Reducing OPEX (Operational Expense) is a low-hanging fruit that often times I see some organizations fail to reach up and grab. Sometimes it is overlooked after virtualizing and other times it is even a fear towards virtualizing (VM Stall). In
Tag Archives: backup/DR
Can your VM be restored? VSS and VMware — Part 2 (updated)
The backup job for your VM completed successfully so the backup is good, right? Unfortunately it’s not that simple and a failure to effectively deal with VM backups can result in data loss and perhaps even legal consequences.
Quest vRanger and Direct-To-Target Backups
Direct-To-Target backups can generally significantly increase parallelism and backup performance. In the vRanger architecture, each ESX host would be the “data mover” and collect the bits and write them directly to the backup target (CIFS or NFS). Quest has noted
Can your VM be restored? VMware and VSS — Part 1
The backup job for your VM completed successfully so the backup is good, right? Unfortunately it’s not that simple and a failure to effectively deal with VM backups can result in data loss and perhaps even legal consequences. We will
The Risks of Thin Provisioning — and Solutions
Recently I was interviewing a candidate who mentioned his vSphere experience. I asked him what his favorite feature of vSphere 4.1 was and he said thin provisioning (technically this was possible in ESX 3.5 but was really introduced in 4.0).
Application Consistent Quiescing on vSphere 4.1
Windows 2008 guests that were created on vSphere 4.0 may need to be modified before the application consistent quiescing support for Windows 2008 in vSphere 4.1 can be used. I prevously posted a two-part series on backups and VSS considerations
Symantec ApplicationHA: High Availability for Virtualized Applications
How can you provide high availability to your virtualized mission-critical applications? There are several ways, and now Symantec is introducing a new option:
Virtual Geek 2010 Survey Results
Chad Sakac (a.k.a. Virtual Geek) has posted the results on his informal survey and there are some interesting results. You can review the full details on Chad’s post but I wanted to “borrow” a few graphics that I thought
VM Backup Reference Architecture – Part 2: Beyond VADP
UPDATE: Some good information in the comments. I will be posting follow-up updates on both Veeam and Vizioncore solutions either during or after VMworld. In Part One, I discussed the features provided in VMware’s VADP (vSphere API for Data Protection).
VM Backup Reference Architecture – Part 1: Fundamentals
I wanted to do a series of posts discussing the pros and cons of various VM backup strategies and some best practices, but I found it necessary to cover some fundamentals before discussing specific solutions.
