Site Recovery Manager links page

The last few months, Site Recovery Manager from VMware has become a hot Topic. Many people wrote about it. All kind of video’s and “How to” documentation pops up out of the blue.

I decided to add a whole page for SRM links. If you miss any please send me an email so i can add them. I will update this page frequently.

You can find it here:

http://tendam.wordpress.com/srm-links/

SRM in a box part 2 pre-post

I am working on a new version of the “SRM in a box” document. This new version of SRM in a box has been slimmed down and includes updates reflecting new versions of software deployed including the new Netapp simulator version 7.3.

John Balsillie a VCI from Australia volunteered to review this project to improve the English, the grammar and the readability. He also reviewed all steps in this project at a technical level.  With this kind of projects you need someone who has a clear sight to review all writings. At some moments you do not see the mistakes you make. Thanks John, your help is appreciated!

This version prepares you for installing VMware Site Recovery Manager on a system with 4 GB ram.

With this post i will share you all the download links for the software which i will use in the new document so you can download them already.

When the document is finished, i will post it here.

Here are all the links to download the software:

· Ubuntu Desktop edition 8.10 for hosting the Netapp simulators: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

· The Netapp simulator 7.3 (login required and you must be a partner or customer) http://now.netapp.com/cgi-bin/simulator

· SQL 2005 Express (free download and use)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=220549b5-0b07-4448-8848-dcc397514b41&displaylang=en

· SQL 2005 Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796&displaylang=en

· Windows 2003 sp2 iso

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1B9FE9E4-1D57-4698-A5CF-DB271ED6D90A

· The following software download can be found at this single url:

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=vi3&lp=1

Create an account, log in and download the following software from a single page:

· VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 iso file

· VMware vCenter 2.5

· VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Update 1

· NetApp Storage Replication Adapter Version 1.0

A new virtualization blog from Netapp

Keith Aasen is a Virtualization Specialist with Netapp covering Canada. This month he started a blog in the Netapp community about Netapp and virtualization. He posted already some interesting articles about the backup of virtual machines.

I think it is good to read article’s which come from a vendor other than VMware. It creates another perspective on how things work and why we maybe should do things in another way.

Just click on the picture below to enter his Blog!

 

I am a little disappointed about the free Veeam Christmas gift ;-)

-Edit- This post was getting a little out of bounds so i decided to delete it. I wrote a “day before Christmas at work and the is not much to do here so what will I post” kind of post about a little bug in Veeam’s Monitoring tool. Exactly got more comments on this one then on other technical post. This is not actually what this blog is about. This blog is to learn and to give something back t the community, which i am learing from for the past 15 years.

At the other site this was a lesson about the influence you have when blogging. And now that many people read this blog i notice that I have some responsibility about what to write and think twice before posting. A mail to support should have been good enough. After all Veeam releases good free tools which I used many times.

Veeam contacted me back in quit a short time. Doug from veeam, thanks for your email

Tomas

install the new Netapp Simulator 7.3 and connect ESX with ISCSI base document

Because i want to do multiple projects with VMware ESX and the new Netapp simulator, i decided to create a base document which i will use as a base document for new projects. I will point to this document as a start for other projects.

This document describes how to install Netapp Simulator 7.3 in a version 8.10 Ubuntu desktop distribution and prepare for iscsi connections to ESX 3.5.

Other documents that i consider to create are:

• Snap manager for Virtual infrastructure
• Enabling de-duplication with vmware on Netapp
• SRM part 2 the new version.
• Other cool stuff

If you have any suggestions for a project, please email me: tomas (at) tendam_info

Download the document here: (right click and save)

SRM Tips and Tricks from VMware

Lee Dilworth just published a post in The Uptime blog from VMware about the lessons they learned from implementing SRM in the field. This includes the problem i walked into when there were no protected luns available. This was because there was no VM created in the LUN. It took a few hours to find this out by myself.

You can read all about it here: SRM tips and evaluation from VMware

 

Vibe.exe or VCB could freeze your Exchange VM

When you are using vibe.exe to create snapshots on Netapp volumes and ESX vm’s, vibe.exe executes an esx snapshot at VM level (Vibe is a tool fron Netapp for Netapp appliances).  When you have installed VMware tools on a windows 2003 server, the SYNC DRIVER is also enabled. This could cause any database (Exchange, Active Directory) to crash and freeze the VM. You are not able to connect to this server any more. The only thing what will help is to reboot the VM. Be sure to disable this driver in you hardware devices. (vmware kb)

Open Device Manager and go to the view menu and select Show hidden devices:

Now walk through the Non-plug and Play adapters to Sync Driver and select it with the right mouse button and select Disable:

Warning you need to restart the server before settings take effect

Disaster recovery book from VMware, FREE step by step with Netapp guide!

