vSphere 5

simonprr said:
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....
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**Warning EMC employee**

We have plenty of reference sites being that we own VMware for EMC storage at the back end.

Still if I were you, I would look at NetApp and IBM as well, of course EMC isn't always a fit.

Please do me a favour and ignore the Dell EqualLogic and HP Lefthand rubbish :)
 
simonprr said:
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.
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Ah, I get it - it's a performance / flexibility thing. Makes sense.

Shaz]sigh[;20648667 said:
A snapshot isn't a backup, if you lose the source, you lose your data. In addition, Veeam also can provide application consistency through VSS. Finally, you don't get the COFW performance hit of using snaps (nor the WAFL chugging).
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I was thinking snapshot as in ZFS snapshot piped to an offsite ZFS array, rather than a VM snapshot. Appreciate that there may be a performance impact of taking the ZFS snapshot in the first place though :)
 
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.
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Ah the TS3500 ... quite nice libraries. Last TSM system I built had a one with a couple of expansion frames and a dozen or so drives.

A definite improved on the pos Storagetek library they were using prior to that which tended to breakdown several times a week.

And in answer to the OPs question; I don't support the vSphere infrastructure but we're using SAN's based around HDS USPVs and the standard backup tool we use is Netbackup (although how its being used with ESX I don't know).
 
It is when you have 4 of them and still have a really tight backup window.

I must admit though that the TSM software is awful - you end up looking in logs, etc. for the reasons why a backup has failed rather than it giving you a GUI. Saying that though I find most IBM software awful :)



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
It is when you have 4 of them and still have a really tight backup window.

I must admit though that the TSM software is awful - you end up looking in logs, etc. for the reasons why a backup has failed rather than it giving you a GUI. Saying that though I find most IBM software awful :)

M.
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Ahhh but because it logs everything instead of presenting it in a GUI you can nicely script reports and actions based on what is going on.

I know we had it setup via some custom in house written scripts which generated reports in HTML format so everything could be checked in a few minutes.

But it really depends on whether you come from a Unix or Wintel background whether you like doing stuff on a command line or a GUI. The only real issue we had was a known bug with the version we were running where RMAN would delete items from its inventory but not remove it properly from TSM ... lead to a build up of unaddressable orphoned data in TSM. It was fun after getting to the bottom of the problem with IBM Support which ended up with me running one command which unindexed ~12TB of data out of each of the main and offsite copy pools which meant we had a few tapes coming back onsite.
 
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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.
 
Im not entirely sure but we have at least 550 vm's we use IBM XIV's for storage. which cost a lot. The exact details are i dot really deal with as I just make VM's and look after more windows and citrix related stuff
 
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.
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For interest what kind of things do your scripts do in the vmware environment?
 
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?
 
Just installed a v5 setup, 10 Hosts, Enterprise+, P4500 SAN, Commvault to back it up (crappy, as no hardware snap support for the P4500)
 
we've got a fair few v4 environments and v5 in test/dev atm. all with HDS or HP storage. think the biggest environment has got around 30 hosts with ~20 TB of storage. use a bit of SRM in one environment with HDS truecopy but nothing too special.
everythings backed up with Netbackup from the guests atm which is rubbish. its all over 10GbE but isn't very innovative. we have looked at VADP but we're still on NBU 7.0 atm and granular restores for linux clients aren't supported - pants.
started looking at the storage awareness APIs recently with our v5 environment - they look pretty cool. should be interesting times.
 
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.
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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.
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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! ;)
 
vSphere is sh**!

Citrix Xenserver destroys vSphere, I have deployed Xenserver in multiple Data Centres and I have always been impressed with its performance particularly hosting Windows 7 vs vSphere, try it, it costs £0.

BTW: Yes I was bitten by the VMware pretty GUI bug, I installed vSphere against 2 x NetApp FAS SAN's using snapmirror over a DR site and yes it was good but I tried Xenserver and the performance blew me away.

CentOS 6 // RHEL 6 KVM performance is also way ahead of vSphere, VMware is ***** since EMC offloaded its original founders.
 
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