Author Archives: Marco

About Marco

Marco works for ViaData as a Senior Technical Consultant. He has over 15 years experience as a system engineer and consultant, specialized in virtualization. VMware VCP4, VCP5-DC & VCP5-DT. VMware vExpert 2013, 2014,2015 & 2016. Microsoft MCSE & MCITP Enterprise Administrator. Veeam VMSP, VMTSP & VMCE.

Veeam announces latest features v7

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Last week Veeam announces the latest new big features in there new to release Veeam Backup & Replication v7 backup application.

This release is a big one with tons of new features and fixes. Veeam started in February with announcing the first new big feature and continued to do this every month. This is a summary of all the big new features with some extra information.

01. vCloud Director Support.

Veeam Reveals Enhanced Backup and Recovery for vCloud Director: Using the vCD API, Veeam will display the vCD infrastructure directly in Veeam Backup & Replication™, backup all vApp metadata and attributes, restore vApps and VMs directly to vCD, and support restore of fast-provisioned VMs. 

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VCAP5-DCA Objective 5.2 – Deploy and Manage Complex Update Manager Environments

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Knowledge

  • Identify firewall access rules for Update Manager

Skills and Abilities

  • Install and configure Update Manager Download Service
  • Configure a shared repository
  • Configure smart rebooting
  • Manually download updates to a repository
  • Perform orchestrated vSphere upgrades
  • Create and modify baseline groups
  • Troubleshoot Update Manager problem areas and issues
  • Generate database reports using MS Excel or MS SQL
  • Upgrade vApps using Update Manager
  • Utilize Update Manager PowerCLI to export baselines for testing
  • Utilize the Update Manager Utility to reconfigure vUM settings
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Solving Veeam Error: Host with uuid was not found

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Today I was upgrading an VMware ESX 4.1 host to VMware ESXi 5.1. I did the update with the VMware Update Manager. After a successful upgrade I tried to backup a VM with Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. This resulted in an error. See screenshot.


How to solve this problem. I found this easy solution in the Veeam Support Forums.

Go to the license screen in Veeam Backup & Replication. Revoke the license of the ESXi host, and start the backup again. If all went well, the ESXi host gets a new Veeam license assigned and the Veeam backup is successful.

Problem solved!!

Extra information can be found:

A general system error occured: pending vpxa update.

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When you upgrade a VMware vSphere environment the following error can occur when you just updated the VMware vCenter server.


In my case this was an upgrade of VMware vCenter 4.1 to VMware vCenter 5.1 with VMware vSphere ESX 4.1 hosts. In the installation of vCenter I checked the option to upgrade the vCenter agents on the hosts automatically. After the installation of vCenter I checked the status of the hosts. The following error was showing.


This sometimes happens. I started searching for a solution. I found VMware KB1002672 and VMware KB1003714 that describes my problem.

Reading both KB articles my first try was to manually restart the vpxa agent and the management agents. See VMware KB1003490

When reading the different articles my ESX host was already unreachable for my vCenter server. Communication to the host was no problem.

So I started SSH and restarted the management Agents. Then I restarted the vpxa agent service. Both where successful. Now select Connect in vCenter. The installation of the new vpxa agent started again and now it was successful after a couple of minutes. Problem solved.

If there are still problems, see VMware KB1003714 for a manual installation of the vpxa agent.

Disabling SSL encryption on VMware Converter Standalone 5.x to increase cloning performance

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When you perform a P2V of a physical server to a virtual server the performance is not to great. It could be a lot better when you turn of the SSL encryption.

This post is a note to myself. Turn of SSL encryption when doing a P2V and you don’t want to wait a long time 🙂

Source: VMware KB2020517

Purpose

By default, the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 default the converter worker encrypts the data stream using SSL. Encrypting the traffic increases security, but it can decrease performance.

This article provides steps to disable SSL encryption in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0.

Resolution

To disable SSL encryption for the converter worker:

  1. Locate the converter-worker.xml file. By default, it is located at:
    • Windows 7 and 2008 Server – C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
    • Windows Vista, XP and 2003 Server – %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
    • In older Windows versions – %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
  2. Take a backup of the converter-worker.xml file.
  3. Open the file in a text editor and locate the tag pair <useSsl></useSsl>. It is located inside the <nfc> tag and has a value of true.
  4. Change the value to false.
  5. Save and close the file.
  6. Restart the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker service on the machine.

VMware has also created a Youtube movie.


