Category Archives: VMWare

Backup Exec, Technology, VMWare

BE 2010 AVVI and Exchange agents

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This may seem obvious to everyone else out there, but it wasn’t to me.  I am testing a new Exchange 2010 server running in VMWare and am experimenting with backups.  I have the whole server backed up using BE AVVI, but wanted the granular restore of mailboxes and messages, so I was also running a job where I selected just the Exchange database. When I went in to do a test restore the Microsoft Information Store showed up in the list with two distinct entries.  The properties looked slightly different but the data was the same.

 

It took me a little time to realize that I was duplicating my Exchange data by having those two backups (duh!), so I turned off my specific Exchange job and just left it with the AVVI job only.  What I didn’t realize was that just having the AVVI job would allow me the granular restores of messages from Exchange.

Technology, VMWare

ESXi Free Version Limitations

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I thought that after my previous post about ESXi really being free, I would write a post with the limitations I’ve noticed when you don’t have vCenter Server.  Having never used ESXi before and always having had vCenter I didn’t really know what to expect.

This is surely not an exhaustive list, but just things I’ve noticed so far.  Some of the items on these lists  really go into the differences of the licensed versions of the product, and I haven’t noted that here. (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus)

In no particular order….

* No cloning of virtual machines (Instead I just copy a machine directly on the data store and ‘add to inventory’)

* No templates (same as above)

* No Virtual Consolidated Backup (VCB) (With the free version you do not have access to download it at all)

* No Virtual Data Recovery (VDR) (same as above)

* No Clustering

* No vMotion

* Performance charts only display ‘Real Time’ statistics

* No Alert features

* No console on the host.  Management is ONLY through VIC

* Symantec’s VMWare agent will not work

* Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS)

* Power Management features

* Dynamically adding CPU and RAM to a running Guest

[UPDATE] * vStorage APIs (why Symantec’s AVVI will not work)

 

Things I was surprised to see…

* AD Integration for security in the Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC)

* Resource groups

* Performance statistics of any kind

* Guest automatic startup/shutdown features

 

 

For now this is all I can think of.  I will try and keep this list in mind and update it as I notice other things.

Post a comment if there is something you have noticed!

Technology, VMWare

ESXi Really Is Free!

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Now that I’m past my first month at the new gig I have learned quite a bit.  I’ve gotten a handle on the environment and layout here, and I’m still finding things every day.  There are a few things that have been quite an adjustment to get used to.

One of the things I miss the most is VirtualCenter and shared storage.  When I first got here there was no virtualization and when we started discussing it the folks around here were pretty set that we would use Hyper-V.  The primary reason for this is that my new company is on a program for start-up companies called BizSpark which allows you access to any Microsoft product with deferred payment, so Hyper-V was essentially no cost for a while.   I recall hearing that ESXi is a free license when your just installing it on a single server, so I started poking around.  Without shared storage though, you cant do anything more with Hyper-V than you can with ESXi.  It turns out that ESXi is indeed available free of cost, and if you go onto VMWare’s website you can register, download, and get a license code for it in just a few minutes!

I installed ESXi 4.1 onto our new Dell server, setup my local storage, networking and authentication, and started setting up new guests just as I would have if we did have shared storage and VirtualCenter.  There are limitations, but many of them are management and monitoring/alerting features. Without VirtualCenter your not going to be able to VMotion, DRS, and several other advance features, but without shared storage you cant anyway!  As far as core functionality and usability the product really is complete and usable.

One of the notable limitations I’ve experienced is the lack of performance monitoring.  You only get the ‘RealTime’ reports of performance on your Host and Guests.  To relieve some of this I’ve downloaded Veeam’s (also free) Monitoring software.  It has more enhanced monitoring of the environment, although it also is limited and only allows for historical reports back 1 week.

All in all, with some known limitations, but a greatly improved price tag, you CAN run VMWare for free.

Technology, VMWare

VMWare Data Recovery storage limitation

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We’ve been using VDR for a while now evaluating if it would work in our environment.  On the whole it is a pretty solid product for a v1 release.  While doing our initial evaluation and going through the documentation we noticed that it was called out that having the VDR storage on a CIFS volume that was larger than 500gb would cause ‘performance issues’.  We wanted to user CIFS over a local VMDK so that we could have the data be outside our data center in the event we were in a DR situation.

Knowing this, for a variety of reasons,  we chose to use a CIFS share that was slightly larger than 500gb. (1.5tb, I know not even close to 500g!)  The documentation never said, DO NOT DO IT or anything like that!  They did not indicate that anything over 500g was not supported.

Well, I’m writing to tell you that anything ‘significantly’ over 500g volume size is NOT SUPPORTED.  By which I mean VMWare Support will not help you.  I know because they told me they could not help me.  The senior support guy for the Americas ‘laughed and walked away’ when told how big the volume is.

In our experience the app became completely unstable and unusable.  Backups were not being processed as expected, the interface would hang and freeze and we would have to restart the VIC app.  I guess in my mind ‘performance issues’ meant that the backups would slow and take longer to complete.  Alas, I suppose that could mean anything.

My feeling was that you could get away with something in the 600-700g range, but beyond that they will send you on your way.