Some weeks ago, Nimble Storage published on its blog an article titled It’s Time To Get Aggressive About Data Protection. the post is a nice summary and analysis of a research they conducted on their customers. The topic, as you can understand from the title, is Data Protection. They interviewed 1600 of their customers with different sizes, from small to medium to large enterprises; and the results were pretty interesting. If I’d have to summarize in a phrase: a need for Next-Gen Data Protection is arising.
Category: Tech
Everything tech: deepdive on the most important technologies, tips and tricks for everyday’s work, tutorial, step-by-step guides, videos and manuals.
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Whiteboard Fridays (on Wednesday): How to properly size your backup repository
I’m in the USA in these days, and part of my activities has been to stop by our Atlanta offices, I had a couple of meetings there, but the main reason has been to attend as a guest to the Whiteboard Fridays. These are live transmissions from the Atlanta offices, hosted by Jose Mendoza and Shawn Lieu plus some guests that join them from time to time, and the topics are usually deeply technical, and there is an extensive use of whiteboarding. No slidedecks, no recorded video, only a whiteboard and a pen.
This time, is about Veeam backup repositories, and how to properly design and size them!
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Veeam storage snapshots and NetApp
In the new upcoming v8, Veeam Backup & Replication will add a new storage vendor for its Backup from Storage Snapshots support, and this vendor is NetApp. All the FAS and V Series will be supported, both in 7-Mode or Clustered Mode, with the only requirement being the OnTAP OS being at least 8.1.
After playing with the tech preview for a month now, I’d like to talk a little bit more about a couple of new technologies that are going to be in there.
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Restore a single VMDK using Veeam Instant VM Recovery
Instant VM Recovery is one of the coolest feature of Veeam Backup & Replication. Regardless of the size of a VM, it allows to have it back in production and running in few minutes, because it’s not actually copied back into the production datastore, but directly executed from a backup file. It’s main use is to restore completely broken or lost VMs, but what if you want to restore a single VMDK, maybe because the original VM is fine and you only need one of its virtual disks? usually, a disk restore would require a complete binary restore into the production datastore, and if the disk is quite large it can take some time. What if you would be able to use Instant VM Recovery also for a single VMDK, instead of having to remove the old VM and swap it with the new one?
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A new server for my lab
My Lab is built basically as a production environment: it has 3 * 1RU Rack servers, gigabit switches and a couple of iSCSI/NFS Storage array. It nothing as a home lab, it’s noisy and it consume a good amount of electricity. I was lucky enough to have a good friend with some free space in his racks inside a datacenter, and he’s hosting my hardware gear for free. As time goes by however my hardware is becoming old and start to show its limits. At some point, I decided it was time for a hardware refresh.
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Veeam Backup with PernixData write-back caching
PernixData is, as of today, the only server-side caching solution for VMware offering write-back capabilities, that is the possibility to accelerate write operations. This feature is extremely helpful in increasing performances in virtualized environments running write intensive applications like databases, mail servers and others. However, the usage of this feature requires some proper configuration in order to correctly protect VM with Veeam Backup
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Test Veeam Storage Snapshots in your lab
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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Test DirectSAN backups without a physical Veeam server
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!