Veeam does a great job at running deduplication to save valuable and expensive disk space for your backup storage however it does this per job, meaning all of the VMs within a job will be deduped with each other.  Now, I don't know anyone that has all of their VMs grouped within one single job, most the time their are multiple jobs each containing multiple VMs.  In the latter case you could be saving even more space (and money) if you could only apply deduplication to span across multiple Veeam backup jobs, and now, you can…enter StarWind Software and Global Deduplication. 

Join vExpert Greg Shields as he talks about 4 elements you need to consider in order to be successful when developing a great DR strategy and how one of my sponsors, AppAssure can help you along the way….  Follow the link below to register!

Every morning I like to fire up vCOps and have a look at my environment and when I do this, I like to see nothing but green (maybe a bit of yellow )  For the past week or so that hasn't been the case…  Not that I have any performance issues, but I do have what is called a 'fault' on a few of my Virtual Machines.  I've been troubleshooting an issue as of late with something causing a few of my hosts to become disconnected, and HA has been attempting (and failing) to restart a few of my VMs, which in turns generates an alarm on the VM and a fault inside of vCOps.  Well, the issue has since been resolved and everything is running fine again, however vCOps is still hanging on to those faults for some of the VMs.

Now I don't see this as a bad thing, it certainly is nice to have a record of these issues inside of vCOps, but being the persnickety fellow that I am when I log into my vCOps and see those VMs showing up on the heat map coloured in red, well, it drives me a little mental…  I thought maybe if I leave it for a week things would clear up, and while some did, others didn't.  So I guess a little manual intervention is involved.

Basically, a fault in vCOps is triggered by an event occurring from within vCenter Server.  VC Ops will hang on to this fault until vCenter Server reports that the issue has been resolved, thus resulting in a red VM like the one above, and a lower health score to boot!  In some cases (cases like mine) you may need to manually cancel and remove a fault from vCOps.  So in the case you ever need to, the following is how to do so…

Either select your VM, or any inventory item that is higher up on the inventory view and navigate to the Alerts tab.

In the Alerts table below, sort, filter, re-arrange however you want and select the fault(s) that you want to cancel and click the 'Cancel' Icon.

Presto!  That's it!  If you navigate back to your dashboard and heat map now you should hopefully see that wonderful greenish tint of all that excellence (after everything refreshes)!  Or in my case there is still more work to do  Happy Troubleshooting!

Well, once again Angelo (twitter) did an awesome job at putting together an awesome event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on May 7th.  I'm not going to include all the slide decks as I normally do, if you want to see them you can rock on over to the Toronto VMUG website and check them out for yourself.  I will however include the last presentation of the day, which was done by Eric Wright (blog/twitter), a community member who spoke about Powershell and PowerCLI and how to apply them to your everyday experiences.  In my opinion this is what the user groups are all about, the users, the members speaking about their experiences.  I understand the need for vendors to have there time to speak, without those sponsors we couldn't have events likes this, and honestly, both vendors that were at this event (Veeam and Arista Networks) did a great job and had some great presentations, but their is nothing more valuable then listening to your peers and other people just like you talk about their experiences…

Speaking of the vendor presentations, the last two VMUGs that I have attended have had some great conversation and back and forth with the vendors during their presentations and this one was no different.  A lot of great questions being asked resulting in a lot of great answers and follow up questions.   These events are amazing when the audience is engaged as they are in Toronto.

It was nice to connect with Angelo and hear about his experiences while hosting the Silicon Valley VMUG last month.  It's always great to connect and hear the things that Angelo has planned for the future for not only the Toronto VMUG but other events he is looking to host.  He really does dedicate a lot of his time to the community and I'm happy that he was recognized as a vExpert and asked to help out with the Silicon Valley VMUG.

So hats off to Angelo and a big thanks to Eric for making it a fabulous day.  And again as always, stay connected with the Toronto VMUG by reading the blog, follow them on twitter, connect on LinkedIn and circle them on Google +.  And as promised, Eric's slide deck below….

First off I wanted to say Welcome and Thank you to PHD Virtual, one of the newest sponsors of mwpreston.net. It's companies like the ones to the right of this post helping to keep the community content flowing by putting out awesome products within the VMware ecosystem.  That being said with the addition of PHD Virtual as a blog sponsor I decided to write a sponsored review of there newest backup software PHD Virtual Backup v5.4.

