Veeam Community Podcast

The Veeam Community Podcast is focused on giving the global virtualization community a new resource for connecting with industry experts, bloggers and peers, as well as for staying up to date on the latest industry news, developments and trends. Each 30-minute weekly episode of the Veeam Community Podcast will be available through RSS subscription and the Apple iTunes store. The podcast is hosted by Rick Vanover, a writer, blogger, VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified IT Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. He currently works as Software Strategy Specialist at Veeam.

In this episode, Rick Vanover (on Twitter @RickVanover) is joined by Erik Zandboer (on Twitter @ErikZandboer) from VMdamentals.com. Erik is a Netherlands-based blogger who recently did a number of comparative blog posts. Rick and Erik discuss why these comparatives were done and the thought process behind the deep dive approach to blogging. Erik's blog posts are:

Veeam Backup vs PHDvirtual Backup part 1- Introduction

Veeam Backup vs PHDvirtual Backup part 2- Performing Backup and Restores /p>

Veeam Backup part 3- Final fiddling on target storage

Veeam Backup part 2- Using jumbo frames to target storage

Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds

The deep dive format is wonderful and fair; at one point Erik wrote, "Looking specifically at restores Veeam has quickly become my favorite." We encourage you to check out each of Erik's posts and follow him on Twitter.

Rick: Hello and welcome to the Veeam Community Podcast. I am your host, Rick Vanover. This is Episode 2, VMdamentals shootout. Here we go.

Today our guest is Erik Zandboer. Erik, how you're doing?

Erik: I'm fine, thanks.

Rick: Thanks for coming on the show, man, I appreciate it. We saw some of your blog posts on VMdamentals.com, and it definitely caught the interest of a lot of people in the virtualization community. You had a great number of blog posts, posts that were very thorough, comparing Veeam Backup and Replication with PHD Virtual's backup product. So tell us about why you went on that long comparative blog post. Why did you do that?

Erik: Well, basically, there are a lot of blog sites out there that always post like the newest thing and the latest releases, but that's not what VMdamentals comments is about. I basically do just technical deep dives, and the more technical the better. So maybe it's not so easy to read all the time, but basically whenever I find something that might be of interest, I just deep dive into it and write a blog post about it.

Rick: Oh, that's awesome, dude, because I was reading through it, and it's incredibly detailed. I mean, I'm learning things about Veeam that was kind of like, oh, I could probably write a blog post myself about that. In fact, one thing that caught my eye was that you were very fair. That was honestly really cool, because you were very fair about this product does it good this way, this product does it good that way, but then both of them I don't like this and I don't like that. So that was very balanced in that sense. So I even picked up some notes on some action items for me in terms of blog posts, to really just make sure that the virtualization community if they're going to use the Veeam solution that they're equipped to avoid some of those gotcha points that you've identified.

Erik: Yeah, sure. Well, maybe that's because I've always been a fan of PHD Virtual. In the old days, their technology was really great, but now lately with the ESXi support and other things and all those Veeam guys pushing me for, "Well, take a look at our product because it's great." So, well, I did, and the funny thing is that both products look at the same problem from a very different perspective and that's why you get different solutions. Each has some nice things and some, well, maybe less nice things. But in the end, they all do the job, but in a different way. So I leave it kind of up to the reader to decide what they really need, what they require.

Rick: Yeah. I noticed that because you definitely didn't make like a blanket recommendation, but I think, again, you were very fair and said this product does this well and that product does that well. So that was pretty cool.

Now you say the Veeam guys are always pushing you. Yes, I'll agree that we are very boisterous in the community. Then within the Netherlands, you're based in the Netherlands, there's a lot of virtualization community and a lot of Veeam customers there. So it think that it's kind of you can't avoid Veeam. Is that a good way of putting it?

Erik: Yeah, I think that's a very good way of putting it. There's something else, because my ex-boss actually works for Veeam now. So he keeps bugging me.

Rick: Is that Henk?

Erik: Yes, it is.

