vsphere

Automated Veeam Cloud Connect deployment: 3 – connect to VMware virtual environment

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

In the previous posts we completed the automatic configuration of the Veeam Cloud Connect environment. In this third post of this short series, we will add additional resources in order to offer replication services. In fact, all the Cloud Connect components are now successfully deployed, so Backup services can already be offered, but to offer also replication services we need to connect our environment to the virtualized platform. Historically, Veeam Cloud Connect supported VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, but since the soon-to-come 9.5 Update 4 will also add support for VMware vCloud Director, we will see how to add both to the infrastructure.

Security for your virtual machines: backup of vSphere encrypted VMs

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

In my previous post of this small series, titled Security for your virtual machines: what is KMIP?, I talked about the new generation of the main hypervisors, VMware vSphere 6.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, and how they both introduced new encryption capabilities for virtual machines. I described the underlying technology used by VMware, KMIP; it’s not time to implement it in my lab and see how it interacts with data protection, specifically backups.

Security for your virtual machines: what is KMIP?

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 3 Comments

The latest generation of the main hypervisors has shown, among other things, a renewed and increased focus on security, with the most visible feature being VM encryption. It’s amazing to see how both VMware vSphere 6.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, both released in the same year, introduced this feature at the same time. But it’s less of a surprise if you think about all the security issues that IT admins and users are facing lately, with things like ransomware, cryptolocker and other threads.
In this first of a series of posts, we’ll look at the different solutions and some deep dive into the used technologies, and how operations like backups are impacted. In this first post, let’s talk about KMIP.

Backup and restore vSphere SPBM policies with Veeam Backup & Replication

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

SPBM allows virtualization administrator to remove all the burden of manual placement of virtual disks, spreadsheets full of data about which VM is stored where, which LUN coming from a given array has feature X enabled, and so on. With SPBM, admins can create multiple policies with the needed options, and once the policy is applied to a VM, vSphere will automatically check for the compliancy of the VM and the storage it is actually stored onto, and if the policy is not fulfilled, a storage vmotion will happen to move the VM into a complaint storage. And policies can also be changed in real–time, and remediation again will happen automatically.
This new solution is a huge advantage, and many admins are leveraging this capability more and more. But what happens when a virtual machine has to be restored from a backup? Are those policies preserved? The answer is yes, if you use Veeam Backup & Replication.

Backup performance of VMware VVOLs

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

Virtual Volumes, or VVOLs, has been one of the biggest addition in VMware vSphere 6. If your storage array supports them, you can start to play with it and decide if it’s time to migrate from monolithic VMFS volumes to this new exciting storage technology. VVOLs have several advantages over regular VMFS volumes, from the granularity of the volume management (essentially, we have now one “LUN” per virtual disk), to policy-based management, and so on. One of the aspects that people didn’t focused too much is the impact on backup operations coming from VVOLs.