PHD Virtual is not a new company to me.  I actually evaluated their backup solutions back when it was called esXpress in the 3.x days.  Let me first say that PHD has come a long way with their backup product since then.  Back in those days there were packages that were actually installed on the ESX hosts and it was all managed through SSH.  Now, with the release of PHD Virtual Backup 5.4 everything is fully integrated into vCenter and much much more easier to use.   Anyways, enough about my history with PHD and on to the review….

My Environment

I first wanted to mention that all of this was tested on a laptop with 8 GB of RAM running VMware Workstation and some cheap, slow NFS storage .   Obviously things would perform a bit nicer in a production environment but this is what I have to work with for the time being.  Also, PHD supports an architecture that utilizes multiple appliances in order to improve performance and scalability, however my tests were done utilizing a single appliance.  Certainly go and get yourself a copy of PHD Virtual Backup and try it in your own environment to see its' full potential.

Installation

Honestly this step probably doesn't even need a walkthrough since it is so simple, but in the interest of being thorough I'll talk about it.    

First off you need to install the Backup Console and the vCenter plugin onto the machine that you wish to manage PHD from (normally your workstation). This is essentially three clicks in a Next Next Done fashion and your off to the races. 

Next you need to deploy the virtual appliance (the brains of the operation).  Again, this is very easy.  Simply go to 'File->Deploy OVF Template' and select your PHD Virtual Backup appliance.  I accepted all defaults as far as resources go and was up and running in less than a minute.  Once the appliance is up and running then only step that needs to be configured at the VM's console is the networking which is done by hitting CTRL+N on the console.

That's it!  You have a copy of PHD Virtual Backup installed now.  A few notables on the appliance

• Appliance runs Linux and Postgres - To me this is as good as gold.  No windows licenses to take care of, no MSSQL lisense to worry about.
• The fact that its an OVF – It's nice to just import the appliance and configure, rather than have to install a base OS, patch the base OS, install all the pre-requisites for the software, then pull down the software and install it.  It's all done in one simple step for you.

Configuration

So now that we have everything installed it's time to configure the appliance by attaching some storage to it, setting up email settings, retention settings etc..  Here is where the vCenter integration shines.  Right-click any object in vCenter and select PHD Virtual Backup -> Console.    After the console has loaded all of the configuration is done by clicking on (you guessed it!) configuration.  Having that integration right inside of vCenter is very nice, for instance you can kick off a backup or replication job by accessing PHD's items on the right-click context menu. 

For the most part configuration can be broken down into the same categories as the tabs that it displays; General, Backup Storage, Network, Email, Backup Retention, Replication, and Connectors.

The 'General Tab' isn't very exciting.  It's basically used as you can see from the screenshot to setup some of the more basic settings such as your time zone, NTP settings as well as vCenter credentials.

The 'Backup Storage Tab' is used to setup your actual storage that you are going to use for your backups.  You can attach backup storage to an appliance through either a directly attached vmdk, CIFS, or NFS.  For my testing I chose to use NFS.  Also in this section you can set some percentages to trigger warnings or actually stop backing up depending on free space available as well as enable/disable compression on your backups.

The 'Network Tab' is pretty self explanatory.  Allows you to change the appliance's IP address or edit/configure DNS settings.

The 'Email Tab' is just that.  Allows you to setup your SMTP server as well as sender and receiver information.

The 'Backup Retention Tab' is where you define how many and how long you want to keep your backups.  There are a couple of predefined configurations (Keep all and Typical), but you are also able to customize your retention based on how many recent backups to keep and in addition to that how many daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to maintain.

The 'Replication Tab' is where you will setup your pointers to your appliances backup storage.  Meaning you specify which backups you would like to replicate to another appliance.  Replication is explained in more detail further down in this post.

The 'Connectors Tab' is where you would setup the shares in order to use the Backup Data Connector (BDC).  The BDC gives you the functionality to access your backups in their native format in order to archive to a tape or disk.  I didn't get a chance to fully test this but I like having the ability to do so.

So for the most part that is all the configuration that you need to do.  So far so good, a very easy install and quite an intuitive configuration.  Now it's time to get into the thick of the application and do some backups and restores.