Rick: Oh, okay. Yeah, Henk Arts, he works there with Veeam, and he's based in the Netherlands as well. So cool.

Erik: Yeah.

Rick: Well, let me ask you this. Did you do this literally on your own? So nobody sponsored you with these types of comparatives? Because a lot of private bloggers can get sponsorship for doing things like this.

Erik: No. No, I didn't get any sponsorship anywhere. I don't like to, "Oh, yeah, I've got the edit this one."

Rick: Okay.

Erik: Basically, no. There's no . . . how am I going to say? This is going to take a while.

Rick: Okay, no problem. Or you can just give a short, "No, I did it on my own," type of answer. Whatever you want.

Erik: It's okay.

Rick: Okay.

Erik: Basically, I don't want any advertisements on the Web or anything. So it's just my blog. It's just the things I like. It's just a technical shoot out or technical deep dive, and that's also one of my hobbies. So there you go.

Rick: Right on. Well, that's great. I love the deep dives, and every category of technology has a few of them. In fact, I'll also point out like Duncan, with the HA deep dive and stuff like that on his website. Then if you're a storage guy, you probably have ended up at one point at Nigel Poulton's blog. He has a lot of good technical deep dives on storage products. The level of those deep dives when you really put all this content together, for the readers out there who haven't been to some of these in- depth posts, they're definitely top notch stuff. In the case of Erik's stuff, it's really great because it's in a comparative light. So, yeah, that's cool, man. The best part is that it wasn't really a sponsored activity. That's what you wanted to go through, and that was the experience you shared. So that's awesome.

Erik: Yeah. I've been thinking a long time, because a shootout includes like a Quest or what was previously called Vision Core or maybe a VM backup product, but it gets very complex very fast.

Rick: Absolutely, and it's also very difficult to compare.

Erik: Sure.

Rick: It's tough to compare apples to apples when the products are different. Then if you compare multiple products at once, then it's almost like you'll never get done.

Erik: Right. Even for this shootout, between two products, I needed three parts. I've written two so far. The third part is going to be about disaster recovery and replication features. But I think the second part, which just came out, I think that was the most important one for most people.

Rick: And why is that?

Erik: Well, basically, it's all about backing up and restoring, and that's the primary use of the products, I think. But on the other hand, you can very well use them for simple disaster recovery, and that's what people sometimes forget, because when you say, disaster recovery, people think like dark fiber connections and send replication. But that's not always necessary at all.

Rick: Absolutely. In fact, many organizations, cost wise, that's just out of the question.

Erik: Right, exactly. So if you can't afford it, but like a 24 hour or maybe a 12 hour window is small enough for you for your disaster recovery basically for your recovery time, then it's no problem to use a product like Veeam or PHD Virtual, or some of the other products that are out there.

Rick: Sure. So I think I counted four basic blog post deep dives that you had out there. Do you have more that are yet to be released?

Erik: You mean specifically on backup products?

Rick: Well, yeah, this shootout had a series of blog posts, and I'll make sure that I put them in the notes for this podcast episode. But I guess I was just wondering if there were more coming, because you have so much material out there. It's great. I would love to see more. But I didn't know if you were done with your project or what.

Erik: Basically, I'm working on Part Three now, as I said, Replication and Disaster Recovery. Maybe I'll add in a part four, but I'm not sure, and that would be about any of the extra features which are in there, like the virtual app you guys have, which is pretty great, but has little to do with backup and restore, basically.

Rick: Yeah, that's true. The Virtual Lab and some of the other features, you're almost taking those feature sets away from your traditional backup product, and it's kind of hard to compare if there's not a category for it with other products, for sure.

Erik: Right.

Rick: So hey, Erik, tell me about you. You're based in the Netherlands. What do you do? I know you have a big change coming up. So tell me a little bit about yourself.

Erik: Okay. Well, I'll start out in the past. I've been doing lots of different things. I started out as an embedded hardware and software engineer. Started out at Siemens at one time in life, and one of the greatest things I think I did back in those days was an assignment for ASML, which builds lithographic scanners.

