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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Check the file system of your USB drive before using it as a backup target
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.
PernixData in my Lab: some performance tests
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.
EFA: nice and free spam filter virtual appliance
EFA, Email Filtering Appliance, is the successor of ESVA, and is a free and powerful antispam virtual appliance. it’s free, it’s quickly installable thanks to the OVF format available for both VMware and Hyper-V environments, and it has a nice and easy web interface to administer everything.