vsphere

Increase the performance of your Veeam backups in network mode

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 1 Comment

If you ever tried to do any file operation via the management interface of an ESXi host, like uploading an ISO file or running a backup using Network Mode, you may know the management interface is not running at the full speed of the underlying network interface, and the bandwidth you end up using is only a percentage of the total available. This limit is designed to preserve the availability of the management interface, but still there are situations where this limit is a problem, and you would like to increase it. Hopefully, there’s a solution.

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

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 19 Comments

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.

Restore a single VMDK using Veeam Instant VM Recovery

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

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?

SanDisk FlashSoft 3.1 per vSphere: una panoramica

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 6 Comments

Ho scoperto per la prima volta FlashSoft in occasione di Storage Field Day 3 a Denver: FlashSoft era stata acquisita da SanDisk nel Febbraio 2012, ed è stata sinceramente una sopresa scoprire che il colosso delle memorie Flash possedeva una divisione Enterprise, fatta di soluzioni come appunto FlashSoft e altre. Penso che come me, molti di voi hanno sempre abbinato il nome SanDisk alle memorie per dispositivi o alle chiavette USB…
Ho finalmente potuto dedicare un pò di tempo a studiare questa soluzione. Questo primo articolo è una descrizione del prodotto e delle sue caratteristiche.

Configurare una piccola infrastruttura iSCSI ridondata per VMware

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 24 Comments

Ho notato spesso diverse richieste da parte di molti utenti su quale sia una corretta configurazione della rete quando si va ad utilizzare uno storage iSCSI, specialmente in configurazioni molto piccole.
Ho deciso quindi di scrivere in questo post come io solitamente configuro uno storage HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 e un cluster vSphere da 3 server. Se utilizzate uno storage differente, probabilmente dovrete adattare qualche configurazione, ma i concetti di base saranno i medesimi.