Author: Luca Dell'Oca

Luca Dell’Oca, 2011/2012/2013 VMware vExpert,works in IT since 2000. Since 2006, he’s working as a virtualization consultant and architect, specialized in the design and management of VMware infrastructures. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Italian VMware User Group, and author of the blog www.virtualtothecore.com, where he regularly publishes articles on everything related to virtualization.
Tech

Backup and restore vSphere SPBM policies with Veeam Backup & Replication

Luca Dell'Oca,

SPBM allows virtualization administrator to remove all the burden of manual placement of virtual disks, spreadsheets full of data about which VM is stored where, which LUN coming from a given array has feature X enabled, and so on. With SPBM, admins can create multiple policies with the needed options, and once the policy is applied to a VM, vSphere will automatically check for the compliancy of the VM and the storage it is actually stored onto, and if the policy is not fulfilled, a storage vmotion will happen to move the VM into a complaint storage. And policies can also be changed in real–time, and remediation again will happen automatically.
This new solution is a huge advantage, and many admins are leveraging this capability more and more. But what happens when a virtual machine has to be restored from a backup? Are those policies preserved? The answer is yes, if you use Veeam Backup & Replication.

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Tech

Backup performance of VMware VVOLs

Luca Dell'Oca,

Virtual Volumes, or VVOLs, has been one of the biggest addition in VMware vSphere 6. If your storage array supports them, you can start to play with it and decide if it’s time to migrate from monolithic VMFS volumes to this new exciting storage technology. VVOLs have several advantages over regular VMFS volumes, from the granularity of the volume management (essentially, we have now one “LUN” per virtual disk), to policy-based management, and so on. One of the aspects that people didn’t focused too much is the impact on backup operations coming from VVOLs.

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Tech

An example for a Veeam backup repository using Windows 2016

Luca Dell'Oca,

In my previous article Windows 2016 and Storage Spaces as a Veeam backup repository I talked about the advantages that Veeam Backup & Replication can bring when combined with Windows Server 2016 and the new ReFS 3.1 filesytem. Several people have asked already about some practical examples about how to design a solution using these technologies, so I thought it was time to give you one storage design.

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Analysis

Windows 2016 and Storage Spaces as a Veeam backup repository

Luca Dell'Oca,

As Microsoft Windows 2016 is now finally generally available, people are starting to seriously looking at its features, and no doubt S2D together with the new ReFS 3.1 is one of the hot topics. I’ve first of all updated my lab with the final version of Windows 2016 in order to have my cluster in a “stable” state, than I started to focus on the different topics related to Windows 2016 and its usage as a Veeam repository. And I started to ask How can we leverage ReFS BlockCloning and Storage Spaces to make Windows 2016 the best solution for Veeam repositories? What about Storage Spaces Direct?”.

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Tech

Patching windows servers with Ansible

Luca Dell'Oca,

After I configured my Ansible server to manage my windows machines in the previous article, one of the first tasks I planned to automate was patching. Patching is one of those extremely boring but needed activities, and in any environment, even with a small amount of server, automated patching may be a savior. As long as proper data protection is in place, like a daily backup of the involved virtual machines, we can safely plan automatic updates, and if anything goes wrong, we just need to revert the virtual machine to the previous state.

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