Sep 26

Veeam & the cloud – for free – almost

TwinStrata has announced it will supply a free CloudArray appliance, for storing up to 1TB of data in the ‘cloud’ to all Veeam B&R customers.

Customers can choose which cloud storage provider they wish to use, and then in just a few minutes connect their Veeam B&R solution to said cloud storage via the CloudArray appliance.

TwinStrata CloudArray is an enterprise-class cloud storage gateway, which either comes as a hardware appliance, or in the case of this offer, a virtual appliance.

Features include:

  • Snapshots
  • HA options
  • Compression
  • De-duplication
  • Encryption
  • Ease of integration with Veeam B&R

Definitely something to check out:

http://www.twinstrata.com/press-releases/TwinStrata-and-Veeam-Software-Extend-Partnership-with-Bundled-CloudArray-Appliance

Sep 13

Site Recovery Manager 5

So, I wanted to talk a little about the new version of Site Recovery Manager that is coming soon.  I’ve got nothing against SRM, but prior versions were a little poor in the administration and no automated fail back, thankfully these have been addressed in the new version.

So, onto some highlights:

  • Integration with multiple vendors spread across 28 arrays
  • Failure detection, then manage the entire failover process
  • Proper Multi Site DR capabilities, not just the 1:1 relationship that is in place at the moment.  This will allow for migration of these Virtual Machines across multiple datacentres across Continents if needs be
  • Application mobility – Assign RPO and RTO service levels to applications to define DR Service levels
  • A new concept of utilizing SRM as a disaster avoidance tool, migrate those VM workloads from the data centre that is in harm’s way to one that can continue processing
  • SRM is not just to be used as a DR tool, but also a data centre migration tool
  • Automated Failback!!! Woot
  • Host based replication – no need to purchase those expensive SAN’s or iSCSI now, a bonus for the SMB’s
  • Scheduled migrations
  • A nice new designed GUI

For those familiar with SRM 4, SRM 5 is what it should have been in the first place, I think I can justify the price of this version now! 🙂

Sep 12

vSphere 5 – the features

Theres A LOT of new features in vSphere 5, and I’ve detailed them all below:

