Storage

It was a bit quiet here in January caused by a new “private project” which has attracted some resources, and will pull more resources in the future.

But this will not stop me from documenting useful stuff. This one is nothing new, but commonly asked by some customers: How do I get my storage capacity back after deleting VMs?!

The outlined steps are all done using esxcli. You need to execute them on a single ESXi host, not on each host in the cluster.

When it comes to disaster recovery (DR), dedicated offsite infrastructure is a must. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, then you should have at least three copies of your data, on two different media, and one copy should be offsite.

But an offsite copy of your data can be expensive… You have to setup storage and networking in a suitable colocation. And even if you have an offsite copy of your data, you must be able to recover the data. This could be fun in case of terabytes of data and an offsite copy on tape.

One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a

• HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity,
• and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016

as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus. The backend storage is a HPE 3PAR 8200.

Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.

Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.

Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.

One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.

I hope that you are not reading this blog post while searching for a solution for a failed cluster. If so, feel free to leave a comment if this blog post saved your evening or weekend. :)

Last friday, a change at one of my customers went horribly wrong. I was not onsite, but they contacted me during the night from friday to saturday, because their most important Windows Server Failover Cluster was unable to start after extending a shared VMDK.

It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.

Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?

When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.

I have worked with a lot of backup software products during my career, but for the last years I have primarily worked with MicroFocus Data Protector (former HP OmniBack, HP Data Protector, or HPE Data Protector), and Veeam Backup & Replication. Data Protector was a great solution for traditional server environments, or when UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.) compatibility was required. Features like Zero Downtime Backups, LAN-free or Direct SAN backups were available for many years. But their code quality has suffered severely in the recent years. The product no longer seemed like a one-stop shop. Some months ago, HPE sold its software division to MicroFocus and started to sell Veeam Backup & Replication through its channel. Some months prior selling the complete software division, HPE acquired Trilead, which is many of us well known because of their VM Explorer. Sad but true: Data Protector is dead to me.

In addition to my shortcut blog post about Meltdown and Spectre with regard of Microsoft Windows, VMware ESXi and vCenter, and HPE ProLiant, I would like to add some additional information about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler.

When we talk about Meltdown and Spectre, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities:

• CVE-2017-5715 (branch target injection)
• CVE-2017-5753 (bounds check bypass)
• CVE-2017-5754 (rogue data cache load)

CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 are known as “Spectre”, CVE-2017-5754 is known as “Meltdown”. If you want to read more about these vulnerabilities, please visit meltdownattack.com.