Virtualization Spotlight » Storage

Video – How does the vSphere Storage Appliance work?

Patrick Redknap — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:37:02 +0000

This video came from Eric Sloof’s NTPro blog and provides an overview of the vSphere Storage Appliance and how it works.

Learn about “Shared Storage for Everyone”

PHD Virtual Backup: Virtual Backup and Cloud Computing

Patrick Redknap — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:07:04 +0000

The Best Virtualization Backup Solution for Managed Services Providers

If you are a Service Provider using Citrix or VMware virtualization solutions to provide hosted or cloud computing services you can benefit by using PHD Virtual Backup to provide advanced data protection services to your customers. As a service provider you have unique challenges. You need to keep costs and overhead low, and you need solutions that fit into your existing infrastructure, provide maximum efficiency and scale effectively for the future needs of your customers.

PHD Virtual is the only provider that offers virtualized backup and recovery solutions for VMware and Citrix environments. Their unique approach leverages a virtual backup appliance (VBA) to enable high-performance data protection that seamlessly scales for large and distributed deployments. Unlike alternative solutions, PHD Virtual Backup removes the need to deploy and manage a separate physical server, additional software, scripts or agents for backup and recovery of Citrix and VMware environments.

Top 5 reasons to consider PHD Virtual Backup

A completely virtualized solution leveraging a virtual backup appliance VBA™.
They snap into your VMware or Citrix virtualization platform architecture and scale seamlessly.
They provide the best backup optimization for LAN/WAN environments.
The ability to lower your backup storage footprint by over 90%.
Pricing and licensing options designed for the service provider business model.

Join PHD Virtual on Thursday, January 20 at 4pm EST or Wednesday, January 26 at 2 pm EST for an online webinar as to explore the benefits MSP’s can gain by using PHD solutions and present examples of how PHD Virtual Backup is enabling virtual backup in the cloud.

Video: File Recovery with PHD Virtual Backup v5.1

Patrick Redknap — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:32:03 +0000

With the PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 release this week we’ve seen lots of “how-to” video content published with it also!

This short video demonstrates the File Recovery features!

New Release: Pancetera Unite version 2.0.2

Patrick Redknap — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:38:00 +0000

Pancetera were the new kid on the block this year, who everyone was talking about. They provide management and optimization software for virtual storage in VMware.

Today I recieved an email notifying me that they have released Pancetera Unite version 2.0.2.

New additions in this release include change block tracking (CBT) integration for vSphere/SmartRead 2.0. The new version also add an option to install an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) client in the Pancetera Unite virtual appliance in order to backup VMware environments.

By integrating with changed block tracking in vSphere only the changed blocks in a virtual machine are captured. By presenting these blocks as a file in the SmartView file system, data movement can be minimized while moving changes of a VM to another storage device. Change Block Tracking can be used to create a daily differential which compliments an occasional base image (commonly made weekly or monthly) of each VM. This allows for reduction of the amount of data needed to copy on an ongoing basis while protecting VMs leveraging existing backup software.

Understanding/Using vStorage APIs for Array Integration & NetApp Storage

Patrick Redknap — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:10:45 +0000

Another thanks goes to Eric Sloof’s blog for making me aware of this one!

This document describes the technical aspects of NetApp support and integration with VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), as well as how to deploy and use this technology.
VAAI is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and SCSI commands that offload certain I/O-intensive tasks to NetApp storage systems. By integrating with vStorage APIs, NetApp enables advanced storage capabilities to be accessed and executed from familiar VMware interfaces, improving manageability, performance, data mobility, and data protection.

More info is here: http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3886.pdf

Xtravirt Paper: NFS Storage Configuration for vSphere using Windows 2008

Patrick Redknap — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:42:25 +0000

Windows 2008 introduced the ability to use NFS shares, enabling the server to be used as a storage target.

The team at Xtravirt have been working hard as usual and have released a step by step guide of the process to setup and host NFS shares on a Windows 2008 server and connection to an ESXi 4 host. This can be used with a VI in a Box solution.

The scenario described assumes that this is being setup on a single server which includes Domain Controller functions. It is designed for personal testing only and not an advocation as a production solution.
Key Concepts:

* Install and configuration of Service for Network File System
* Install and configuration of Identity Management for UNIX
* Adding NFS storage to an ESX host

Download the paper here: http://xtravirt.com/nfs-storage-configuration-for-vsphere-using-windows-2008

VMware shows new Storage I/O Control feature of vSphere 4.1

Patrick Redknap — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:07:28 +0000

On Friday VMware released to the community a video demonstrating how the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature, part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1, works.

SIOC provides the capability to define quality of service prioritization for the I/O activity on a single host or a cluster of hosts.
The prioritization, which can be enable or disable on specific datastores, is enforced through shares and limits.
The ESX/ESXi hosts monitors the latency in communication with the datastore of choice. As soon such latency exceeds a defined threshold the datastore is considered congested.
At that point all VMs accessing that datastore are prioritized according to their defined shares.
The administrator can even define the amount of I/O operations per second (IOPS) that each virtual machine can reach.

The video shows SIOC in action and is really worth checking out!

This article’s content was primarily sourced from Yellow Bricks!

Changed-Block-Tracking on an ESX VM in ESX causes VMDK Mount Issue!

Patrick Redknap — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:46:33 +0000

I’ve just been informed of an issue that occurs when running ESX in a VM on ESX. The team at PHD Virtual stumbled across this gem while trying to do CBT backups of their “ESX on ESX” sandbox environment.

It turns out that if you enable Changed-Block-Tracking (CBT) on the ESX virtul machine (VM) it changes how the VMDKs are presented to the ESX virual machine, causing it to be unable to mount!

So now your ESX VM has no storage!

As soon as you disable Changed-Block-Tracking on the VM the disks reappear when you rescan the scsi adapter or reboot the ESX virtual machine!

I’d be interested to see who else can replicate this?

More info on this issue as I get it!

How-To: Remount an NFS Datastore without rebooting

Patrick Redknap — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:16:17 +0000

NFS is a great storage solution within a VMware vSphere environment, but when the connection to the NFS server is lost, you’ll find yourself in a whole bunch of trouble!

In most circumstances some virtual machines are still connected to the NFS Datastore and since it’s in use, you cannot delete and recreate it. In the end there’s no other alternative than rebooting the ESX host, or is there……

If you want to find out how to remount an NFS Datastore you should watch this online training from “Virtualization Guru” Eric Sloof!

Remount an NFS Datastore without rebooting from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

VMware Backup – Top 5 Bloggers to Follow!

Patrick Redknap — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:40:53 +0000

Since the launch of esXpress 4.0 approximatly one week ago there have been a number of blog reactions out in the virtualization community (all positive).

In this article we thought we’d give a quick rundown of some of the main bloggers out there to follow!
As usual one of the first people to jump on anything virtual is Alessandro Perilli from Virtualization.info!
Because of this we’re going to assume he’s the “King of Virtualization blogging” and list the top 5 AFTER him

Other bloggers out there who you should follow to gain a true insight into the virtualization community and what is going on include:

	Rich Brambly @ VM/ETC
	Scott Lowe @ ScottLowe.org
	Duncan Epping @ Yellow-Bricks.com
	Eric Sloof @ NTPro.nl
	Eric Siebert @ VMware-Land