Archive for January, 2011

EMC’s Record Breaking Event: Almost showtime!

As EMC2 counts down into the final hours before their live record breaking event, posts are showing up around three products: Data Domain Archiver, the Data Domain 890 and GDA, and the EMC2 VNX and VNXe series. I looked around and found some info here and there on these new products.

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Veeam Backup vs PHDvirtual Backup part 2- Performing Backup and Restores

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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Veeam Backup vs PHDvirtual Backup part 1- Introduction

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 3rd party backup products. Read the rest of this entry »

Veeam Backup part 3- Final fiddling on target storage

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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Veeam Backup part 2- Using jumbo frames to target storage

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 »

Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds

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 »

Soon to come
  • Coming soon

    • Determining Linked Clone overhead
    • Designing the Future part1: Server-Storage fusion
    • Whiteboxing part 4: Networking your homelab
    • Deduplication: Great or greatly overrated?
    • Roads and routes
    • Stretching a VMware cluster and "sidedness"
    • Stretching VMware clusters - what noone tells you
    • VMware vSAN: What is it?
    • VMware snapshots explained
    • Whiteboxing part 3b: Using Nexenta for your homelab
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