Tech
Whitepaper: “HP + Veeam: Fast VMware Recovery from SAN Snapshots”
Jan 17th
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I recently wrote a series of posts about Veeam Explorer for SAN snapshots.
Veeam guys were so happy about my posts they decide to combine all of them in a whitepaper, and they published it in their website few days ago.
If you want to have a copy, go here and download it.
As usual, any constructive comment about the whitepaper is welcome!
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The Paradox of Exchange 2010 reduced IO requirements and vSphere VADP-based backups
Sep 6th
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VMware snapshots are the base of every backup solution designed around VADP (VMware APIs for Data Protection). If a virtual disk can be snapshotted, it can be saved. Plain and simple.
However, there are some situations where this solution can eventually lead to some problems. The best known, and if for example you are among the usual Veeam forums users you know them well, are Exchange 2010 virtual machines. Exchange 2010 disk usage behaviour
The new underlying database format was designed by Microsoft to be light on the storage it runs on, and is well explained here. The technical reason is in More >
Nutanix: an overview
Jul 2nd
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On 14th of May 2012, Nutanix has officially started its EMEA division. I was testing at that time Fusion-IO cards, and I was really interested in Nutanix as one of the best implementation of the Fusion-IO “no SAN” idea. Luckily I was their official first guest, since we had a webex on that same day early in the morning. Alan and Rob showed me their technology, answered to all my questions and gave me a lot of material. This article aimes to be a recap of what I learned that day, and the first one of a series in the More >
Beware how and where you save your backups
May 31st
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Yesterday in a mailing list we had a nice discussion about some “worst practices” we see at some customers about their backup configurations. They inspired me this post about some common-sense you can apply to your backups.
Separation I often found environments where a customer totally relies on the redundancy and resilience of his new shiny SAN, where he configures an area for backup purposes. Among the fancy statements I heard there are “I’ve plenty of space there…” or “my SAN is completely redundant!”. Obviously those statements did not exclude the possibility something can go wrong (maybe even a “trivial” corruption in More >
Pre-emptively enable HotAdd/HotPlug of a VM
May 17th
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It happens often to have to do maintenance on Virtual Machines bacause of an exhaustion of computing resources. A web server with many more visitors than those predicted when it was sized, a database server with newly added application, there are many examples.
In thse situations, a sysadmin schedules the activity on the virtual machine in non working hours(usually nights or weekends), stops the VM, changes settings by adding more cpu or ram, and restarts the VM. Even if this task takes only few minutes, it would be possible to avoid it completely by choosing a compatible guest OS and pre-emptively configure More >
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