Category:

VMware

VMware VSAN ESA Re-balance

by Roger Lund October 15, 2023

written by Roger Lund

After I moved my VM’s to the vsan, I saw this warning.

So lets go ahead and enable auto re-balancing,

Lets go to the cluster, Configure, vSAN, And Services.

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Lets click on edit, Under Advanced Options

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Lets change automatic re-balance to enable, and click Apply.

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Now lets go to monitor, vSAN and Re-syncing Objects

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As you can see, there are items with the intent to re-balance on the right.

And now there are none.

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I asked Chat GPT the following to see what it thought about why we need to do this.

me: “in VMware vSAN, why is re-balancing important?”

ChatGPT

VMware vSAN (Virtual SAN) is a software-defined storage solution that pools local storage resources of ESXi hosts to provide a highly available and resilient shared storage solution for virtual machines. Re-balancing in vSAN is an essential operation for various reasons:

Even Distribution of Data: Over time, as workloads change, new data is written, and old data is deleted, the distribution of data across the disks and hosts can become uneven. Re-balancing ensures that the data is uniformly spread across the cluster, maximizing the utilization of resources.
Performance Optimization: An imbalanced cluster can lead to some disks or hosts being more heavily utilized than others. This can result in performance hotspots. By re-balancing the data, the I/O load is spread more evenly across the cluster, which can enhance overall performance.
Capacity Management: If one disk or host becomes fuller than others, it might run out of space even when other parts of the vSAN cluster have ample free space. Re-balancing helps in ensuring that storage capacity is used effectively, and no node runs out of space prematurely.
After Adding or Removing a Disk/Host: When you add new hosts or disks to a vSAN cluster, they start empty. vSAN’s re-balancing operation ensures that the new resources are utilized efficiently. Similarly, when a disk or host is removed, the data from that resource needs to be redistributed to maintain the desired fault tolerance levels.
Ensuring Compliance with Storage Policies: vSAN allows you to define storage policies that determine factors like fault tolerance and stripe width. If the data isn’t balanced properly, it might not meet the requirements of these policies. Re-balancing helps in ensuring that the data complies with the set policies.
Maintenance Operations: Before performing maintenance tasks or updates on a host, you may need to evacuate the data. After completing the task and bringing the host back, re-balancing can help restore the data distribution to its optimal state.
Health and Monitoring: vSAN health checks monitor for imbalances in the cluster. Re-balancing helps in rectifying those imbalances, thus ensuring the cluster remains in a healthy state.

It’s worth noting that VMware vSAN has automated mechanisms to handle some level of re-balancing operations in the background. However, there are scenarios, especially in rapidly changing environments, where manual intervention or closer monitoring might be necessary to ensure optimal performance and capacity utilization.

what do you think, is it far off?

That’s all for today 😊

October 15, 2023 0 comments

vExpert VMware VMware VSAN ESA vsan

VMware VSAN ESA with Intel Optane 900P drives.

by Roger Lund October 14, 2023

written by Roger Lund

Intel was kind enough to supply me with Intel Optane 900P drives for my Lab. As you know I am part of the VMware vExpert program, that allows things like this.

So naturally, the first thing I want to do is configure the VSAN ESA Express Storage Architecture. https://core.vmware.com/vsan-esa

Since AI is on our minds, I thought I would ask it to give us a overview and do a intro. Of course I used our favorite Chat GTP4.

This was done with VMware vSphere 8 update 1.

“

Greetings, dear readers! As an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, known as ChatGPT, I’m here to introduce you to a fascinating subject that’s changing the game in data storage and management: VMware’s Express Storage Architecture (ESA), especially in the context of the recently released vSAN 8 U1. This article has been commissioned to provide you with an understanding of ESA and to walk you through setting it up with Intel Optane PCIE 900P’s in Cisco UCS Hosts.

VMware’s vSAN 8 U1 marks a significant advancement in data storage with its introduction of ESA. This development enhances dis-aggregated storage, a robust and successful method for customers to share vSAN storage resources with other vSAN clusters or compute-only clusters. With the incorporation of ESA, users can now mount remote vSAN datastores housed in different vSAN clusters, leveraging an ESA cluster as an external storage resource for a vSphere cluster. All this while maintaining the ease of use that customers have come to appreciate from vSAN’s Original Storage Architecture (OSA).

