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Category: Data Protection

VMware Mangle – Chaos Engineering Made Easy

Scott Forehand

In any enterprise organization there’s an immediate need to test and validate fault-tolerance and recoverability. If you have a VMware virtual environment, testing just got a lot easier. Meet VMware Mangle.Mangle enables folks like us to run chaos engineering experiments against applications and infrastructure components, and allows us to quickly assess resiliency and fault tolerance. It was designed to introduce faults with minimal pre-configuration and can support any infrastructure that you might have including K8S, Docker, vCenter or any Remote Machine with SSH enabled. Included in Mangle is a pretty powerful plugin model that allows the engineer to define a custom fault of their choice based on a template and run it against the environment without building code from scratch.

For those of us that want a quick and easy way to install Mangle just about anywhere, grab the container images.

If you’re not that fancy yet, or prefer to deploy a virtual appliance on vSphere that is pre-packaged with Mangle, you can grab the .ova files.

In either case, refer to the VMware Mangle website for detailed instructions on deployment and configuration.…

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Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab

Scott Forehand

Part 1: Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab
Part 2: Homelab Considerations: Storage Simulators for Your Homelab

So I’ve been digging into how to license enterprise software for my homelab, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found. Some people choose to go the route of getting below-board licensing for enterprise software, but I’m not one of those people. For those of us who want a legitimate software footprint on their network, this post is for you. We are not going to cover how to build your homelab, or what storage you should use. We are going to cover how to license your  homelab at little or no cost to you, including your choices for legally licensing products from VMware, Microsoft, Veeam and more.

VMware Licensing

Let’s start the conversation by talking about VMware, since virtualization is the main focus of this blog. While VMware does offer their ESXi hypervisor for free, that doesn’t include some of the enterprise features like access to APIs, and the rest of the vSphere suite. In terms of licensing, the cheapest way to get a production copy of VMware for an enterprise is vSphere Essentials, which costs $560 at the …

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Veeam 9.5 Update 3a Available Now

Scott Forehand

As of yesterday, Veeam has officially released a new version of Veeam Backup & Replication. The update includes support for new platforms, a large number of ecosystem changes in support of the upcoming set of Veeam capabilities due later in 2018 that were showcased at the VeeamON conference, some optimization for technologies like direct SAN access and virtual appliance modes, and some bug fixes. Veeam is planning a larger update coming soon, which will carry the Update 4 mantle.

So what does Update 3a get you? Well…

Additional Platform Support

  • VMware vSphere 6.7
  • VMware vCloud Director 9.1
  • Preliminary support for VMware vSphere 6.5 U2 (See more below)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 1803
  • Microsoft Windows Hyper-V Server 1803
  • Microsoft Windows 10 April 2018 Update
  • VMware Cloud on AWS version 1.3
  • Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 1801

Support for these platforms means that Veeam Backup & Replication will now do the following:

  1. Install Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a on the new Windows operating systems.
  2. Install components (such as proxies, repositories, etc.) on the new Windows operating systems.
  3. Perform backup and replication jobs from the new vSphere platforms and the Hyper-V roles in the Microsoft Windows Server 1803 operating system.

You …

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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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Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices eBook

Scott Forehand

I wanted to share a free resource that has really helped me wrap my head around Veeam Backup & Replication. This eBook, written and maintained by a group of Veeam architects, is easily understandable no matter your level of expertise with Veeam and serves as a great resource outlining how to configure Veeam using best practices in your Veeam backup environment.

The eBook was released in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.0 Update 2. It’s been updated and maintained and as of this writing, contains the best practices for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 1.

Read the book online, or download it in PDF, ePub or Mobi format by following this link.

If you feel like showing the authors love, or just following them on social media, here they are:

Preben Berg (@poulpreben)
Andreas Neufert (@AndyandtheVMs)
Tom Sightler
Pascal di Marco
Stanislav Simakov (@ssimakov)
Paul Szelesi (@PSzelesi)
Luca Dell’Oca (@dellock6)
Edwin Weijdema (@viperian)…

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