Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery

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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:

  1. Create a snapshot of disk(s)
  2. Hot add disk(s) to Data Recovery appliance
  3. Create hashes of (hopefully variable) blocks
  4. Read data of changed blocks
  5. Dedupe(using variable chunk sizes) and create hash
  6. Store data
  7. Remove hot add disk(s)
  8. 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 🙂 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! 😛

    VMworld Day 1

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    It’s been chaos all day long yesterday. Some of you might have expected me to do actually live blogging and that’s what I had originally planned indeed. But after being added to the SRM Lab and last minute Community Lounge there’s no way I can find the time to do some actual blogging, or even twitter these days.

    I’m not even going to try to recap yesterday in terms of announcements. No way I can keep up with the constant flow of information/announcements being published / exposed by my fellow bloggers. Most of them are featured on PlanetV12N or use twitter anyway so you can easily keep track of what’s happening at VMworld.

    I do want to tell you guys about the VMTN Experts Session we had yesterday. Although the turn up wasn’t what we hoped for I do think the session was useful. All the VMTN experts and important bloggers, and I guess we can openly call them vExperts today, were there and you actually had the chance to talk to people who’s avatar you normally only see on Twitter or the forums. The conversations we had were awesome.

    I’ve got a totally different view of some people. Some of them I only know via their short tweets or replies on the forum or even blog articles. Some posts/tweets get interpreted a certain way because of a feeling/association you have with the person. Interpreting posts on the internet is hard and I know I will definitely think different about certain people and posts, which is a good thing.

    I was really honored to meet people like Mike Laverick, Scott Herold, Jason Boche and Tom Howarth. There contributions in terms of VMTN community posts and moderation, blog articles, books and just VMware / Virtualization evangelism in general is outstanding and I highly respect their input, effort and knowledge! Great to finally meet you guys!

    Now head over to PlanetV12n and read up. I will give my take on all the announcements when the storm is over though!

    PS: A reminder to some of the bloggers out there, if you visit the Live Labs and want to take pictures / film the technology preview please ask the VMware Employees if you’re allowed to do so…

    vExperts are being announced…

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    The first names are being dropped on Twitter as we speak. Scott Herold(VMGuru.com), Eric Siebert(VMware Land) and Eric Sloof(NTPro.nl) are the names I’ve seen so far that have won the vExpert award. I can honestly say that all three more than deserve it! They live, eat and breath VMware and virtualization in general!

    Congrats to all of you that will receive an email today! I know a lot of the vExperts will be at VMworld, so if you’re there please visit the Community Lounge/Booth today and introduce yourself… (if you haven’t already!)

    Update, before I could click “Publish” a couple more names appeared, keep watching Twitter cause it will be chaos over the next couple of hours. I’m not going to post every single name cause soon John Troyer will release the complete list!

    VMTN Meet the Expert, free shirt?!!

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    Now I want to see a full packed booth tomorrow at 13:00 – the Community Booth(next to the Dell Booth). So as a incentive we will give a free t-shirt to everyone that comes and drops a question to the Experts or even starts a discussion!

    If you’re scared to asks question just head over and vote for the best of the VMworld show poll, we will also be giving away shirts for that during the day. Just come and visit the booth during the day or during the VMTN Experts Session / Meet and Greet… who doesn’t want to have a cool looking VMworld Community shirt? I know I want one so I might just ask the famous Tom Howarth a question!

    To all you bloggers out there, please re-post. And just so you know these guys are on the panel:

    gabrie Gabrie van Zanten, – Owner of gabesvirtualworld
    jason Jason Boche, – VMTN Moderator, Minneapolis Area VMUG president, and owner of Boche.net
    alan Alan Renouf, – Owner of Virtu-Al, Powershell Enthusiast
    steve     Steve Beaver, – Tripwire, VMTN Moderator, and contributor to Virtual Black Hole
    scott Scott Herold, – Quest, owner of VMGuru.com and accomplished Author
    thomas Thomas Bryant, – VizionCore and VMTN Moderator
    vitoolkit Wil van Antwerpen, – Owner of vi-toolkit.com
    eric Eric Sloof, – VMware trainer and owner of ntpro.nl
    tom Tom Howarth, – VMTN Moderator and owner of PlanetVM
    duncan Duncan Epping, – VMware Senior Consultant and owner of Yellow-Bricks

    VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview

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    One of my colleagues just noticed this new section at the VMTN Community Forums: VMware vCenter Server 2.5 on Linux: Technology Preview. You can find a PDF with a how-to here, here’s  a short outtake:

    This document describes how to install a technical preview of the Linux version of VirtualCenter server. The intended audience is developers, system administrators, and managers interested in using VirtualCenter on a Linux operating system.

    CAUTION   Do not use this version of VirtualCenter on Linux for production purposes. This release is for evaluation purposes only.

    Keep in mind this is only the vCenter server for Linux, not the client! And also keep in mind that it’s for evaluation only, please don’t use this in a production environment! If I can download it I will give it a spin tonight!