Rick: Oh, cool.

Erik: And I did a redesign for the level sensor components.

Rick: Oh, deep. So the deep dive stuff starts there.

Erik: Starts right there, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely, that's cool.

Erik: So I've doing a lot of software and also hardware. Then I basically made the change more to system administration, and from there I kind of rolled into VMware.

Rick: Cool. What kind of virtualization technologies do you work with right now?

Erik: Right now, it's solely VMware and basically all things around, because a lot of people thought that hypervisors were pretty cool and that basically that would be the end of virtualization, but actually I think it's just the beginning. The hypervisor is just a simple tool, and once we have this tool, there's so much more to start. You see that by the latest product, like VAAI, the vStorage API for Array Integration, and products like Veeam. All these smart things being pushed to the market and that's a nice adventure to be on.

Rick: Absolutely, I'll agree with you 100%. In fact, you brought up a good point with VAAI, which I hate that acronym by the way, it's just too clumsy. But anyways, one of things that we're not quite, from a market adoption standpoint, I'd have to say that the actual percentage of the people that have VAAI supported storage with vSphere 4.1, the whole stack ready to go, that percentage is pretty small. But once that increases, this is going to be some good stuff because snapshot performance can be improved with VAAI supported hardware, and that's going to be a big deal because Veeam is one product, but a lot of products, especially in data protection, they all use snapshots. If the snapshot performance can be increased, basically through the hardware assisted locking, then we've got some really good stuff coming down the way. Because, really, this will be, again, removing a barrier so that we can go more virtual, and you're so correct that the hypervisor was simply the gateway technology for us to do that. So, yeah.

Erik: Absolutely. I think storage used to be boring stuff because you had to send, and it was sharing some LANs in your data center. But with the coming of virtualization, storage became very cool again, I think.

Rick: Absolutely. My little motto is, "Always buy the most expensive storage you can afford," because you want to always put that as your most performing resource. Because, no offense, but HP, Dell, IBM, whatever the server doesn't really matter. You know?

Erik: Sure:

Rick: It's the storage and the storage protocol and the disk technology that you have in the end and how it's laid out. Those types of things are probably more important. Of course, you want to have enough CPU, enough memory, enough network I/O, enough storage I/O on the host, but I've always thought that storage was now the most critical design element of the data center, for sure.

Erik: Exactly. I've done a lot of measurements on a Sun Unified Storage box, the 7000 Series, at a data center in Scotland. We performed some performance tests on VUE combined with that system, and that basically a Zetabyte File System with NFS on top, and it performed amazingly. It was just incredible, with around 20 to 30 startup disks, we managed to get over 1,300 VUE desktops running.

Rick: Whoa.

Erik: That's definitely amazing, and that's all because of the way they separate read and write cache and they extend their read cache memory with Flash and have optimized write caching. It's a very smart way of working. Those are the things that really make the difference. Like you said, a server is just a server, but storage can be specifically interesting for certain solutions when you use certain systems inside, basically.

Rick: Absolutely. In fact, I'll even point up a blog post, one of your Veeam Backup Part 3, was "Fiddling With Your Target Storage." So you've got some tips in there for Veeam customers to maybe make sure that, I think it's iSCSI in this case, right?

Erik: Yeah, well that was very interesting because I tried an NFS native iSCSI and iSCSI through vSphere. I tried NFS through vSphere, and I tried shifts directly. The fun thing was that the home lab that I use has a pretty weak CPU. So CPU power constantly was a problem. So once you get better performance, you start to saturate your CPUs, so performance drops. So it's very interesting to see how it's not the smartest solution, but also, in my case, the CPU limitations that apply.

Rick: Sure. Yeah, I have in my home lab, I have a HP ProLiant server and a DroboPro iSCSI SAN, which if I do some heavy lifting I feel it. But I don't have access to a Sun Unified Storage system, which would be nice. But it's just really tough because most environments that have the real gear, it's not really an environment we can use as a lab, unfortunately.

