Apr 12
25
vExpert Title Holder
The other weekend I became aware of the fact that I was named a vExpert from VMware! I am very honored to be part of this program and congratulate all of my colleagues that have been accepted into the program. Looking back at the last two years that I have been blogging, I had a mission in mind to start documenting my thoughts, lab results and product reviews so that I could have an online repository (if you will) to constantly refer back to and to also share with the community.
Looking at the vExpert 2012 title holder list, I see a lot of familiar names and many that I have yet to meet. The great thing about the VMware community is the dedication that each and every member has to share technical knowledge with the masses that are supporting a vast array of infrastructures out there. I can’t think of a better community to belong to!
I must also say that I absolutely enjoy writing blog articles and being active in the social media virtualization space as well as being an advocate for the technology.
Rick
Mar 12
10
Speeding Up VMware Converter 5
Back in June of last year I did a preview post on VMware Converter 5 describing some of the great features of this product. Well, now that it has been out there a while I thought that this would be a good time to talk about a significant change to how the conversion process can be accelerated by simply turning off the default method of transport. As a catch-all, they have the converter using SSL so that if a P2V (or V2V for that matter) is done across an unsecured connection, the data is protected. The product has a great sector based copying process during the cloning operation and conversion speed, but I have found this tweak to help speed the process up considerably within your network.
Please note that this change should only be done if you are performing your P2V processes within your private or corporate network, whether it be on the ethernet segment in your LAN or across your private MPLS WAN. I do not recommend turning this off if you are P2Ving a machine across the internet or unsecure line for whatever reason.
Changing the VMware Converter Client
First off, locate this file in your installation directory which is generally at c:\program files\VMware\VMware Converter Standalone
Next, open it up in your favorite XML editor (notepad for me) and make a change to this highlighted entry:
Make the entry “false”:
You will want to save this back as an XML file so make sure that you change the settings in notepad when you save it.
That’s it! Why there is no “tick box” for turning this off is beyond me, but this will speed up your conversion times. Some of my testing has shown a 6x reduction in P2V times.
Rick
We had two main presenters for this session. George Winter, a Technical Product Manager in the Information Management Group at Symantec in Mountain View, CA and Gareth Fraser-King was also there who is in the Global Technical Field Enablement division in the the United Kingdom.
Both speakers and had a deep understanding of the product lines they referred to and here are some of the highlights on the opening remarks:
- They have been a partner with VMware for nearly 12 years
- V-Ray Technologies “best describes the product lines”
- Visibility into virtual machines and applications
- Transparent backup and recovery across physical and virtual machines
- Third generation with granular recovery
- An entry point into the cloud
Problems that they are solving:
- Machine restores are placed back on to the original location or alternate location, just like any other restore software.
- “Design Criteria” – NetBackup Ecosystem? They talked about backing up various OS’s to allow a seamless backup environment.
- Replication Director coming out in 7.5 as well as vAPP integration with vSphere and vCD.
- Backup Data Path with the SCSI LUN locking potential if backups consume the pipe and lock the LUN
They showed a few slides on host utilization during a backup and the difference when the products are used, but I was interested to see the memory load on the ESX host in a stateless compute environment.
They said that their Benchmark results – -has only been limited by hardware.
VIP – VMware Intelligent Policy – VMware Protection on Autopilot
- Alternate method of backing up new and moved vm’s
- Designed for dynamic environment – vMo, DRS, sDRS, etc
- Query engine can be taylored to protect VMware environments
VIP will balance the load of backups over the storage path (FC or File Based) – as well as VMware attributes: Folder, resource pool or vApp. I asked the question on backup windows since they are throttling the streams our of each ESX server and how they combat that. They said that they are reliant on aggressive DRS policy setup at the cluster level.
They also had a 1/3 rack in the room to show off the NetBackup appliance. This was the Symantec NetBackup 5220:
I found this link for the product on the web: http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-nbu_5220_DS_21157020.en-us.pdf
Shortly after the noon hour, they talked about the NetBackup Accelerator in NetBackup 7.5
This is a client based backup product that does change block tracking within the OS on the VMware environment. It also provides a single file restore through a catalog that is created on a per vm basis. They say that this is fundamentally different that other solutions that require a full restore and then the file list located. There is a “proprietary technology” (agent type) to do this and must be installed within the OS. Tape restore is done the same way and selected data is pulled from tape in the same fashion.
How is this agent managed? This is usually done through their management utility, but can be done through other facets such as SCCM, etc .
All in all, this was a great meeting / presentation from George Winter and Gareth Fraser-King and a great session to kick off Virtualization Field Day 2!
Rick