Backup

Getting a backup job created and running is a very simple task in PHD Virtual Backup.  You can either set the backup job from within the console or (again with the vCenter integration) right click the VM you want to backup and select PHD Virtual Backup -> Backup.

 If choosing the first option you have a few ways to backup your VMs.  Selecting the Hosts & Clusters view will allow you to select a datacenter, cluster, host or specific VM.  The VMs and Templates view allows you to select a Datacenter or a folder from within your vCenter inventory.  

Next you will need to select which PHD appliance you would like to back the VMs up to.  Since I'm testing this out on a workstation lab with only one appliance this is a pretty easy decision for me, but if you were in production you would have the ability to deploy multiple appliances attached to different backup storage in order to distribute your backups across different types or tiers of storage.

From there you need to schedule your backup (Now, Once, Daily, Weekly) and move on to the backup options.  Here you have the ability to be run a verify task (on all blocks or just new blocks) on your backup job.  You can also check whether to include powered off VMs, mark the backup as archived (meaning it will not be deleted by the retention policy), chose whether to use VMware's change block tracking and whether or not to quiesce the OS if backing up and Windows guest.

I ran a few different jobs on various OSes (Linux and Windows).  The backup speed was great, the compression and deduplication were great.  Obviously that first initial seed takes a bit of time to complete, but from then thereafter if utilizing CBT the subsequent incremental backups are very efficient and sometimes occur in less than 5 minutes depending on the number of changed blocks. Also worth mentioning, for each job you are able to get a nice detailed view as to what happened behind the scenes in regards to the speed and deduplication.   Again, a few notables

• Once again, very easy, very intuitive – documentation isn't needed in order to start using this PHD's software.  The step by step wizards guide you through everything.  If you are familiar with vCenter and vCenters inventory views you should be fine using this application.
• Retention options are great – I like the ability to archive or save weekly\y/monthly/yearly backups. 
• Retention is applied to the VBA - Here's a wish list item.  It would be nice to apply different retention settings to individual VMs within a job or to the job itself. 

Restore

Restoring is handled in two different fashions by PHD Virtual Backup.  You can restore the complete VM or perform a file-level restore to just get individual files.  The full VM restore is pretty straightforward and once again easy to perform.  You simply need to find your restore point you wish to restore inside of the backup catalog and click 'Restore' along the top toolbar.

The Restore Job wizard doesn't require much from a user perspective.  Simply select your storage or where you want to place the restored VM, and select a few options in regards to the networking on the newly restored VM (which network to attach it to and whether to generate a new MAC address).  Just as the backup process my testing with full VM restores went flawless.  

The file-level restore is handled by setting up an iSCSI target to the backed up VM on the PHD appliance, then connecting your client to that iSCSI target using the Windows iSCSI Initiator. You can kick of a FLR wizard in a few ways, either by selecting your VM within the Backup Catalog or clicking 'Create' in the File Recover section of the application.  Either way will invoke the wizard.  There are really only a few steps within the wizard…

First, select your VM and restore point that you wish to grab the files from.  It looks simple in this screenshot but if you have 100's of VMs with 100's of restore points there are some great filters at the top that allow you to narrow down your search.  

Secondly you can chose to mount the created iSCSI target to your local machine by simply checking the box.  If you are going to be restoring the files on your local machine immediately this is the best option, otherwise if you need to mount the target later you can do so by clicking 'Mount' on the File Recovery section.

Once the wizard is complete, if restoring from a Windows guest you should be able to see the folders and files within explorer.  Linux guests require a separate third party application (ext2explore) to be downloaded and installed in order to perform FLR

Notables

• Full VM restore – works flawless and very easy to perform.
• FLR for Linux VMs – you need to download a separate application in order to perform and FLR on your Linux guests.  Would love to see this fully integrated into the application.
• Exchange item level recovery is available via a partnership with Lucid8.  If you have time check out this video which takes you through it.

Replication

Technically I don't have the gear to fully test replication so I will just explain how replication works within PHD Virtual Backup.  Unlike most products that perform their replication on the VM level, PHD actually performs their replication on the backup level, meaning that your production VMs are not affected at all.  Essentially once a VM has been backed up, as long as you have added your backup storage as a replication target, you can now perform a replication on the backup files of that VM.   Replication is meant to occur from site to site, or from appliance to appliance, giving you a true DR solution in the event of a site failure.