Erik: Right

Rick: But I think you actually bring up a good point that when you do kind of identify CPU as the bottleneck, in the case of an underpowered lab like what I have at home or whatever, when you compare those different storage protocols, I think you can actually determine which one performs better because the other bottleneck had been identified with CPU or maybe network throughput or something like that.

Erik: Right, right. Once I enabled jumbo frames, things got really, really better, and I think that's mainly because the CPU has less overhead because there are less packets to handle.

Rick: Yeah, I'm looking at your graph right here. You had the IX-200, is that right?

Erik: Yeah. An IX2-200, yeah.

Rick: In two or three of the different test categories, it was nearly a 15% to 20% performance increase with jumbo frames. So that's awesome.

Erik: Right, exactly. So I'm not saying you should always enable jumbo frames just to get that 20% extra, but it might help in your case. It's very case specific. You have to try it out basically.

Rick: Absolutely. You have to try it out. That's the end all be all because it's hard to make blanket recommendations because all virtual machines are not created equal, all infrastructures are not created equal. We'll just call it virtualization tofu, right? It takes the flavor of what it's cooked in, okay.

Erik: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: So once you put a product in the data center, it's going to reflect the other technologies around it. So we definitely agree with you that you need to give it a try. I've got to send a cheap plug, a cheap shout-out here to Veeam. We have this program for NFR licenses for VMware certified instructors, vExperts and VCPs.

Erik: That's what I'm running on.

Rick: There you go. You get the two free sockets of NFR Veeam Backup and Replication. So we definitely encourage you guys to check it out. You've already been there, so that's great.

Erik: Yeah.

Rick: So, Erik, I've got kind of a gimmick here for the podcast, and we're still in stealth mode, meaning we haven't gone public with it yet. So you kind of have been primed for it. But I have three questions for you. So I want to kind of get your view, just you as a technologist, what has interested you now, in the past, and also in the future?

So, Erik, as a technologist what's the most interesting technical role or story or experience that you have done at some point prior in your career?

Erik: Well, basically, we've already been through that. I think that was ASML. That's a very interesting company when you look at technology because they have everything. They have a lot of software, they have mechanics, they have complex optical systems. So it's very nice to be part of a team like that.

Rick: Cool. And how about today, what are you working on right now today in technology that you're most interested in or find the most passion to get things done? What's your favorite thing right now?

Erik: Right. Well, I think it used to be just VMware, but as storage got more and more interesting, basically I started looking at storage more and more. So I've done a series on RAID levels and how to optimize throughput on that level. So what I think is that basically the merger between storage and virtualization, as these boundaries disappear, it will eventually become like an inseparable entity.

Rick: Sure, absolutely.

Erik: So basically, that's the interesting thing I see happening right now.

Rick: Okay, cool. What do you see in the future? What kind of gets you excited to what's coming down the road technology wise?

Erik: With storage and VMware merging more and more, I decided that it was time for me to start looking into that direction as a professional. So as of February, I will be joining EMC as a vSpecialist, and actually I'll be the first vSpecialist in Holland.

Rick: Oh, cool, congratulations.

Erik: Thanks. Yeah, I'm very proud of it. As I said, I'm starting in a few days, and basically I can't wait to see what the future has in store.

Rick: Oh, that's great. I think it's going to be a wild ride for you.

Erik: Yeah, definitely. Things I see, those guys are crazy.

Rick: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm not going to disagree. All right. Did you watch the launch event for Broken Records?

Erik: Yeah, sure. Did you see the videos? Did you see Chat World?

Rick: Yeah, that was . . .

Erik: Then you understand what I mean.

Rick: Yeah, it's entertaining for sure. Okay. Well, Erik, hey man, we're wrapping it up here. Let's take a quick moment.

So, everybody, if you want to follow Erik on Twitter, he is at ErikZandboer, and he has his blog at VMdamentals.com, and I'll have both of these in the podcast notes so you can have direct links here. Erik is also known to be a photographer at Xhd.nl.

Erik, hey, thanks for being on the podcast.

Erik: Okay. You're welcome