2009 – New Links

Bridget Bothelo over at Virtualization Pro

Discussion over at ars technica (I noticed this in my referral stats)

Update: June 15, 2009 – New Links

Search Server Virtualization’s weekly Podcast: VMware cuts free ESXi hypervisor support, fuels battle vs. Hyper-V

Update: June 26, 2009 – New Link

Mike Stokes over at eGroup

Update: July 3, 2009 – New Link

Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM

Mike Laverick from RTFM

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Veeam and Free ESXi – it's official now

Jun 3rd

Posted by vmdoug in ESXi

22 comments

Figured I would blog this…These are not my words, I just copied from Veeam’s official release. Let me know in the comments what you think…

As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free.  One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Recently, VMware requested that Veeam Software discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.  In light of VMware’s request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises its new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the Veeam Essentials bundle (announced today).  This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing 6 sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, but it is actually better, because with Veeam Essentials at its special discounted price, customers also get Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter.

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Win a trip to VMworld 2009 in San Francisco

Apr 15th

Posted by vmdoug in VMworld

No comments


Veeam has just announced that we are giving away a free trip (airfare, hotel, pass) to VMword 2009 in San Francisco. I’m really looking forward to the videos that people submit. For contest details, check here.

Veeam PowerShell Extensions Example

Mar 24th

Posted by vmdoug in PowerShell

1 comment

I decided to write this simple example of how to use some basic functions of the Veeam PowerShell Extensions. This is by no means comprehensive, just an idea of some of the things that can be done if you don’t have time to install Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.5 yourself.

The Veeam PS Extensions are very similar to the VMware VI Toolkit, but don’t require the VI Toolkit. With the Veeam PS Extensions you use PowerShell to connect to the Veeam Reporter Enterprise database, not vCenter. This gives the advantage of not putting any stress on vCenter and you also get access to all of the historical data in Veeam Reporter Enterprise.

Once you have everything installed, simply open the Veeam PowerShell Extensions shortcut and connect to the Veeam DB using the _Connect-VIServer command:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Connect-VIServer

cmdlet _Connect-VIServer at command pipeline position 1

Supply values for the following parameters:

SQLInstance: localhost\veeam

SQLDatabase: VeeamReporter

Now that you are connected, you can do some basic commands like _Get-VM

Name

PowerState

Num CPUs

Memory (MB)

—-

———-

——–

———–

WindowsServ01

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM02

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM011

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM03_RUN

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM04_TEST

PoweredOff

1

256

WindowsServ02_STA…

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM03

PoweredOff

1

256

WindowsServ02

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM04

PoweredOff

1

256

Windows Server Ho…

PoweredOff

1

256

DSL Linux

PoweredOff

1

256

To check what data set you’re viewing, you can use the _Get-VRCurrentDate command:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Get-VRCurrentDate

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:24:15 PM

If you want to connect to a different date, simply use the _Set-VRCurrentDate command and enter a date:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Set-VRCurrentDate

cmdlet _Set-VRCurrentDate at command pipeline position 1

Supply values for the following parameters:

Date: 03.22.2009

To check that you’re connected to the proper date, rung the _Get-VRCurrentDate command again:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Get-VRCurrentDate

Sunday, March 22, 2009 12:00:00 AM

Now, executing the _Get-VM command will show different results, for that particular date:

Name

PowerState

Num CPUs

Memory (MB)

—-

———-

——–

———–

WindowsServ01

PoweredOn

1

256

MSVM02

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM011

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM03_RUN

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM04_TEST

PoweredOff

1

256

WindowsServ02_STA…

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM03

PoweredOff

1

256

WindowsServ02

PoweredOff

1

256

MSVM04

PoweredOff

1

256

Windows Server Ho…

PoweredOff

1

256

DSL Linux

PoweredOn

1

256

Notice that WindowsServ01 and DSL Linux are both listed as PoweredON for this date, they were listed as PoweredOff on the other date.

This is a VERY simplistic example just to show connecting to different dates/times in the database.

An apology to the PowerShell Community

Mar 24th

Posted by vmdoug in PowerShell

4 comments

Today Veeam released an update to it’s popular Virtual Infrastructure Reporting platform, Veeam Reporter 3.5. In the Enterprise version one of the new features is PowerShell Extensions. As we were preparing the release, I had some discussions with Alan Renouf and Hal Rottenberg about how we implemented it. They immediately raised some concerns regarding our implementation and I’d like to take the time to address those here. We were too close to the release to address this but we will address it in a future hotfix. Please understand I’m not a PowerShell expert, I’d just like to let everyone know about this feature and get suggestions for how to make it better.

The idea behind Veeam’s PowerShell Extensions is to allow people who want to query vCenter using a PS script to query Veeam’s Reporter Enterprise database instead. We wanted to provide an easy way to do this without having to completely re-write pre-existing scripts that have been written for the VI Toolkit. Another advantage is that Reporter Enterprise saves “points-in-time” of your Virtual Infrastructure, so if you want to run a PS script comparing last month to this month, the data is there, it’s just a matter of connecting to it.

In the process, we ended-up messing with the Verb-Noun syntax of PowerShell and we understand (now) that the PowerShell community will not be happy with this. For instance, in the VI Toolkit you have the command “Get-VM”. Rather than change the noun (VM) Veeam decided to change the verb, so with the Veeam PS Extensions the command is “_Get-VM”. Essenitially all the verbs that can be used in the VI Toolkit can be used with the Veeam Extensions just by adding an “_” in front of the verb.

We understand now that this is wrong and we will be working to fix it. One suggestion is to leave the verb alone and change the noun so that we would have “Get-VRVM” where the VR=Veeam Reporter. Another suggestion is to use “Veeam\Get-VM”. Both of these options are valid, what do you think? We’d love to know your feedback!

Hal Rottenberg has invited me to be on his PowerShell podcast on April 30 and I’m looking forward to being there and talking about how we’ve implemented this and getting suggestions for how to improve it.

You can check out the Veeam Reporter Enterprise User Guide for a full description of the PowerShell Extensions.

Thanks,

-doug

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