This free Disaster recovery book shows how to configure ESX to setup disaster recovery with a Netapp. This is a must read for everyone involving Netapp and VMware ESX.

This will guide you through all kind of considerations about Disaster Recovery settings and shows you how to configure your Netapp appliance to accomplish this for your site.

Right click and choose save to download the document:

Ten tips on de-duplicating your VMware shared storage on Netapp

When you are using VMware esx with the enterprise features you have to store your Virtual Machines on shared storage like Netapp provides. As everybody knows your storage usage will explode immediately. It isjust too easy to create multiple virtual machines that will eat up your storage space.

At the VMUG 2008 event I took a look on the presentation from Eric Sloof where he was showing a power shell script which can batch create multiple vm’s in a minute with one mouse click. You can imagine what this script will do for your storage environment.

Netapp added a big value to VMware storage utilization by providing De-duplication. Especially in a VMware environment where VM primary partitions are the same for about 80%. De-duplication scans these volumes where the vm’s resides and removes all the double blocks and create pointers to them.

The fun thing about De-duplication is the answer on what does it cost on Netapp? It is free! At least for the latest FAS systems. It is not available to R100, R150, FAS250, FAS270, and products that are within the range of the 800 or 900 series.

To give you a quick start on the usage of de-duplication I wrote ten tips on using it in your VMware environment:

1.) De-duplication is a scheduled process. Default it will run every night. So when you do storage Vmotion from a non de-duplicated volume to a de-duplicated volume it is not de-duplicated immediately. Be sure you have calculated this before you do a storage vmotion

2.) Be sure to set “fractional reserve” in a de-duplication volume not at 100%. The reason is that when you de-duplicate the volume, all free space will be added to the fractional reserve pool. So you never get any in the volume where your data resist. When you set fractional reserve at 20%, only 20% of the free blocks are added to “fractional reserve pool and the other 80% to your volume free space!

3.) Use NFS volumes for your VM’s. NFS is far the most flexible storage provisionary for VMware. You can thin provision VM’s and resize NFS volumes on the fly when you want to use De-duplication space savings for another volume.

4.) Place your VM swapfiles on a different Volume. It is best practice for VMware esx environments to place your swap files on a dedicated swapfile volume. Swap files do not have much identical blocks which cab de-duplicated.

5.) Be sure that everyone who has access at the volumes to understand what De-duplication does and what they need to know what happens with data that migrates or is being copied to other volumes/clients. This could prevent volumes to go offline or other data corruption, because it is un-de-duplicated when copied to unsupported storage.

6.) Schedule the De-duplication process at time frames where there is no data access like production or backup windows.

7.) Be sure to not create a Netapp snapshot while the de-duplication process is running, because the metadata can be locked inside the snapshot. (this data is within 1-3% overhead) Instead create a snapshot before de-duplicating. Afterwards Snapshots are not de-duplicated!

8.) Use the best practice for volume provisioning to ESX environments. Provide a 500 GB volume as the maximum. This will always let Netapp De-duplicate your storage on any FAS system. This is also a best practice for ESX performance.

9.) Always place the same OS vm’s in the same volumes. Create volumes per OS. This will free up more space in your volumes.

10.) To get the most out of your De-duplicated space savings, split up OS disks and data disks on different volumes. More duplicated blocks in a volume give you more de-duplicated space!

Commands to start with de-duplication:

First to enable De-duplication on a Netapp volume:

sis on “Volume name”

Next to start a De-duplication process for the first time. (after this a default schedule will de-duplicate your volume every night.

sis start -s “Volume name”

To start the process manually:

sis start “Volume name”

To display the status of the process:

sis status [-l] “Volume name” (in advanced mode)

To see your space savings:

df –s

To stop your De-duplication process. (It will stop your schedule as well).

sis stop “Volume name”

To turn it off:

sis off “Volume name”

To un-De-duplicate your Volume:

sis undo “Volume name”

blog was temporary unavailable. problem solved

Due to a DNS problem of my provider the url www.tendam.info was not available this morning. I called the provider and it was solved within an hour. This was caused by another customer who was providing illegal characters at a program which caused dns to hang. They changed the procedure so this will not happen again.