Notables

• Only changed blocks are replicated, making the replication just as efficient as the backup process.
• Built in test mode allows you to completely test the functionality of the replicated VM in a standby environment.  This is great, just as the Verify Backups option is on the backup jobs.  What good is a backup or a replica if it doesn't work?  This way, you will know it does.

Conclusion

Certainly if you are looking for a backup solution for your vSphere environment check out PHD's Virtual Backup.  The software is very easy to use and is fully integrated into vCenter making it very easy to access what you need when you need it.  Installation is a breeze, configuration is simple and quick.   Utilizing CBT, the incremental backups run extremely fast which will allow you to minimize backup windows.  I like the different approach to replication which leaves production VMs untouched and affects only the backups.  Also, the scalability of this product is great and when using multiple appliances throughout the network you can really distribute the load as much as you want.   As with any product there are certainly some spots where that they could improve on or features that they could add such as support for more granular control per VM inside of a backup job and the ability to add more than one type of backup storage to an appliance.  That being said however, PHD Virtual Backup does a tremendous job at doing what it was built for; backing up your virtual infrastructure.  A very intuitive interface makes this application a breeze to install, set up, configure and to use.  I can guarantee that you won't need a training course to figure this one out  Certainly don't just rely upon me, go grab a trial version from PHD and check it out yourself.

Well, look at that.  Things are on the up for this blog.  I wanted to take the chance to give a big welcome to yet another new sponsor StarWind Software.  I'm very excited to welcome StarWind to this blog as I have used their iSCSI SAN software in my lab and it is awesome!  Especially considering the price…FREE!  That's right, Free!  They do have some more enterprise ready solutions that you can purchase which come with some other features (which I would certainly recommend for production), but honesty, with the free edition you get deduplication, snapshots, clones, CDP, thin provisioning and much more…  You have no reason not to try it, head on over to StarWinds' product page and pull it down for yourself.  To top it off, Starwinds iSCSI San has actually been nominated in a couple of categories in the 2012 Storage Awards; Storage Virtualization Product of the Year and Storage Magazines 'One to Watch' award.  The media release can be found here.

Aside from the SAN solutions Starwind do offer a variety of other products as well, such as Backup and Recovery for Hyper-V, V2V converters, iSCSI initiators,etc.  Perhaps one of the most interesting products which is to be released in the future is the Backup and Recovery for VMware.  You can sign up to be notified once it is ready here, or just follow the advertisement on the right hand side of this page to the correct location.

So a big welcome and thank you to StarWind Software!

Quite a bit of hype around a few releases from VMware dealing with their End User Computing portfolio.   Yesterday VMware released the View plugin for vCenter Operations, Horizon Application Manager 1.5, Project Octopus was put into beta, Simbra 7.2, Socialcast, and last but certainly not least VMware View 5.1 was released as well.

And don't let the .1 fool you, this version of VMware VIew has a slew of improvements, enhancements, and new features packed into it.  I will outline a few of my favorites below but be sure to head on over to the press release and check them out for yourself.

The View Storage Accelerator

This is a technology that should improve speed and performance by caching the commonly identical read blocks of your virtual desktops into a specified amount of local host memory.  Keep in mind this is just for read blocks, but should be very useful when there are a number of common blocks being read such as during a scheduled anti-virus scan, boot storms, etc…

View Persona Management

New in View 5 was the built in persona management, well, View 5.1 takes that one step further and provides persona management across both virtual and physical desktops.  This feature however is not meant to be something that is constantly used within the environment, but more so used to help migrate physical XP workstations to a virtual Windows 7 desktop.

USB Redirect

Again, this was available within View 5, however 5.1 has removed the need to have the physical driver installed on your end points.  By utilizing some technology built into the agent and a generic USB arbitrator on the client side you should see support for a wider range of USB devices flowing in.

Once again, these are only a few choice features of View, there are many more features as well as an explanation of all the other announcements from yesterday over at the End User Computing blog or the press release.   Check them all out and find out for yourself that View 5.1 is more than a .1 release.   View 5.1 should be shipping sometime during Q2 of this year so stay tuned…

I've been meaning to write this post for some time now and with my recent nomination of a vExpert I thought the timing was finally right.    The basis was really to just to share my experiences with VMware, its' community, and the knowledge, connections and friendships that I have gained from all of the above and how it all really started with a user group, the VMware User Group.

