23 Dec
My recent webinar on deduplication best practices with Veeam is available for replay!
![image4[1]](http://rickvanover.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/image41.png?w=318&h=63 "image4[1]")
I talk about job configuration, repository configuration and considerations for using deduplication appliances with Veeam Backup & Replication.
Check it out here: http://go.veeam.com/webinar-12202011-rick-vanover-deduplication-best-practices-using-veeam.html
29 Nov
If you haven’t seen Ricky El-Qasem’s recent blog post on how to deploy a nested Hyper-V host on ESXi 5 on the Veeam blog; you should check it out. It’s a good one if you want to dabble with Hyper-V yet don’t want to allocated dedicated hardware.
There are a number of steps to deploy a nested host on vSphere, such as Hyper-V. I’ve done one little trick and made a virtual machine that you can restore from a Veeam Backup & Replication backup. This backup contains one VM (nothing installed on it) that you can restore and it is ready for use as a Hyper-V host as a vSphere guest. You can download this as a Veeam backup file here.
A couple of notes:
But restoring the Veeam Backup file is easy. This backup was like the quickest ever as I cloned my existing Hyper-V nested hosts, removed the .VMDKs and replaced with new .VMDKs and backed it up. Below shows the job iteration: 
Restore this backup (it requires Veeam Backup & Replication version 6), and it has one VM in the backup. Simply click the “Import backup” button in Veeam, and point it to the file I have for download above. The file is a ZIP of a backup file (VBK) and the job metadata file. Then restore like this:
You’ll have to select a new location for the restore for VME-HVCSV003. This VM will work for both Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V Role and for the Hyper-V only installation (MUI / Free Hyper-V).
There are two networks provisioned to this VM, one called “VM Network” and the other called “Quorum”.
If you aren’t going to leverage Failover Cluster Manager (formerly known as MSCS) and deploy a Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) for the VMs; then you can remove the 2nd network interface.
Happy virtualization, enjoy!
29 Nov
WOW! What great stuff. Veeam Backup & Replication version 6 is live. I’ve been working with betas of this for quite a while, and I’ve very excited for this release.
There are plenty of resources to get started:
- Webinar series
- What’s new document
- My blog of a list of the what’s new and improved
And more! Follow @Veeam and @RickVanover on Twitter or more on this BIG release.
17 Nov
Windows Server 8 introduces a new virtual disk format, VHDX. VHDX is an expanded set of features from the traditional VHD file format used in Hyper-V and Xen virtualization environments. The other mainstream virtual disk file formats are VMDK for VMware and VDI for VirtualBox platforms.
17 Nov
I recently did a guest post at the HP TechBiz site. An excerpt of my post:
Virtualization has taken on a number of different meanings over the years, but none more fitting than it becoming the default decision for today’s infrastructure decisions. This can be viewed in a number of different ways. Most notably, many organizations have adopted a "virtualization first" for new server builds and core infrastructure investments. 
Virtualization First
The virtualization first approach is really the manifestation of a virtualization being used, tested and approved for production workloads coupled with the cost savings. That’s how we got here, but all we have done since then is add layers of justification for virtualization that we simply can’t match on the traditional way of delivering infrastructure to our internal stakeholders. These additional justification points include being able to protect virtual machines to a higher degree than what we can do with a physical machine at a fraction of the price, migrate across different hardware and storage products with ease, and most importantly deliver the services at the required availability and performance levels that our stakeholders continue to expect of us.
16 Nov
At work, I’m working on “STUFF” that includes a hypervisor-based backup and replication solution for Hyper-V VMs. It’s not much of a secret, but you can check out all of that info here: http://go.veeam.com/v6-backup-replication [v6 Preview Materials]
I’ll admit it, coming at it from the VMware perspective required some rethinking. First of all, these backups and replications are executed without a checkpoint (SCVMM term or snapshot in Hyper-V talk). Once you get your head around Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), you’ll quickly see that a few techniques around leveraging shadow copies will be a very efficient way to move data for Hyper-V backups.
So, once I have those concepts in hand; I can see a very clean approach to performing these agentless Hyper-V backups and replications.
Stay tuned of course, but check out the v6 preview materials that I have linked above and follow me on Twitter for any news that may happen!!
14 Nov
Upgrading from ESXi 4 to ESXi 5 can be challenging, especially if you’re using the free version of the hypervisor. That’s because for the free hypervisor, we don’t have the access to the more robust vSphere Update Manager (which makes upgrading very easy).
There are a few options to upgrade a free ESXi 4 hypervisor to ESXi 5. These options are spelled out in the vSphere Upgrade Guide. In this post, I’ll show one method and I’ll mention the other mechanisms. Basically, the options include using vSphere Update Manager (which is available only with vSphere Essentials and higher), performing a scripted upgrade, using vSphere Auto Deploy, using esxicli or using the ESXi 5 CD.
Click here to the read the entire post at Virtualization Review.
14 Nov
Love or hate Microsoft Windows DHCP, chances are there is some amount of it installed in effectively every modern data center. The nice integration with Windows DNS and Active Directory make it a safe bet for providing DHCP access for both clients and servers (that’s another discussion I’m starting soon; stay tuned).
14 Nov
We’ve all set up test vCenter installations and used the built-in Microsoft SQL Server Express engine. It is a great way to get up and running to test this or that feature of vCenter before trying it in production. For a production environment, I’ve always preferred to leverage a shared (or centralized) SQL Server to host the database. Primarily, they are easier to manage across all database installations (for topics such as SQL Server updates and service packs). As a secondary benefit, there is less overhead in having a number of virtual machines provisioned with extra memory and CPU resources dedicated to having multiple SQL Server Express installations running around.
14 Nov
While I never really want things to go wrong, I do want to be able to troubleshoot if needed. Probably the tool I use most commonly for that first step is Windows Task Manager. In Windows Server 8, a couple of new things are in place as well as a totally overhauled interface.
If you run Windows Server 8, the Task Manager is still accessible in all of the same ways we’re used to. The Processes tab is one of the first places I go in basic troubleshooting. In Windows Server 8, running processes are categorized into groups: Applications, Background Processes, and Windows Processes.
