Virtual To The Core

Veeam Availability Suite v9, how many Storage Enhancements!

Luca Dell'Oca, July 1, 2015July 1, 2015

The upcoming Veeam Availability Suite v9 has tons of enhancements and new features, but improvements around primary and backup storage will surely be one of the biggest parts of our next release.
We already announced a new addition in our list of supported storage arrays for our storage snapshots integration (EMC VNX/VNXe), but this isn’t the only storage news—on the contrary, there are plenty of them, and I’ll cover some of them in this post.

Analysis

VVOLs are more than just “per-VM”storage volumes

Luca Dell'Oca, June 16, 2015June 15, 2015

As I’m following closely the growth and evolution of this new technology for vSphere environments, I’ve found an article on the blogosphere and some additional comments on Twitter that made me re-think a bit about the real value of VVOLS. Is the real value of VVOLs the VM granularity, or it’s more the policy-based management?

News

The new Veeam Cloud Connect, now with replication services

Luca Dell'Oca, June 9, 2015June 9, 2015

Last year, Veeam released Veeam Cloud Connect, a new technology that allows the easy creation and consumption of offsite backup repositories. It was the first solution specifically designed around Service Providers, both from a technical and business point of view. Its extreme ease of use and capabilities made it an instant success, and as of today several hundreds of service providers are offering offsite backup services based on Cloud Connect.
As a first generation technology, everyone was expecting additional capabilities in the following versions, and the most common request has always been “are you going to add replication capabilities?”.
As you can guess from the title of this post, that’s exactly what is coming in the next version!

Tech

Deep Dive: Memory consumption of a Veeam repository

Luca Dell'Oca, May 26, 2015May 27, 2015

Veeam repositories, both Windows and Linux based, are running a software component responsible for receiving and storing data as they are processed by proxies. One of the most important parameter when sizing a repository is its expected memory consumption. Here are some informations for its proper configuration.

Tech

My adventures with Ceph Storage. Part 10: Upgrade the cluster

Luca Dell'Oca, May 19, 2015May 26, 2016

As any existing software, Ceph is subject to minor and major releases. My entire series of posts has been realized using version Giant (0.87), but by the time I completed the series, Hammer (0.94) was released. Note that Ceph, as other linux softwares, uses a major release naming scheme based on the letter of the alphabet, so Giant is the 7th major release. Ceph releases both minor and major versions of the software, so it’s important to know how to upgrade it.

Tech

Deploy and install NetApp ONTAP Simulator 8.3 RC1 for a vSphere cluster

Luca Dell'Oca, May 12, 2015December 4, 2016

NetApp has a nice ONTAP Simulator that is freely available, and allows anyone to test out their storage platform without having to own a physical array. In the past I’ve used the NetApp Edge VSA, but since some months this is not available anymore, and the simulator is the only way to go. In this article, I’ll show you how to install and configure the Simulator with its latest version 8.3 RC1, and connect it to a vSphere cluster.

News

Service Providers Tour, this time down under!

Luca Dell'Oca, May 5, 2015May 3, 2015

As I promised few months ago, I was planning to repeat the Service Providers tour in other regions. Well, time has come, and has you are writing this post, I’m flying over Asia and the Indian Ocean towards Auckland, my first stop. We will hit also Melbourne and Sydney.

News

New whitepaper: Veeam Backup & Replication v8 Data Protection for Oracle Environments

Luca Dell'Oca, April 28, 2015April 26, 2015

I’ve published a new whitepaper for Veeam, regarding Veeam Backup & Replication v8 and data protection for Oracle Environments.