I began my journey with virtualization back in 2008 after I had taken a promotion at work and was kind of thrown into it.  This was back in the 3.x days and ever since that first vMotion that I seen I can say I was most certainly hooked.  I had some experiences with the community, more specifically the VMTN forums along with attending the odd vForum, but as with anything you really don't get the most out of anything until you develop a passion for the technology.

And that was exactly what happened, with the upgrade to vSphere I found myself managing this virtual environment more and more and really starting to dedicate a lot of my free time reading documentation, whitepapers, following industry experts and their blogs and really starting to dig deep into all that is VMware.

2010 was the year that I started to attend my local VMUG chapter in Toronto on a regular basis, and this is really where my journey began.  December of 2010 brought the full day regional VMUG where I saw a presentation on vCenter Operations, a technology which was still in beta after the Integrien acquisition.  After seeing the power in this product I followed up with Martin, the product manager for the product and landed myself and my company a spot on the beta crew.  I did my best to provide Martin and his team with the most information i could in regards to the product and how we were using it in a production environment and in response to that received a ticket to VMworld.

Now I knew VMworld was going to be big and epic, but never could I have prepared myself for what was to come.  A week full of community events, tweetups, meetups, parties, sessions….it was unbelievalbe really.  One of the tweetups that I attended was hosted by John Troyer and basically just talked about how to start up your own technical blog.  This was something that I had pondered for the years leading up to that day, but never really acted on.  After VMworld I decided I would give it a go…and I think its been a successful venture so far.

So, after the blog was up and going it was really all about building my brand.  I landed some sponsors, ended up on the Veeam Community Podcast for an episode, and ultimately, just last week was named a vExpert for 2012.

So, I guess that's enough rambling for now, but the main takeaway from this post I guess would be to get out to your local VMUGs and engage into conversation with the community.  I mean, I ended up a vExpert, wrote a couple of VCP certifications, started a blog which I now know I love maintaining, and really, it all started with a user group.

As you may have noticed the banner advertisement on the right hand side of this page I have a new sponsor; AppAssure.  AppAssure provides data and application protection across your server stack including virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.  By combining physical and virtual backups into one management console, coupling that with object level recovery as well as bare metal recovery AppAssure really does have a winning product that I would certainly recommend to check out.  They also have an interesting comparison to Symantecs' Backup Exec running on their site right now.  I wanted to take the time to personally thank AppAssure for their sponsorships as it is companies like these that help to support the community in order to maintain a wealth of great content flowing.

Currently AppAssure has scheduled a free webinar titled "12 Backup & Recovery Questions Every Windows Administrator Must Ask"  Below you can find a description and link to the event.  vExpert Greg Shields (twitter) is heading up the webinar so you know it's going to be a good one…Check it out!

On April 27, Greg Shields and Joe Hand are doing a webinar on “12 Backup & Recovery Questions Every Windows Administrator Must Ask.” In just a few short years everything about IT changed completely. Physical servers are quickly becoming virtual ones. Private and public cloud are topics on everyone’s minds. Even server backups and data recovery, having long been sleepy activities for administrators drawing the short straw, are now seeing revolutionary shifts in tactics and technologies. It can be hard to keep up.

Join Greg Shields, VMware vExpert, and Joe Hand , AppAssure’s Sr. Director, when they share what every windows administrator must ask.

·         Twelve questions about backups and data recovery that every Windows administrator should ask.

·         A live Q&A session

Time:    1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT (10:30 AM – 11:30 AM PDT)

Register for this webinar

Wow!  I'm happy to say that I have been named a vExpert for 2012!  Sunday morning I seen the slew of twitter notifications which kind of lead me to believe that I had been selected, so i headed on over to the official list and found my name listed within the other 382 people who currently hold the vExpert 2012 title.

So what is a vExpert exactly, well, VMware defines it as the following…

So, needless to say I'm honoured.  Honoured to be labeled with the title, but more so honoured to be listed with some very big and well known names in the world of virtualization and VMware.  I look forward to what the year holds ahead.  So, big thanks to VMware and more specifically to Alex Maier for heading up the vExpert program and to John Troyer for 'spreading the word'.  Congrats to all returning and all new vExperts!  Keep up all the great work!