Another salient feature of vSAN 8 U1 is the support for vSAN stretched clusters with disaggregation in vSAN, made possible by the OSA. This feature optimizes network paths for specific topologies, leading to improved performance capabilities in stretched cluster configurations.

Lastly, vSAN 8 U1 allows for dis-aggregation across clusters managed by different vCenter server instances, offering a level of scalability and flexibility previously unattainable.

However, this high-level overview only scratches the surface of what VMware’s Express Storage Architecture truly brings to the table. The meat of our exploration lies in how we can set up ESA using Intel Optane PCIE 900P’s in Cisco UCS Hosts, and that’s what we’ll focus on in the upcoming parts of this article.

So stay tuned, and together we’ll deep dive into the nuts and bolts of this innovative storage solution, exploring the possibilities and benefits it can bring to your organization’s IT infrastructure.
“

I then asked the following.

“now give a overview of how this ESA behaves differently than vSAN in lets say vsphere 7.x in this scenario. 3 UCS C220’s with 2 Optane drives each.”

“
VMware’s Express Storage Architecture (ESA) introduced in vSAN 8 U1 brings notable changes in the way vSAN manages and operates storage, especially compared to previous vSAN versions like those integrated into vSphere 7.x. For the purposes of this overview, let’s consider a scenario where we have three Cisco UCS C220 hosts, each equipped with two Intel Optane drives.

In the traditional vSAN environment you might have encountered in vSphere 7.x, storage resources are pooled together across the cluster, with each host contributing storage to the vSAN datastore. vSAN then handles the distribution and management of this storage resource, providing the illusion of a single, unified datastore. This distributed nature of vSAN allows for high resilience, as data is typically mirrored or erasure-coded across multiple hosts. However, this traditional architecture does not readily support the sharing of vSAN storage resources with other vSAN clusters or compute-only clusters.

Enter VMware’s Express Storage Architecture in vSAN 8 U1. ESA introduces the capability of storage dis-aggregation, allowing the vSAN storage resources to be shared with other vSAN clusters or even with compute-only clusters. So in our scenario, if one of the UCS C220’s with its pair of Optane drives was part of a separate vSAN cluster (or was a compute-only cluster), it could still access and use the storage resources of the other two hosts via ESA. This results in enhanced flexibility and utilization of storage resources.

ESA also supports dis-aggregation in vSAN in both standard and stretched cluster configurations, although some limitations exist. While it brings added capabilities, there are features such as cross-vCenter Server capabilities, support for stretched clusters, and de-duplication that are not currently supported in ESA but are part of the traditional vSAN architecture.

The integration of Intel Optane drives plays a crucial role in both these architectures. In vSAN 7.x, Optane drives can be used as cache to dramatically improve the performance of the vSAN cluster. In vSAN 8 U1 with ESA, the same drives can still be used for caching, but they can also be used more flexibly because of the dis-aggregation feature. This means the performance benefits of the Optane drives can be enjoyed by all clusters with access to the dis-aggregated storage.

In conclusion, while the traditional vSAN as found in vSphere 7.x provides a solid and robust storage platform, the introduction of ESA in vSAN 8 U1 brings a level of flexibility and interoperability that was not previously possible, opening up new ways to maximize your infrastructure’s efficiency and performance.

“

Next I go to the datastore, and change the storage policy

Why? Lets see what Chat GPT says about it.

I asked “I set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5, explain how it differences from vSAN of old.”

“
The Express Storage Architecture (ESA) in VMware vSAN 8 has introduced significant changes to how RAID-5 is implemented and managed compared to previous versions of vSAN. This new architecture aims to provide improved performance, space efficiency, and adaptability. Here are the key differences when you set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5 compared to the traditional vSAN:

Performance and Space Efficiency: In previous versions of vSAN, using RAID-5 resulted in some performance trade-offs due to the computational complexity of erasure coding, despite its better space efficiency compared to RAID-1. With vSAN 8’s ESA, RAID-5 can now deliver the same level of performance as RAID-1, meaning you get RAID-1-like performance with the space efficiency of RAID-5. This is made possible by ESA’s log-structured file system and optimized data structure.