  1. Storage I/O Control for NFS
  2. Storage DRS
  3. VMFS-5
  4. ESXi Firewall
  5. VMFS Scalability and Performance enhancements
  6. 2TB+ pass-through RDM support
  7. vCenter inventory extensibility
  8. Storage APIs — VAAI T10 Compliancy
  9. Storage APIs — VAAI Offloads for NAS
  10. Storage APIs — VAAI Thin Provisioning
  11. Storage APIs — Storage Awareness/Discovery
  12. Storage APIs — Data Protection compatible with MN
  13. APD, Permanent APD Survivability Enablement
  14. Snapshot enhancements
  15. Storage vMotion scalability improvements
  16. iSCSI Enablement: iSCSI UI Support
  17. iSCSI Enablement: Stateless Support
  18. Multi-queue Storage IO adapters
  19. Increase NFSv3 Max Share Count to 256
  20. SATA 3.0
  21. Software FCoE initiator support
  22. Enhanced logging support
  23. Enhanced Storage metrics
  24. Profile-Driven Storage
  25. Storage vMotion support for snapshots
  26. vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA)
  27. SSD Detection and Enablement
  28. vSphere Replication
  29. vSphere Data Recovery 2.0
  30. VADP enhancements
  31. vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Enhancements
  32. vCO — Library extension and consolidation
  33. vCO — Scalability
  34. Network I/O Control (NIOC) Phase 2
  35. NIOC — User Defined Resource Pools
  36. NIOC — HBR traffic type
  37. NIOC — 802.1p tagging
  38. Network Traffic Stats for iOPS
  39. Improvement to UDP and Multicast traffic types
  40. New networking drivers for server enablement
  41. vDS support for Port mirror, LLDP and NetFlow V5
  42. vDS Manage Port Group UI enhancement
  43. Hot-Insert/Remove of Filters
  44. Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
  45. Storage vMotion support for Linked Clones
  46. vMotion scalability (dual-NIC & longer latency support)
  47. vNetwork API enhancements
  48. vNetwork Opaque Channel
  49. Support for 8 10GbE Physical NIC ports per host
  50. Add Host Resources MIB to SNMP offering
  51. Metro vMotion
  52. Host Profile for DRS to support Stateless ESX
  53. HA interop with agent VMs
  54. DRS/DPM interop with agent VMs
  55. DRS enhancements for Maintenance Mode
  56. Enhanced processor support for FT
  57. vSphere 5.0 HA aka “FDM / Fault Domain Manager”
  58. vSphere HA – Heartbeat Datastores
  59. vSphere HA – Support for partitions of management network
  60. vSphere HA – Default isolation response changed
  61. vSphere HA – New Status information in UI
  62. vSphere HA – IPv6 support
  63. vSphere HA – Application Awareness API publicly available
  64. Extensions to create special icons for VMs
  65. ESX Agent Management
  66. Solution Management Plugin
  67. Next-Gen vSphere Client
  68. Host Profiles Enhancements
  69. vCenter enhancements for stateless ESXi
  70. vCenter Server Appliance
  71. vCenter: Support for FileManager and VirtualDiskManager APIs
  72. Virtual Hardware – Smartcard support for vSphere
  73. Virtual Hardware Version 8
  74. Virtual HW v8 — 1TB VM RAM
  75. Virtual HW v8 — 32-way Virtual SMP
  76. Virtual Hw v8 — Client-Connected USB Devices
  77. Virtual HW v8 — EFI Virtual BIOS
  78. Virtual HW v8 — HD Audio
  79. Virtual Hw v8 — Multi-core Virtual CPU Support UI
  80. Virtual HW v8 — New virtual E1000 NIC
  81. Virtual HW v8 — UI and other support
  82. Virtual HW v8 — USB 3.0 device support
  83. Virtual HW v8 — VMCI device enhancements
  84. Virtual HW v8 — xHCI
  85. Support SMP for Mac OS X guest OS
  86. Universal Passthrough (VMdirect path with vMotion support)
  87. Guest Management Operations (VIX API)
  88. Guest OS Support — Mac OS X Server
  89. VM Serial Port to Host Serial Port Redirection (Serial Port Pass-Through)
  90. Passthrough/SR-IOV
  91. VMware Tools Portability
  92. VMRC Concurrent Connections enhancements
  93. Scalability: 512 VMs per host
  94. ESXCLI enhancements
  95. Support SAN and hw-iSCSI boot
  96. Hardware — Interlagos Processor Enablement
  97. Hardware — SandyBridge-DT Processor Enablement
  98. Hardware — SandyBridge-EN Processor Enablement
  99. Hardware — SandyBridge-EP Processor Enablement
  100. Hardware — Valencia Processor Enablement
  101. Hardware — Westmere-EX Processor Enablement
  102. Platform — CIM Enhancements
  103. Platform — ESX i18n support
  104. Host Power Management Enhancements
  105. Improved CPU scheduler
  106. Improved scalability of CPU (NUMA) scheduler
  107. Memory scheduler improvements to support 32-way VCPU’s
  108. Swap to host cache
  109. API enhancements to configure VM boot order
  110. VMX swap
  111. Support for ESXi On Apple XServe
  112. Redirect DCUI to host serial port for remote monitoring and management
  113. UEFI BIOS Boot for ESXi hosts
  114. Scalability — 160 CPU Threads (logical PCPUs) per host
  115. Scalability — 2 TB RAM per host
  116. Scalability — 2048 VCPUs per host
  117. Scalability — 2048 virtual disks per host
  118. Scalability — 2048 VMs per VMFS volume
  119. Scalability — 512 VMs per host
  120. Stateless — Host Profile Engine and Host Profile Completeness
  121. Stateless — Image Builder
  122. Stateless — Auto Deploy
  123. Stateless — Networking Host Profile Plugin
  124. Stateless — VIB Packaging Enhancement
  125. Stateless — VMkernel network core dump
  126. Host profiles enhancements for storage configuration
  127. Enhanced driver support for ESXi
  128. Intel TXT Support
  129. Memsched policy enhancements w.r.t. Java balloon
  130. Native Driver Autoload support
  131. Root password entry screen in interactive installer
  132. vCenter Dump Collector
  133. vCenter Syslog Collector
  134. VMware Update Manager (VUM) enhancements
  135. VUM — Virtual Appliance enhancements
  136. VUM — vApp Support
  137. VUM — Depot management enhancements
  138. vCLI enhancements
  139. PowerCLI enhancements
  140. VProbes — ESX Platform Observability

