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Month: April 2018

VMware Configuration Maximums Tool

Scott Forehand

It’s finally happened! VMware has just made our lives a lot easier. If you manage a VMware environment, you have to know the configuration maximums for each VMware product and version in your environment. If you’re taking a VMware certification exam, you have to know the configuration maximums for each product and version in the blueprint for the exam you want to take.

Now, all of that information is readily available on the web, eliminating the need to search for the documentation you need and write everything out in your own spreadsheets. Check out the new VMware Configuration Maximum Tool here: https://configmax.vmware.com/

As of this writing, this tool contains the configuration maximums for vSphere 6.0, 6.5, and 6.5 Update 1. I’m sure more versions, and more products will be added to the tool in the future, so bookmark it!

This handy tool allows you to select your vSphere version, and then choose to display maximums only for the technology you choose. You can even compare the configuration maximums across different versions, which is really useful if you want to see what improvements and enhancements have been made that may lead to a small rearchitecture effort in your environment, or plan …

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Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Active Directory Deep-dive

Scott Forehand

Technology used to create this post: Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5, VMware vSphere Web Client, Microsoft Windows Server 2016

The vast majority of corporations use Active Directory (AD) in their environment for centralized management and authentication. Active Directory provides multimaster replication, which means that you can set up several domain controllers that will synchronize data between every domain controller in a domain when a change has been made to any of those domain controllers. The Active Directory Clock is an incremental sync when it replicates between domain controllers. Veeam Backup & Replication notifies the other domain controllers that a restore is happening,  and that the clock will be turned back to allow the newest changes can be synchronized between all of the domain controllers in the domain. To accomplish this, Veeam Backup & Replication uses native VSS integration to back up Active Directory, including NTDS Writer and DFS Replication Writer. That integration allows for a complete backup that can be restored properly without damaging other data in the AD JET database.

If you’re curious what VSS Writers are on one of your servers, this script will get all VSS Writers from <localhost> and output a grid:

$VssWriters = Get-VssWriters
…

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Simplifying Veeam Backups Using VMware Tags

Scott Forehand

If you’re lazy like me, you hate having to open 26 different applications when you provision a new virtual machine. Lets eliminate the need to open one of those applications, Veeam.

Traditionally, when you provision a new virtual machine, you would open Veeam Backup & Replication Console and add that specific VM to one of the Backup Jobs you have configured. You’d have to make sure that you’ve correctly configured things like encryption, application-aware backups, exceptions and credentials for the VM you’ve provisioned.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate extra work. Here’s how you can solve this problem with a little bit of automation using VMware Tags and Veeam Backup & Replication.

Note: VMware Tags require vCenter version 5.1 and above. Reference

Step 1: Create Backup Tags in VMware vCenter
For my needs, I created quite a few VMware Tags. One for each of the Veeam Backup Jobs I needed, and a few to dynamically change the settings of the backup job for specific virtual machines. Here’s how they’re laid out:

  1. Create a new category for your backup tags called Backup. For this category, you should set Cardinality to Many tags per object, and you
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VMware vSphere 6.5 Upgrade eBook

Scott Forehand

Emad Younis is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect working in the Cloud Platform Business Unit, part of the R&D organization at VMware. His current focuses are the vCenter Server Appliance, vCenter Server Migrations, and VMware Cloud on AWS. He’s written tons of blogs, whitepapers and eBooks for VMware, including the eBook that this blog is about. For those of us who are migrating from older vSphere versions (like 5.5,  which is end of support in September) to vSphere 6.5, this eBook is a must have resource.

This free eBook was written to help guide VMware customers through every phase of the vSphere 6.5 upgrade process. It’s broken down into three phases:

Phase 1: Pre-upgrade – The work that you need to do before starting an upgrade.
Phase 2: Upgrade – Outlining the steps of the upgrade process and execution.
Phase 3: Post-Upgrade – Validating with business owners that everything went according to plan.

Each phase outlines minute details things that you should consider during the upgrade process, and also links to resources that will help make your upgrade a successful one. Included in the eBook are two common upgrade scenarios to help guide you through the upgrade process from …

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