Erasure Coding Schemes: The traditional vSAN used a 3+1 RAID-5 erasure coding scheme, where data was written as a stripe consisting of 3 data bits and 1 parity bit, across at least 4 hosts. The ESA in vSAN 8 replaces this with two new RAID-5 erasure codes – a 4+1 scheme (4 data bits and 1 parity bit across at least 5 hosts) and a 2+1 scheme (2 data bits and 1 parity bit across at least 3 hosts). These new schemes offer better space efficiency, especially for smaller clusters.

Adaptive RAID-5: vSAN 8’s ESA introduces an adaptive RAID-5 feature that automatically adjusts the RAID-5 erasure code based on the host count in the cluster. This means the system will optimize the RAID-5 scheme for your current configuration without requiring manual intervention. This is a key improvement in terms of ease of management and ensuring optimal data resilience.

Data Resilience: The ESA Default Raid 5 provides better resilience in face of host failure. When a host fails, the system automatically adjusts to maintain data availability while also keeping the prescribed level of resilience.

Overall, these differences mean that when you set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5 in vSAN 8, you’re using a much more space-efficient, resilient, and performance-optimized version of RAID-5 compared to previous versions of vSAN. This all translates into a higher effective storage capacity, better performance, and simpler management for your vSAN clusters.

“

Let’s go ahead and set it!

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If we go to the VSAN services, we can see it now has the policy.

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Next we are going to migrate a VM to the workload

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Under VM Storage Policy, select the policy, and the vsanDatastore.

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Click Finish

Lets go ahead and Migrate a VM to it.

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To show more movement, I queued another VM to migrate.

Ok, lets click on the cluster, monitor, vSAN and then performance, and click backend.

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We can see some traffic.

Lets change to real time. Under the drop down.

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To note, I only have a single 10GB link per host, until I can run some more cabling. And I am migrating from a Hybrid Truenas array.

More to come on this front for Sure!

October 14, 2023 0 comments

Kubernetes VMware

Getting Started with Tanzu Kubernetes in vSphere 8

by Philip Sellers January 20, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

This post is the first in a series of creating Tanzu Kubernetes on vSphere 8. I’m doing this my home lab, which I have decided to create with an Orange theme, because its not an Apple lab. (Yes, that’s cringy dad-joke territory.)

So what is done up to this point in the lab?

Purchased a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro as my core switch & router
Setup several VLANs for vSphere use
- Management VLAN
- vMotion VLAN
- FT VLAN
- Storage VLAN for iSCSI
- VSAN VLAN (for later)
- Servers VLAN for VM workloads
Purchased 3 x HP Z640 workstations with Xeon processors, RAM and an SSD boot disk
Setup iSCSI from a Synology NAS
Added dual 10Gb NICs to each host and added a Ubiquiti 8 port 10Gb Switch
Used 1 0 G t e k b r a n d TwinAx/DAC 10Gb cables to connect things up
Installed ESXi 8.0.0 on each host
Deployed vCenter 8.0.0
Configured a Standard vSwitch and Distributed vSwitch
Setup iSCSI software adapters, configured, connected and provisioned 2 x 1TB VMFS datastores

Deploying TKG

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) with vSphere 8 has gotten significantly simpler, in my eyes. The wizards in vCenter 8 are great and walking a novice through the deployment of TKG in a simplistic way, however, there are somethings that flow better with the workflow if you’ve completed prep before hand.

Checklist of items to complete before the Workload Management wizard

vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing is required because DRS (and vSphere Distributed Switch) is required. HA also needs to be enabled.
You will need to make some basic network decisions around load balancing.
- You will either need to use native vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS) or NSX
- For vSphere Distributed Switches, you need a load balancer. Either deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer or HAProxy load balancer are you two options.
- For NSX, you’ll use their internal load balancing features of NSX.
- NSX-T is supported and you can use a vSphere Distributed Switch (a converged distributed switch) but not a NSX Distributed Switch/N-DVS). You must migrate if you use N-VDS.
You need to setup and define vSphere Zones or your Tanzu is limited to a single vSphere cluster. Personally recommend setting up a zone (see below).
A storage policy is required.
Management Network – control plane VMs to the Supervisor cluster
Workload Network – traffic to the Kubernetes API, workloads, and services

vSphere Zones

Most customers are probably not leveraging vSphere Zones. This feature in vSphere is for multiple zone deployments when a customer scales to multiple colocation datacenters or clouds. I would recommend that even as you start your Tanzu journey, even if you only have a single zone – go ahead and create a single zone. This is one step in future-proofing your Tanzu installation. The whole idea of Kubernetes is enabling your cloud-native applications to be deployed across multiple clouds for resiliency. By creating your first zone, you create your first step in this journey. For more detail, see this article.

