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Archive for the ‘Virtual Backup’ Category

People who have been using VMware Data Recovery quickly discovered that this product had issues. VMware’s take on Data Recovery was that they wanted to have a backup product for the smaller shops with a short time-to-market. Too bad it was this product that drove a lot of users to Veeam or PHDvirtual because of its many problems. In secrecy VMware started working together with EMC’s BRS division to build a brand new backup product leveraging EMC’s Avamar technology under the codename “Project Toystory”. This product has seen the light of day as “vSphere Data Protection 5.1” or vDP for short. In this post I will be looking into vDP version 5.1, which is actually the initial release.

Introduction to vSphere Data Protection 5.1

This is the first release of vDP, so actually a 1.0 version. I will not be expecting a fully feature-rich product, but one that actually WORKS would be nice. After all, it is a “free” product Read the rest of this entry »

After a rather successful part 2 of this series, it is high time to kick off part 3, which covers Replication and Disaster Recovery (DR). Most important to note, that backup and DR are two completely different things, and one should not be tempted to combine both unless you are positive your solution will cover all business requirements for both DR and backup.

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As some of you may have seen, Veeam’s podcast episode two features an interview with VMdamentals, by yours truly. Check it out here:

Veeam Community Podcast Episode 2 – VMdamentals shootout!

In part 1 of this series, I looked at two solutions for making virtual backups: Veeam and PHDvirtual. In this part, I’ll be looking at installing, making backups, verifying backups and of course restoring items.

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For a long time I have been a fan of PHDvirtual (formerly esXpress) and their way of backing up virtual environments. Their lack of ESXi support has driven a lot of people towards other vendors, and the one that is really on technology’s edge nowadays is Veeam’s Backup and Replication. Now that PHDvirtual has released their version 5.1 with ESXi support, it is high time for a shootout between the two.

Some history on drawing virtual backups

In the old ESX 3.0 and ESX 3.5 days, there was hardly any integration with 3^rd party backup products. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I thought I had done a pretty complete tuneup on the storage path from Veeam backup to an Iomega IX2-200 NAS, two things came up I wanted to test. The first one (why didn’t I think of that) is to set compression to “low”, saving CPU cycles and hopefully getting more throughput. The second one was starting a second job on the same Veeam VM to the same target storage.

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In my quest to get the most out of my home lab setup when it comes to backup speeds to my IX2-200 (see Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds) today I will configure jumbo frames on my environment, and I will show how each of the possible connection options to the IX2-200 can be configured for jumbo frames.

A small history on network frames, and especially the Jumbo Ones

There are many stories going round about jumbo frames. Some say it is not worth while, others say it is the difference between day and night. But what are jumbo frames in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Veeam’s Happy Holidays gift, I now have a license for several Veeam products. The one I really wanted to try in my home lab was Veeam Backup and Replication.

In this blogpost, I will try various ways to connect the Veeam appliance to my Iomega IX2-200 NAS box. This setup is very tiny indeed, but it clearly shows the options you have and how they perform compared to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

After a very long wait, at last the ESXi supporting version of PHDvirtual Backup is here! Version 5.1 just went GA.

Finally PHDvirtual has got ESXi support for their backup product. I keep admiring them for their efforts: Because they solved problems years ago when nobody else could, their solution got dated as VMware finally integrated some almost vital backup features to their vSphere product.

Now PHDvirtual has done an almost complete rewrite of their product in order to modernize up to the standards of the vStorage API in vSphere.

Be sure to check out their solution!

Today I got my hands on the new PHD Virtual Backup Appliance – version 5.1-ER. Following in the footsteps of its XenServer brother, this new version uses a single VBA (versus the previous versions where multiple VBA’s were used). Best of all: ESXi support at last!

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