vSphere 5

simonprr · 24 Nov 2011 at 21:47

Who's got a vSphere 5 environment they look after?

Building one for the company I work for at the moment.

If you do use it at your company, what SAN storage do you have and what software do you use for backups?

Cheers

Edit: Actually vSphere 4 too....

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 10:44

Cool, for interest what SAN do you use?

What do you mean by "TSM"?

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:10

Thanks for the replies people

droyden said:
veeam here, with a vsphere5 environment, be aware that veeam doesnt "officially" support 5 - and restores dont work without the hotfix. Veeam v6 will fully support it and is due soon I believe.

edit: no san but its in the forecast for next year.. hopefully

Actually Veeam does work with vSphere 5 and SAN Transport mode backups with a hotfix you can obtain from support. I've been trialing it because for some reason Backup Exec 2010 R3 (latest version) with SAN Transport mode backups is slow. Raised a support call but haven't got anywhere yet! :rolleyes:

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:11

growse said:
Silly question: why use Veeam (or similar) over and above simple LUN snapshots / backups? What exactly does it get you?

Well, if you get it working with SAN Transport mode then the backups pull the data directly from the SAN and won't impact your ESXi hosts (and running VMs) and therefore should be better performance (especially if you have a 10GBE iSCSI network like we do) plus will allow you to restore individual files/dbs etc from within the VMDKs and do change block monitoring etc.

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:10

Shaz]sigh[;20648706 said:
CBT is a mechanism within VADP, not something you do. It's what Veeam tries to hook in to to ensure the quick backups (essentially journalling).

As a matter of interest, do you actually use Direct SAN Access? If so, is it on a physical box?

Virtual appliance mode is how I've always deployed it which is akin to Avamar/Networker proxys (or in the olden days, hot-add).

Regarding LAN/SAN backup, the argument was sound when it was 4Gb FC and 1GbE, now, with 8Gb FC/10GbE it's pretty much the same, you just skip the OS layers.

Yes, Direct SAN aka SAN Transport. Yes I have a physical Windows 2008 R2 server with the LUNs mounted using a 10GBE NIC to the iSCSI switches.

Even though the performance of Veeam using this method is 10 times better than Backup Exec, it's still not as good as a backup I have of a physical SQL Windows Server that is directly connected to the backup server by 10GBE. I get about 26% of the 10GBE NIC around 13000MB/min!

and thats local SAS RAID 5 storage. I should be getting at least that when backing up the VMs on the SAN cause the SAN performance is so much better.

I wondered if some people don't mind running a benchmark or two if they can. If I run one from within a VM which is on SAN it can achieve read speeds of around 600MB/sec!

Will post some soon.

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:25

droyden said:
As I said, it backs up fine under vSphere5, but doesnt restore without the hotfix

Ah ok, I couldn't get the SAN transport backup to work at all without the hotfix!

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:59

m4cc45 said:
Sorry we use an IBM SAN - TSM is also a product by IBM which is basically an enterprise tape backup solution. We have a massive tape library - holds around 300 tapes or so.

M.

Cool, we have a Dell TL4000 which is basically a re-branded IBM autoloader. Only holds 48 tapes but we have 4 x LTO 5 drives which are nice

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 19:43

Nikumba said:
ESXi 4U1, with about 32Tb of storage over 4 lefthands with one being at a DR site that we snap shot to, backed up to take with BackupExec 2010R2 due to goto R3 shortly

Kimbie

What mode of BE backups do you use?

simonprr · 26 Nov 2011 at 18:14

Whats a ZFS snapshot?

simonprr · 27 Nov 2011 at 20:56

m4cc45 said:
I'd have to check but I'm sure the link below is ours. We have 4 of them and they were stupid money.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/index.html

M.

Wow, serious bit of kit!

simonprr · 29 Nov 2011 at 23:41

m4cc45 said:
Yeah scripting is good (I come from Wintel but before that DOS and now do a fair bit of Powershelling and I'm also the VMware Admin which I do a bit of scripting in).

I just haven't been bothered to do much in it as I haven't really been annoyed enough to do so... yet...

M.

For interest what kind of things do your scripts do in the vmware environment?

simonprr · 30 Nov 2011 at 00:02

Bit off topic, but I can't seem to get a port channel working. Think I'm going mad I just can't get it to work and have no idea why! I have 3 x 1Gb ports connected to a Cisco 3560G switch, I've set it up exactly the same way as it shows here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...ype=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1004048

But 2 of the ports go to suspended, one connected. The 2 connected negotiate at 10 and 100 and the connected one at 1000. sh log says that it can't bundle the ports because they are different speeds, however even forcing the speeds at the switch and vSwitch makes no difference!

Any ideas?

simonprr · 2 Dec 2011 at 00:57

Sounds nice, whats the P4500 SAN like performance wise?

simonprr · 2 Dec 2011 at 20:25

Cool !

jabroni_83 said:
everythings backed up with Netbackup from the guests atm which is rubbish. its all over 10GbE but isn't very innovative.

You backup from inside the VM? ie. not through vSphere or the host etc? I assume you mean the performance is rubbish....

jabroni_83 said:
started looking at the storage awareness APIs recently with our v5 environment - they look pretty cool. should be interesting times.

Oh right, do you mean the vStorage APIs? Not knowing anything about SDKs or APIs or development, what will you be able to do with this? Please do tell!

simonprr · 10 Dec 2011 at 19:15

Interesting, why has VMware got the market lead then?

Surely it's not free for all the same features as vSphere? How would Citrix make any money....

VMware is ***** since EMC offloaded its original founders

What do you mean? :confused: