FYI: The Site Recovery Manager compatibility guide has just been updated. As of the 16th of march vCenter 2.5 U4 is supported for SRM 1.0 update 1.
BC-DR
VCB and Diskeeper
I just noticed this new KB article:
Diskeeper is a 3rd party defragmentation product that has the ability to defragment unmounted NTFS volumes that are presented to the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy. This means that it can defragment RDM LUNs. Unfortunately, this creates the possibility of inconsistencies in the file system if there is a virtual machine running on that RDM.
The Automatic Defragment option causes the defragmentation to take place.
Consult your Diskeeper documentation to obtain instructions for disabling this feature in the version of the product that is installed on the VCB Proxy server.
Be aware to not use Diskeeper on your VCB proxy!
VMware vCenter Data Recovery
During VMworld I quickly wrote down the steps that VMware vCenter Data Recovery takes when backing up VMs. I added one step which isn’t unimportant, changed block tracking(4):
- Create a snapshot of disk(s)
- Hot add disk(s) to Data Recovery appliance
- Create hashes of (hopefully variable) blocks
- Read data of changed blocks if previous backup exists
- Dedupe(using variable chunk sizes) and create SHA1 hash for index
- Store data (possibly encrypted)
- Remove hot add disk(s)
- Remove snapshot
Compared to the current VCB installable and current feature set VI 3.5 offers this is a huge enhancement. (VMware vCenter Data Recovery will be part of the vSphere products.) Creating deduplicated back ups of only the changed blocks based on variable chunk sizes will give every user the opportunity to have a decent backup scheme. VMware vCenter Data Recovery utilizes the new VMware Consolidated Backup API by the way. For those afraid that the dedupe datastore gets corrupted an automated short integrity check is performed once a day and a thorough integrity check once a week.
Keep in mind that not only VMware will be able to utilize these new features. Because VCB is changed to an API a much tighter integration with 3rd party backup tools can be expected in the near future!
I would love to get my hands on a beta version of the product as soon as it’s available to play around with it some more and tell you more about the rich feature set this product will have. Unfortunately it’s not available yet and you will all have to wait, but I will keep you posted.
SRM Patch released
VMware just released patch 2 for SRM 1.0 Update 1. It’s a cumulative patch that corrects several problems with 1.o Update 1:
- a problem that prevents protected virtual machines from following recommended Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) settings when recovering to more than one DRS cluster.
- a problem observed at sites that support more than seven ESX hosts. If you refresh inventory mappings when connected to such a site, the display becomes unresponsive for up to ten minutes. (This problem was also addressed in Patch 1 for SRM 1.0 Update 1.)
Before you apply the patch please backup both SRM server’s / databases.
VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery
What a day again, and it’s actually not finished cause within a couple of minutes the VMworld Europe 2009 party will start.
The VMTN Experts session was actually, in my opinion, pretty good today. We had way more people coming over that were asking questions or just came over to have a chat with one of the Experts! With the vExperts being announced this morning there was a good atmosphere, even Statler and Waldorf euuuh Boche and Laverick were having fun. For those on twitter and those who have been following the story about VMDougs snuggie, check the video Gabe published, lol.
Now today I did one of the labs together with Eric Sloof, Data Recovery. There are a couple of write-ups on the product for instance this one by VM-Aware so I’m going to write about all the features and scheduling possibilities. One thing I’ve noticed no one writing about is that the Appliance actually uses the hot-add feature which is part of VCB. So basically what happens when you do a backup:
- Create a snapshot of disk(s)
- Hot add disk(s) to Data Recovery appliance
- Create hashes of (hopefully variable) blocks
- Read data of changed blocks
- Dedupe(using variable chunk sizes) and create hash
- Store data
- Remove hot add disk(s)
- Remove snapshot
So this is what I’m guessing will happen cause I actually haven’t seen the documentation, but it makes sense in my opinion.. The cool thing about this way of running backups is that doesn’t really matter if you do a full backup or do an incremental/differential it’s always small because of the deduplication. Full backup it is! Although some blogs aren’t sure yet, it will contain file level restore in the future!
By using the hot add mode it’s a LAN free backup, all I/O is being handled by the ESX Server I/O stack. This will however cause overhead on the ESX Server so you might not want to start 20 backups on the same host. Also keep in mind that the deduplication will be rather CPU intensive so this might also slow down the process if you run multiple backups. The deduplication is “inline” by the way which means that the data will be deduped before it will be written to disk.
Now there’s more to write about, and especially about the Cloud Plugin that has been demoed today… But I really need to get ready for the VMworld party called “Cloud9” this year! See you guys in a few minutes ๐ and for those that didn’t come to Cannes, please join John Troyer tonight(wednesday) at the weekly podcast and remind him he’s really missing out on this! ๐