Last Thursday myself and Alex Mittell from PHD Virtual Technoligies attended the London VMUG (VMware User Group), which was held at the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and sponsored by RES Software.

There were many usual suspects from the vistualization community there, and we got to chat to loads of them including: Simon Seagrave, Steve Chambers, Daniel Eason, Jane Rimmer, Simon Long, Doug Hazelman, Ricky El-Qasem, and Mike Laverick.

One thing Alex focused on in our discussions is the major issue he recently discovered with VMware’s CBT, which corrupts backups done with software packages that have not implemented a specific workaround.

You can find out more about this CBT issue on Tom Howarth’s blog post!

You can also see the pics I took on the VMSpotlight Facebook page!

Yesterday Alex Mittell from PHD Virtual attended the New Jersey VMUG, which was hosted by the people from vKernal.

As soon as he told me he was going I asked him to grab some snaps of the event!

The turnout was about 75 people, many of the attendees also said they wanted PHD Virtual to do technical presentations at one of the next VMUGs, so keep your eyes peeled for usual suspects Alex Mittell and Doug Soltesz presenting at future VMUGs.

You can find the pictures of the NJ VMUG on the Virtualization Spotlight page on Facebook.

On Sunday Eric Sloof wrote a blog post highlighing a potential issue with version 3.1 of Veeam Backup. The main focus of the discussion surrounds drastic reductions in back-up speed with servers upgraded to vSphere 4.

The people at Vizoncore and Veeam have posted on the subject in several online spaces also. One of Veeam’s product managers who runs a blog has posted on this topic here: http://www.vnotion.com/?p=38 explaining testing he has done on the issue.

View the VMTN discussion thread here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1302322

Jason Mattox and Steve Philip also contributed to the discussion (excerpts below from Eric Sloof’s blog):

Jason Mattox :

Putting my differences aside, (I’m from vizioncore) and wanting to see this fixes for all VMware users, here is what it think is going on. I think this is due to the read speeds from VMFS on ESX 4 VS ESX 3. Give this test a try, create a 10 GB VM and run this command, how does it take on ESX 3 vs ESX 4? You have to remember that VCB over the network is using VMware API’s which are going to get more disk/read time. I think VMware has starved the COS reads again. I think this same thing happened from ESX 2.5.x to 3.0 and when 3.0.1 came out it was fixed, I’m not 100% on that ,but I think that’s what happened. time cat JM_10GB_Test-flat.vmdk > /dev/null

Steve Philp :

As the person that posted the original question both on VMware’s forum and on Veeam’s forum, I can tell you that we’re all just waiting for VMware to acknowledge and fix the issue. We have been working with VMware tech support for a few weeks now, providing them with backup and file copy performance data involving the Service Console. We have no idea whether they’re seeing other reports of the issue, they haven’t been very forthcoming with info. I can confirm that the backup speed problem ONLY affects transfers using the Service Console. Using VCB / SAN mode in Veeam Backup allows full backup speed. Here’s the followup posting on my blog with our “lesson’s learned”.

So after months of being guarded, the vSphere 4 code was announced to the world as having reached “gold” status.

The announcement came with a substantial sting in the tail for VMWare’s current large enterprise customers and Cisco. The introduction of the new “Enterprise Plus” license option, allows no existing VMware licensee to be eligible for without further payment.

This has left a lot of users furious at what they describe as “an insult”. The sting has been made even worse as it has come at a time when corporate spending is down across the board and many businesses are struggling.

VMWare’s introduction of a layer above the current top license tier, just doesn’t make any sense. Existing top tier customers are not happy with the prospect of having to cough up more for it.

VMTN “vSphere Enterprise Plus position” Thread

Discussions on the VMTN board on vSphere and it’s features have erupted since it was announced yesterday. Some of the discussions have raised some interesting points.

This thread – HERE – has raised an good point about a limitation in the VMWare Data Recovery (VDR) feature. The initial release of Data Recovery only allows one backup per day to be scheduled. Now this is more a lack of functionality in the current version rather than a technical limitation, however it does restrict the ability to conduct multiple daily backups to a “MANUAL” task.

The VMTN poster “Smoggy” pointed out that “if you want to backup a VM more than once a day then you could simply add that VM to multiple backup jobs inside the scheduler”, this is a bit of a bodge but could be a workaround until VMWare add the functionality.

In terms of usability for companies running multiple servers this is a critical oversight by VMWare. It seems clear that VDR has been aimed as an entry level backup solution, leaving the market open for established Enterprise backup solutions like esXpress.