It’s 2016: and BTRFS could really be your next filesystem

Posted on February 2, 2016January 28, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca 17 Comments

Switching to a new filesystem is never a task that is done with a light heart. We have our own trusted good old filesytem, that has maybe limits in features and performance, but has never let us down. New filesystems are available, and they promise wonderful things. But as much as we are fascinated by them, the big Q “Should I trust it?” comes to mind when we just start thinking about moving to a new filesystem. In Linux, this question arises everytime BTRFS is involved.

Migrate from VMware tools to open-vm-tools in CentOS

Posted on January 26, 2016December 4, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca 2 Comments

In 2012 I wrote a blog post that became really popular: Installing VMware tools on Centos 6 via yum. Few years forward, and today the preferred tools are the open sourced ones available natively in many linux package managers. So, some may think to switch from one version to the other one for their existing virtual machines. That’s what I’ve done in some of my virtual machines, and here is the process.

Use updated kernel in CentOS 7

Posted on January 19, 2016December 4, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca

CentOS is known for not using the latest versions of the Linux kernel. If you need up-to-date versions, you need to configure the OS to use different repositories.

SSL protection and its legacy problems, or is it greed and laziness?

Posted on January 12, 2016January 12, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca

I started to blog when I was already working on virtualization technologies, but before this I was a security consultant, and I still hold my CISSP certification. So, for once I’m writing something about security more than virtualization, because this news about SSL totally deserves an article. TLS is hard… let’s keep SSL for a […]

How can you test 1000 VMs with Veeam SureBackup?

Posted on December 15, 2015December 4, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca 5 Comments

If you have a large environment that is constantly changinh, you may want some automation to test VMs every day with Veeam SureBackup. Here’s a solution to do so.

An example of Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repository mixing whitebox servers

Posted on December 9, 2015November 22, 2015 by Luca Dell'Oca 2 Comments

Since Veeam announced the Scale-Out Backup Repository technology coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v9, I’ve been asked already multiple times to give some practical examples on how to leverage it. Let’s see together one interesting way to leverage the “performance” policy available in Scale-Out Backup Repository.

3D TLC NAND flash, your new SATA disk

Posted on December 1, 2015November 22, 2015 by Luca Dell'Oca 1 Comment

In 2014, in a presentation I’ve done, I’ve said to people that in 2-3 years new and cheaper flash memory would have become the stardard solution for general purpose disk storage, thanks to a price per GB comparable with spinning disk. Seems that I was right after all.

Protecting NFS storage on vSphere using Veeam virtual proxies

Posted on November 24, 2015November 24, 2016 by Luca Dell'Oca 2 Comments

If you want to backup virtual machines running on an NFS storage in vSphere using virtual proxies, Veeam has a dedicated registry key to protect you from NFS locks.