Veeam

Go to VMworld 2012 for Free from vDestination!

Last year Greg Stuart over at vDestination.com gave away a free trip to VMworld 2011.  It looks like he has done it again with the aid of Veeam, TrainSignal, and Symantec.  Some quick info:

    • VMworld 2012 Full Conference Pass
    • Air fare to SFO up to $500 USD
    • 5 nights hotel accomodations (Sun-Thurs)

Also, it seems that Drobo has donated a Drobo B800i iSCSI Storage Array as well for the winner.  Here is a short snip of the requirements:

 This trip contest is based on need and need alone. If you can’t afford to go to VMworld, if your company won’t send you then this is your chance. In order to enter to win you will need to make a comment on this blog post and include the following three points in your comment:
(1)Describe to me and my sponsors why you need to go to VMworld 2012, (2)What you are most looking forward to (it’s okay if it’s Bon Jovi, it may be what I’m most looking forward to!) and (3)How you plan on paying it forward.
This shouldn’t take more than one paragraph really, you won’t have a better chance if you write a novel, keep it short and concise. You will be chosen by a panel of vExperts based on your answers to the questions above.

For more information and all the goods, please visit vDestination.com (http://vdestination.com/2012/06/26/go-to-vmworld-2012-for-free/)

Veeam Backup & Replication v6

One of my favorite virtualization backup companies is about to mark another day to bring new features and take the backup world to the next level…Veeam Backup & Replication is moving to the new release, v6!  The focus of v6 include:

  • Enterprise scalability of your virtual backup infrastructure
  • Advanced replication
  • Multi-hypervisor support

The biggest feature addition is 1-Click File Restore.  You are able to find the file and restore the individual file.  This allows us to take single file restores to our helpdesk people, easing the load on your virtualization and backup administrators.  I am excited to actually see what these other improvements are that Veeam is bringing to the table.

As most of you know, I am fan of Veeam and have used it at many of my companies.  I stand firm behind their product because I feel they are pushing innovation of virtualization backup and replication to the limits and driving all of those wonderful acronyms that we love to push at management in the direction that management likes to see them go!  :)

Check out the video to get a more detailed view of the new features and enhancements in v6!

Veeam saves the day!

This past weekend I was faced with a challenge of moving from an old unsupported SAN on a 3.5 deployment to a new supported SAN and a new 4.1 deployment. I was in dire need for a quick solution for migrating data from one SAN to another. Some would say, “Just use Storage vMotion to move the VMs from the old storage to the new.” I get that, but, I was unable to utilize that feature because the old deployment was not licensed for it.

[blocknote class="red" title="Solution"]In comes Veeam Backup & Replication to save the day.[/blocknote]

The deployment was a small deployment, around 20 VMs. The solution I ended up with was using the VM Copy functionality to copy the VMs from the old SAN to the new SAN. Once the data was copied over, I added the VMs to inventory, upgraded VMware Tools, and then upgraded Virtual Hardware. Powered everything up and viola…migrated VMs now running in 4.1 on the new SAN.

Using the VM Copy function was extremely easy to get setup and started.  The steps that I took to get it moving were:

  • Install Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Add old VirtualCenter Server in order to access old SAN VMFS Datastores
  • Add new vCenter Server in order to access new SAN VMFS Datastores
  • Configure a VM Copy Job
  • Sit back and relax while Veeam did the work

I won’t go into detail on how to install Veeam as this is covered in many places online.  I will, however, go through the steps on creating the VM Copy Job.

The first step was to configure the VM Copy Job, as seen here:

Create a VM Copy Job

After clicking Next you will be asked what Processing Mode you will be using.  In my particular case, I had Veeam installed on a VM and so I picked Virtual Appliance Mode with Network Failover.

Selecting a Processing Mode

The next step in this simple process is to add the VMs that you want to copy.  This is a pretty self explanatory step, here is what you should see:

Add VMs that you want to copy

After adding the VMs you will be asked for a destination.  This, of course, will be your new SAN and new hosts.  Just select the host and datastore you want to copy the VMs into.

VM Copy Destination Selection

After adding the VMs that you want to copy with this job, you will continue on and be presented with a screen that will ask you if you want to use VSS in the VM to get a transactional consistant copy.  In my particular case, I had a maintenance window for the downtime of the VMs so I powered them down to do the copy, therefore, I didn’t select anything.

Utilize VSS if you want a transactionaly consistant copy

The final configuration step is to determine if you want to schedule it to run automatically or not.  This can come in handy if you want to have the job start after hours when you won’t be in front of a machine.  In my case, I was sitting right in front of my machine at home.

Schedule the job to run anytime you want

And the finale, you are now one click away from having Veeam do some work for you.  Just click Finish or select the checkbox to run the job as soon as you click Finish.

Fin

Pretty simple process and it definitely made it easy for me to get around the typical tools you would use to do a migration such as Storage vMotion and VMware Converter.  Once you have the VMs over you can then browse your datastores and add the VMs to inventory.  In this instance, I had to upgrade VMware Tools and upgrade the virtual hardware to complete the process.  Confirmed everything was working as normal and called it a day!  Thanks Veeam for saving the day yet again!

[note class="download"]You can download a trial of Veeam Backup & Replication direct from Veeam’s Website![/note]

If you have any questions or comments then please feel free to post up in the comments!

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