vSphere

Top 3 Features in Veeam v9

In my last post, I walked you through the upgrade process for going to Veeam v9. After having some time to work with the product and exploring the many new features, I have come up with my top 3 that I want to share with you. Let’s jump straight into it:

Stand-alone backup console

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In v8 and previous releases of Veeam, I’d have to login directly to the backup server to manage any parts of my backup infrastructure. Many times this meant asking nicely (kicking off) if one of the other admins were still using the server so that I could login. No more!!! Now the console supports connecting to a remote Veeam backup server. You can install the client right on your workstation and connect just as if you were on the server itself. Also the new look of the console is great. Not that the other console wasn’t pleasant to look at but….the changes that were made are nice!

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Upgrade to Veeam Availability Suite v9

There are many products out there that people use to backup their VMware environment. One of the more popular products is Veeam. In my opinion, Veeam is simple, effective, and user friendly and that’s why its the backup solution for so many. With the release of Veeam Availability Suite v9, many of you will be upgrading to take advantage of all the new features that are now available. Here are just a few of the many new features to the two products:

Veeam Backup & Replication:

  • Backup from Storage Snapshots (EMC, HP, and NetApp)
  • Veeam Cloud Connect Replication
  • Veeam Explorer for Oracle
  • Scale-out Backup Repository
  • Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (EMC, HP, and NetApp)

Veeam One Monitor:

  • Support for Veeam Backup & Replication v9
  • Veeam Cloud Connect Monitoring and Reporting
  • Performance and configuration assessment for Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Capacity planning for Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Enhanced multi-tenant monitoring and reporting
  • New reporting on over-sized/under-sized VMs and idle VMs

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ESXi Host Client Fling 4.0

By far, my favorite fling is the ESXi Embedded Host Client. I really like the potential of this one and what it could mean for the future of VMware Update Manager. VUM is really just about the last thing that has me holding on to the vSphere client. With the ability to upgrade VMware tools and hardware and install ESXi  updates with the embedded host client, it seems that VMware has the potential to have all of its products managed by a web browser. Here’s a walkthrough of the quick and simple install.

First, upload the host client vib to a datastore using the web client12-28-2015 9-33-38 AM

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Deploy a ESXi Appliance to vCloud Air

So, I finally decided to take advantage of my VMUG advantage subscription and create a vCloud Air account. When you sign up for VMUG Advantage, there are a lot of perks that come with it. One of the many benefits is the EVALExperience, which gives you a 1 year evaluation license to quite a few VMware products.

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One of those products is vCloud Air. They give you a $600 credit ($300 every 6 months) towards vCloud Air.12-17-2015 2-54-09 PM

I wanted to try out William Lam’s ESXi appliance and see if I could deploy it there. Here’s a run down of what it takes to do it:

After logging into vCloud Air, I thought it was going to be a simple upload of the OVA file and deploy….wrong!

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Create a Nested ESXi 6.0 lab using VMware Fusion 8

I wanted to create this post because like me, many people just don’t have all the necessary equipment to create a full blown lab to play around and test things in. Also, I like the ability to be portable and I think its safe to say that a server isn’t the most portable thing in the world. In comes the powerful laptop. At my disposal is a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB of DDR3 RAM and a 512GB SSD. I’m storing all my VMs on an external SanDisk 480GB SSD external drive. With this, combined with VMware Fusion 8, I am going to show you how to create a vSphere 6 environment. We will also create shared storage so that we can test features like HA and svMotion. Let’s get started.

The first thing we want to do is create our different networks for the different vSphere features that we want to use. We will create 5 different subnets for our network, one for each feature.

10.10.2.0 – Management Network
10.10.3.0 – iSCSI/Storage Network
10.10.4.0 – Fault Tolerance Network
10.10.5.0 – vMotion Network
10.10.6.0 – VM Network

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