Category: VMware

Connect Veeam to a Cloud Service Provider

Veeam has the ability to connect to numerous Cloud and Service Providers globally built right into the console. You can select an SP based on the type of service that you would like, either Backup-as-a-Service or Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), and how much you want to pay for that service. Once selected it as simple as the Service Provider giving you three items, a URL or IP address to connect too, and a username and password to access the Service.

Continue reading “Connect Veeam to a Cloud Service Provider”

RDMs, Clusters, and Veeam

VMware has the ability to pass through from shared storage the raw settings of a LUN to a single VM.  This Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is achieved using a proxy file inside of a VMFS volume.  The benefits of this include being able to send disk commands to the storage, and support for clustering technologies.  In the Veeam world this has stopped backups from working as Veeam has traditionally accessed VMware snapshots to perform backups.

With the addition of physical agents, centrally managed through either the Veeam console or through Veeam Availability Console, these VM’s can now be protected, providing cluster aware backups on RDMs, inside of the virtual world.

Before we dive into protecting RDMs, lets take a look at what they are, how they are different, and some competing technologies.

For block storage presented to VMware, there are four major ways to use the storage.  RDMs, independent disks, vmdks, and VVols. Continue reading “RDMs, Clusters, and Veeam”

Home Lab – Part Two

After a bit of mucking around I’ve managed to get VMware installed on my two home-brew servers.  The first server was completely straightforward and installed the latest version of ESXi6.5.  The second took the image, but on boot failed due to a lack of a network driver, with an error talking about nfs41client.  After a bit of googling I found an article showing how to resolve this by adding a network driver to ESXi6.5.  I followed the steps in the article and the host booted.  If anyone else has this problem please take a look at the great blog available here – http://www.computertechblog.com/adding-realtek-r8168-driver-to-an-esxi-6-0-iso/

Unfortunately my NAS, problematic little beast that it is, has decided that the HDDs in it are no longer useful, and has failed them.  I’m looking into this at the moment, however I think it is time to admit that the iomega needs to go the way of the Dodo.  I’m going to attempt to fix it this week.  One last chance…