VCAP5-DCA Objective 4.2 – Deploy and Test VMware FT

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Knowledge

  • Identify VMware FT hardware requirements
  • Identify VMware FT compatibility requirements

Skills and Abilities

  • Modify VM and ESXi host settings to allow for FT compatibility
  • Use VMware best practices to prepare a vSphere environment for FT
  • Configure FT logging
  • Prepare the infrastructure for FT compliance
  • Test FT failover, secondary restart, and application fault tolerance in a FT Virtual Machine

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VCAP5-DCA Objective 4.1 – Implement and Maintain Complex VMware HA Solutions

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Knowledge

  • Identify the three admission control policies for HA
  • Identify heartbeat options and dependencies

Skills and Abilities 

  • Calculate host failure requirements
  • Configure customized isolation response settings
  • Configure HA redundancy
    • Management Network
    • Datastore Heartbeat
    • Network partitions
  • Configure HA related alarms and monitor an HA cluster
  • Create a custom slot size configuration
  • Understand interactions between DRS and HA
  • Analyze vSphere environment to determine appropriate HA admission control policy
  • Analyze performance metrics to calculate host failure requirements
  • Analyze Virtual Machine workload to determine optimum slot size
  • Analyze HA cluster capacity to determine optimum cluster size
    Continue reading →

Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition

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Today Veeam launched their new product Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud edition. So what is new? Here are some Key features.

Cloud-agnostic 

Support for 15 different public storage clouds including:

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon Glacier
  • Rackspace
  • HP Cloud and more

Cloud cost estimation

Set up cost estimates per cloud and specify limits by GB or dollar.

Encryption

Configurable encryption up to AES 256-bit secures data in transmission and at rest in the cloud.

Bandwidth scheduling

Control bandwidth in real time and schedule limits to ensure bandwidth during working hours.

Compression

Reduce the size of backups to reduce transmission time and storage costs. Data is compressed before transfer to the cloud.

Job notifications

Emailed reports keep you informed on backups synchronized to the cloud.

Simply affordable

Traditional methods of offsite backups can be costly and complex. With annual subscription licensing model, Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition avoids significant up-front costs and allows you to introduce cloud backups with minimal financial risk. Since you select the cloud provider of your choice and pay cloud usage costs separately, there is no commitment or vendor lock-in to a particular cloud.
Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition – Licensing and Pricing FAQs

Compare editions

Cloud Edition is available as an annual subscription and includes all of the functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise and Standard editions.


Download full comparison

See Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud edition in action.

More information:

NAKIVO Rewards VMware Professionals with NFR Licenses for VM Backup and Replication

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Today I received the following email from Dasha Zolotar from Nakivo. And I think it is worth to mention.

NAKIVO Inc., a leader in VM backup to cloud software, has announced today that NAKIVO Backup & Replication is now available free of charge to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs), VMware Certified Instructors (VCIs), and VMUG members.

In addition to their day-to-day duties, VMware professionals run their home and work labs to try and learn new software, verify new concepts and ideas, and run pre-production tests. “We are pleased to provide VMware professionals with a fully-functional, yet a free data protection solution for their home and work labs allowing them to drive innovations in business and technology, enhance their IT infrastructure, and improve professional skills,” said Bruce Talley, CEO at NAKIVO.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a next generation, unified VM data protection solution that combines unmatched simplicity and usability with an advanced feature set including local, offsite, and cloud backup, support for live applications and databases, deduplication, compression, encryption, and near-real-time data protection.

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication is loaded with new technology and capabilities to backup VM’s locally, offsite, and to the cloud. It’s the easiest to use backup application that I’ve seen in a long time”, said Marco Broeken, Virtualization Architect, http://www.vclouds.nl, “With NAKIVO’s new FREE NFR promotion, VMware pros can now use a simple, fast, and feature-rich tool to protect their home labs.”

Current VMware vExperts, VCPs, VCIs, and VMUG members can get a two-socket NFR license of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v2. The NFR license keys are available for non-production use only, including educational, lab testing, evaluation, training, and demonstration purposes. NFR licenses are available at http://www.nakivo.com/en/free_nfr_license.htm.

ABOUT NAKIVO

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California NAKIVO is a privately-held company that develops and markets a line of next generation data protection products for VMware virtualized environments with Microsoft and Oracle applications. NAKIVO provides the most intuitive, fast, and affordable VM backup and replication solution enabling SMBs to protect, encrypt, compress and de-duplicate data both onsite with local storage and offsite with public clouds. NAKIVO is focused on customer feedback and innovation to deliver the most advanced technology for reducing customer VM recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), while also delivering the most cost effective VM backup to cloud solution with support for leading storage cloud providers including Amazon and Dropbox. For more information, please visit: www.nakivo.com.

I personally did not have time to test this product, but now I think I will give it a try in my homelab.