HiperLogic

Virtualization, High Performance Computing, Healthcare IT, Enterprise Computing

April 2010

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2010.

Backup and Restore the Notes Field in VMware

April 30, 2010 in VMware by Rod | No comments

Many customers use the the Notes: field in the VMware vSphere client to track a variety of information, like what the VM is for.

Unfortunately, a few different 3rd party products overwrite the Notes: field by default with their application specific data.

If you find yourself re-creating all your Notes: field after having a 3rd party blow them away, here is how you can back them up and restore them to prevent this in the future, using PowerCLI .

If you aren’t familiar with setting up and getting started with PowerCLI, See the 5 minute guide to VMware PowerCLI by Rod Mach.

To export all your Notes field and store them in c:\temp\notes.csv

Get-VM |select Name, Description |Export-Csv C:\temp\notes.csv

To import all your Notes field back in:

Import-Csv “C:\notes.csv” | % { Set-VM $_.Name -Description $_.Description -Confirm:$false}

Pano Desktop Virtualization 3.0

April 19, 2010 in Pano, Uncategorized, VMware by Rod | No comments

Pano continues to make the simplest desktop virtualization solution on the planet, with their award winning “ZERO” client that has no operating system, moving parts, firmware, CPU, or other components that could fail.

The new Pano System 3.0 solution has the following new features:

1. Support for Windows 7 (32-bit)
2. Support for multiple desktops per user. A use can choose between their XP and Win7 desktop, or have different desktops for different projects.
3. Easily deploy desktops into their own OU without scripting.
4. Wizard driven Active/Passive Pano Manager configuration eliminates single point of failure.
5. Silent Install of Pano DAS
6. Tighter integration with VMware View 4 ( Optional )
6. Continued abstraction of the hypervisor, most administration can be done through Pano Manager.

Current customers contact HiperLogic for detailed information on upgrading from your current release, this release is free for all customers on current maintenance.

HiperLogic Featured in Channel Pro Magazine on Storage Virtualization

April 19, 2010 in StarWind, VMware by Rod | No comments

Rodney Mach of HiperLogic was featured as the cover story for Storage Virtualization solutions in Channel Pro Magazine.

Windows 2000 vCenter Converter Tips

April 17, 2010 in VMware by Rod | No comments

The great thing about VMware is never having to give up that Windows 2000 box that is running some legacy app that you just still have to keep around. Simply turn it into a VM, or create a backup VM copy in the event the physical hardware would die.

A couple tips that might help you if you are having a problem with VMware vCenter Converter with Windows 2000:

1. Make sure the VM is Windows 2000 SP4 ( Required )
2. Use the latest Converter client, vSphere U1 has several fixes for converting W2K.
3. If the VM doesn’t boot after the conversion, make sure when you do the conversion you choose
SCSI as the target disk type, if you choose IDE or it picks IDE then the VM will convert fine, but won’t boot.
4. If the VM is not on your domain for some reason ( I have seen this at a customer site where legacy boxes where not joined to the domain) make sure that the host can resolve in DNS both vCenter AND the ESX host you are converting the VM to. If it doesn’t, put the ESX host and vCenter in the hosts file on the W2K box before starting the conversion.
5. After the conversion, make sure and delete all the old legacy devices, especially the stale network adapters, or you may have unusual issues. To do so:

1. Open a Windows command prompt and type the following:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
This tells the device manager to show all non-present devices.
2. At the same command prompt, type
devmgmt.msc
3. In the device manager, select View menu, and then check
“Show Hidden Devices.”

You can get the latest download info for the Windows 2000 sysprep files that vCenter Converter requires at VMware KB 1005593

That’s it! If someone has a tip they would like to share, comment here.

10/29/2010 Update

VMware dropped support in vCenter Converter for Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000, along with support for the OVF format and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) format in vSphere 4.1, though it can work it is not supported.

Workaround this by converting to esx 4.0 with converter 4.0.1 and move the VM to the vsphere 4.1 cluster afterward. In that case converting to ESX 4.0 is supported from converter 4.0.1, and vmotion from 4.0 to 4.1 is supported, you only add the vmotion step in the workflow, and need a 4.0 host.

VMware Licensing Issues When Buying AMD Magny Cours 8-core or 12-core Based Servers

April 13, 2010 in VMware by Rod | No comments

A note to customers, when you buy a server with the new AMD Magny Cours chips with more than 6 cores per socket, you must have either vSphere Advanced OR Enterprise Plus. This is a licensing issue, all other editions of VMware limit you to 6 cores per socket.

See:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

There is also an explanation here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html

Likely VMware will be forced to fix their licensing scheme now that 8-core and 12-core servers are available. The document states “VMware will revisit its licensing policies as x86 processors with a greater number of cores become available.”

If you already have Advanced or Enterprise Plus, you should be fine. Otherwise, be aware you will need to upgrade your VMware licenses until which time VMware changes their licensing ( assuming they do. )

Having a Full Backup for the Cost of an Incremental – Veeam Synthetic Backup

April 13, 2010 in VMware Backups, Veeam by Rod | No comments

A customer recently asked me how often they needed to do a “full” backup with Veeam so they would have a full backup in the event there was corruption of one of their differentials. With Veeam Backup’s synthetic backup, this scenario doesn’t exist!!

Veeam uses a synthetic backup which means EVERY backup gives you a full backup, at incremental speed, in a file called jobname.vbk. This .vbk file does NOT depend on any past differentials ( which have the extension .vrb).

The fantastic thing about synthetic backup is never taking the time and space penalty after your 1st backup for a full backup, with all the comfort of a traditional full backup.

The veeammeup blog has a good technical description of this wizardry of how synthetic backup works, which I duplicate here.

