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

Test Veeam Storage Snapshots in your lab

Luca Dell'Oca,

In a previous post, I described how you can configure a virtual proxy to access an iSCSI storage, in order to test DirectSAN backups. Veeam has an additional functionality, called Storage Snapshots, that improves even more DirectSAN backups performances when you have a supported storage. I’m going to show you in this post how you can configure it in your lab.

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Tech

Test DirectSAN backups without a physical Veeam server

Luca Dell'Oca,

One of the nice features of Veeam Backup & Replication, when it comes to backup speed, is the possibility to use DirectSAN as its backup method on vSphere environments. This option offers the best performances, but has some precise requirements at the hardware level. It could be easy to comply with them in a production environment, but what if you want to test it in your lab, where usually hardware options are limited? Don’t worry, there is a solution!

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Tech

Check the file system of your USB drive before using it as a backup target

Luca Dell'Oca,

One of the new features introduced in Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 is the new “Backup Copy” job type. With it, an administrator can create a secondary location for his backups, without having to clone large backup files from the primary backups using tools like rsync or robocopy.
If you plan to use an external USB drive as your target for this kind of jobs, be sure to check the file system in use, before runnng into problems.

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Analysis

QoS: the next “Big Thing” in storage?

Luca Dell'Oca,

In the last months I talked with or looked at several storage vendors, and I saw a new topic becoming more and more important: QoS (Quality of Service). The list of vendors offering this feature (with differences in their own technologies) is becoming quite large: CloudByte, GridStore, Coho Data, SolidFire, HP 3Par, NetApp. And for sure I’m forgetting someone else.
As you can see in my short list, there are both startups that have this feature from their first release, and also big names who added QoS to their existing products. There is a new trend coming, and QoS is for sure becoming a “hot” topic in storage.

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Tech

PernixData in my Lab: some performance tests

Luca Dell'Oca,

Few weeks ago I published an article titled “My new “I/O Test Virtual Machine”, telling you about the VM I built to run my performance tests for virtualized environments. After a first post running those tests against my “plain” Lab and its enhanced version using another server-side caching solution, many of you asked me if I was planning to do the same tests with PernixData. So i did, and here are my findings.

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