There we go, a lot of new features, and I will be blogging about some of them in the future, but probably not all of them! 🙂

Sep 10

vSphere 5 storage advances

There’s a buzz about vSphere 5 (apart from the rather odd changes to the licensing! 🙂 ) especially the changes being made to VMFS with VMFS5… I thought I would detail some of the different features that are being introduced:

  • Support for LUN’s larger than 2TB, but using GPT
  • 1MB block size, no need to pick the right size
  • Over 130,000 files per data store support
  • NAS, full file clone, fast file clone for linked clones now supported by VAAI!
  • Dead space reclamation support in VAAI, allows storage arrays to de-allocate the blocks when a Virtual Machine is moved to a different data store
  • Disk space and latency are used by Storage DRS to govern if a Virtual Machine needs to be migrated.  It can also be used for automatic data store selection whilst incorporating load balancing processes – but this can be switched off if you want to use the storage vendors automated tiering
  • 64TB! LUN support, without using extents
  • Storage DRS (sDRS) can utilize clusters of data stores (of the same type) plus can use placement rules
  • sDRS can evacuate Virtual Machines from data stores once they are put into maintenance mode
  • Fast migration with storage vMotion through the use of mirrored writes to the source and destination VMDK’s, so only one copy is required
  • Tag your storage through profile driven storage characteristic tags to allow Virtual Machines to be placed on mission critical storage, second tier or third tier, dependant on SLA’s put in place by the business
  • VASA – vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness allows storage vednors to expose the arrays capabilities to vCenter, raid level, disk type etc
  • Virtual Machines with snaps and linked clones can now be storage vMotion’d
  • FCoE Initiator now supported through software, but some dependencies on hardware there

Lots of advances there, especially liking the extra VAAI integrations which offload the storage based work to the storage array.  One word of warning, best way to utilize VMFS5 is to just create a new data store and migrate your virtual machines onto it.  You can convert current VMFS3 to 5 but you won’t get all the benefits of a native 5 VMFS.

More details to follow when I get time to type it up!

Aug 29

Veeam Backup & Replication v6

Some more details have been released on the upcoming (Q4 2011) release of Veeam Backup & Replication Version 6. Hyper-V support is the major announcement that was made quite a while ago, but there are some new goodies being implemented to.

Backup proxies are being introduced which allows for a new scale out architecture to be implemented. Rather than the main backup server doing all the processing and load bearing of the entire backup infrastructure, backup proxies can be deployed within the environment which allows this processing to be offloaded to them. This allows for a massive amount of scale out, compared to the current v5 method of just adding another Backup & Replication Server. Enterprise Manager will stay and give you the ability to manage all main and proxy based servers plus the ability to edit and copy backup jobs, which currently is not possible as Enterprise Manager is used only for reporting.

Replication speed is increased, in some cases, being reported as 10x in a push environment. It allows the use of the vSphere API’s for Data Protection, called Hot Add to perform writes. This enables support for replication of thin provisioned target disks and cuts down on network traffic, which in turn improves replication speeds.

Some other updates:

  • Failback with the ability to sync modifications to data made since failover — either on one single machine or all Virtual Machines
  • Creation of replica copies of the master images in the event of a failover
  • Seed first backups via portable hard drive instead of doing primary syncs over the network
  • Restore single files from the search results in Enterprise Manage, through just one click
  • Delegate authority to helpdesk staff to complete file level restores
  • Free license swaps between VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, (depending on the number of per-socket licenses being available)

Personally, I can’t wait for v6 to be made publically available in Q4 due to the addition of the scale out architecture and speed increases in replication, this is a definite plus to this already brilliant product and is giving all the other backup solutions a run for their money.