The way Veeam’s Synthetic Backup works is that after the first full backup, all subsequent backups are incremental, meaning just the changes from the last backup run, forever. Veeam Backup “injects” the changes into the full recovery file (.VBK) and then also saves any data replaced during this process into the reversed incremental changes file (.VRB). The .VBK file is always a full recovery file and the largest file in the directory. The .VBK file also has the most current modified date as it gets updated after each backup cycle.

The .VRB files do not change, as they contain the .VBK data blocks which were replaced by incremental data for that particular incremental backup run. To restore or roll-back to a particular date/time, all related .VRB files are applied to the .VBK file in the required order to get you back to that point-in-time.

The retention policy specifies how many of the .VRB files you want to keep, this also then corresponds to how “far” you can roll-back. If the retention policy is set to 14, then the 15th time the backup job runs it will delete the oldest .VRB file.

If you archive the .VBK and associated .VRB files as a set to tape, you can recover them back to disk if needed and import them into Veeam Backup to roll-back or recover to any point in time in that set.

So to be clear, if you accidently delete the .VRB file(s) you can get back to your full, as the .VBK is the “full” file. (This should never happen, but I had a customer who had an admin delete these files on their filer to free up some space before they knew the implications).

Veeam Backup and PowerShell – Get a list of VM’s in a Job

April 13, 2010 in PowerShell, VMware Backups, Veeam by Rod | No comments

We love PowerShell at HiperLogic, because we use it to automate just about everything.

Veeam Backup has PowerShell integration, and this post is about creating a small script to meet a user requirement to get a list of VM’s in a backup job called “mytestjob”. The customer wanted to integrate this information into another program via powershell glue.

To run this code, run the following from the powershell console:

add-pssnapin "VeeamPSSnapIn"
$job = Get-VBRJob -name "mytestjob"
$job.GetObjectsInJob() | foreach { $_.Location }

One other interesting easter egg of things to come, run this powershell line

 Get-VBRJob |get-member |select-string "HyperV"

Veeam Reporter 4.0

April 9, 2010 in VMware Monitoring, Veeam by Rod | No comments

Veeam has announced the next release of Veeam Reporter Enterprise, now known as Veeam Reporter 4.0. This release is currently in Beta.

This new release builds on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which will benefit customers by removing the need to have Microsoft office applications installed for reports, allows access from any client, and allows Veeam to ship reporting packs faster and outside of major releases. Note there is no charge for SSRS with SQL Server Express (free.)

There is a new web dashboard for 4.0, this new dashboard can be customized and embedded into other websites like Sharepoint.

Veem Reporter 4.0 now includes historical performance data which allows for trouble shooting and capacity planning.

Finally new functionality has been added to support new vSphere technologies such as host profiles and distributed switches, integration with Veeam Business View, and Visio diagram support for up to 6000 VM’s.

Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0: Now Standard and Enterprise Editions

April 9, 2010 in VMware Backups, Veeam by Rod | No comments

Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0 now has TWO editions, Standard Edition 5.0, and Enterprise Edition 5.0

Note that ALL THE CURRENT FEATURES of Veeam Backup and Replication 4.1.1 are in Standard Edition, plus all the new 5.0 features. NO current features have been removed and moved to the Enterprise edition, which is very good for existing customers. All existing Veeam Backup and Replication Customers ( on maintenance) will get 5.0 Standard Edition at no charge.  Veeam is creating an Enterprise Edition to target new high end features that not all customers may want to pay a premium for.

Currently, there are differences in three areas between Standard and Enterprise Edition:

U-AIR (universal application-item recovery): Enterprise Edition includes U-AIR™;
Standard Edition does not. U-AIR is the ability to restore individual application objects,
such as email messages, directory objects or database records, from a regular imagelevel
backup. To the extent this capability is available in the market today (some vendors
offer very restrictive and limited implementations), it is considered a “premium” capability
and carries an additional cost. Veeam is excited to be able to offer a much more flexible
and robust implementation that brings greater value to customers.

Recovery verification: Standard Edition provides basic recovery verification (starting
a VM from a backup file and manually testing it), while Enterprise Edition offers
automated and more advanced recovery verification (including a fully managed,
isolated test environment; support for application test scripts; and bulk VM testing).

On-demand sandbox: Enterprise Edition includes the ability to run one or more VMs
from backup in an isolated environment, providing a working copy of the production
environment for troubleshooting, testing, training, etc. Standard Edition does not
include this capability.

Windows guest file system indexing: Standard Edition maintains an index of Windows
guest files currently on disk; Enterprise Edition also includes files in archived backups.

Customers who are current on maintenance will receive Standard Edition v5.0 as a regular product update at no additional charge. Standard Edition will include all the functionality in the current v4.1 software plus the major new features described in this blog, and the usual fixes and improvements.

For customers that want the enhanced functionality of Enterprise Edition,  the Enterprise upgrade fee will be waived on licenses purchased on or before June 18th, 2010. You must have maintenance on all sockets through the end of the year. ( We recommend customers always stay on maintenance, so this should be a non-issue).

Many customers want to know if they should upgrade to Enterprise, or stick with Standard?  For customers that want the enterprise features mentioned, you should upgrade for no cost. The caveat is that all FUTURE purchases of Enterprise will be $300 per socket MORE expensive than Standard edition.  MSRP is 599 on Standard, 899 on Enterprise. Also annual maintenace will increase from $119 a socket for standard to $179 a socket for Enterprise.

To upgrade your license to Enterprise, go to http://www.veeam.com/manage_licenses.html

If there are any questions on the new Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0, please contact HiperLogic and we will help you determine what is best for your particular situation

© 2006-2010 HiperLogic, LLC.  |  Serving the Ann Arbor, Southeast Michigan, and Ohio region  |  (888)-268-3930  |