Virtual To The Core

Quick tip: how to delete Windows.old folder

Luca Dell'Oca, May 15, 2014December 4, 2016

After an in-place upgrade in the latest versions of Windows (2008 and up), the installation keeps a complete copy of the previous operating system into a folder named “Windows.Old”, in case you’d like to revert the upgrade. This is a useful option, but it leave your installation with a huge wasted space on the disk.
Learn how to remove the folder without installing Disk Cleanup or rebooting.

Tech

Do we really need backups?!?

Luca Dell'Oca, May 12, 2014December 4, 2016

“oh gosh, Luca has gone mad…” I’m almost sure this is your feeling when you read the title of this post. It’s no secret I work for Veeam, and our flagship product is Veeam Backup & Replication, a data protection solution for virtualized environments. So why did I chose that title? I like catchy titles, and most of all this is the question I asked my self after reading another blog post. Read my post, and you will understand why my final answer is “yes, damn yes!”.

Tech

Time for Next-Gen Data Protection?

Luca Dell'Oca, May 5, 2014December 4, 2016

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.

News

The hidden story of the Veeam and Nutanix white paper

Luca Dell'Oca, April 28, 2014April 30, 2014

Last week, Veeam and Nutanix have published a joint technical paper, regarding the best practices to use Veeam Backup & Replication v7 in a Nutanix infrastructure, when running VMware vSphere. The paper is 20 pages long, it has been written by myself and Derek Seaman, and you can download it here. This post however is about what’s “not” written in that paper, its story, and what I learned from this great experience.

Tech

Whiteboard Fridays (on Wednesday): How to properly size your backup repository

Luca Dell'Oca, April 24, 2014April 24, 2014

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!

Tech

Veeam storage snapshots and NetApp

Luca Dell'Oca, April 17, 2014April 18, 2014

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.

Tech

Restore a single VMDK using Veeam Instant VM Recovery

Luca Dell'Oca, April 14, 2014December 4, 2016

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?

Tech

A new server for my lab

Luca Dell'Oca, April 8, 2014December 4, 2016

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.