If you choose not to use vSphere Zones, you’ll need to choose a cluster to assign your Tanzu deployment onto.

New Networks for Tanzu and HAProxy (or NSX)

I created 3 new networks for Tanzu and HAProxy. The first is a Kubernetes Control Plane network. The second is a Load Balancer network. The third is a Kubernetes workload network.

The Kubernetes Control plane will be used for the HAProxy management network. This is where Tanzu will talk to HAProxy to configure and programmatically setup external access to your Kubernetes workloads. “Programatically” is the key here. Kubernetes will reach out to HAProxy and make all the magic happen automatically. While I’m talking about HAProxy – the same is true with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka AVI Networks) or NSX-T’s built-in load balancer.

The Load Balancer network is where your external endpoints for your workloads are going to be exposed. It is a range of IP addresses. For your production workloads, this is the network that should scale with the number of workloads you plan to have. Keep in mind, this is for the single zone (back to the previous concept) – so enough external IP addresses

HA Proxy Download and Config

Review the requirements of HAProxy Load Balancer from VMware. You can obtain the current OVA from VMware’s GitHub for HAProxy – https://github.com/haproxytech/vmware-haproxy.

As you deploy, take note of the following things that you will need during the configuration. Network settings and some backend network configuration for the HAProxy configuration is definitely required.

HAProxy Load Balancer Controller Endpoint – this is the API endpoint that Tanzu will call to configure HAProxy. This is the primary integration point of HAProxy with your Kubernetes and vSphere clusters.
Username and password configured during the HAProxy deployment
Virtual IP Address Ranges
TLS Certificate from the HAProxy appliance

I loaded the HAProxy OVA into my Content Library (aka The Barn) and then cloned a VM out from this location. It is a standard OVA deployment and you’ll be prompted for configuration to deploy. This guide does a great job of walking you through the HAProxy deployment.

Wizard, wizard

Welcome. The pre-requisites are listed and linked to documentation.

Decisions, decisions – What vCenter Server and what network technology will you use? The wizard adjust based on your choices. For a base level in the lab, I’m deploying VDS.

Next step is choosing where to deploy your Supervisor cluster – the Kubernetes cluster that controls all workload Kubernetes clusters in your deployment. This is where you can choose and associate a vSphere Zone to allow for scale and multi-zone resiliency.

You’ll choose a storage policy – easy peasy.

Next, your load balancer configuration – as noted from above for HAProxy, will be required to input and associate the stand-alone HAProxy or HAProxy cluster.

Next, you’ll use your planned management network

Lastly, your workloads will need a place to run. This is where the Kubernetes API, workloads and services will run – but the API needs to be accessible to interact with other services. Behind the covers, the Kubernetes cluster will run in its own private IP space, that is not of real concern.

Deploy.

Monitor.

Done.

January 20, 2023 0 comments

Kubernetes VMware

Error deploying VMware’s demo Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on vCenter 8

by Philip Sellers January 6, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

For users getting started on vSphere 8 and Tanzu, after you get everything setup and configured, you’ll likely hit a snag. VMware’s GitHub hosts a quick start guide and YAML manifest for deploying your first Tanzu workload cluster. It will fail with the following error:

Error from server (unable to find a compatible full version matching version hint "1.18" and default OS labels: "os-arch=amd64,os-name=photon,os-type=linux,os-version=3.0".

vCenter and Kubernetes Versioning

Why does this error? This is a brand new cluster, after all? The answer is a versioning issue.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is tied to the vCenter version and since we are running vSphere 8 and vCenter 8, the release has specific Kubernetes releases it supports. K8s 1.18 is not compatible. vCenter 8.0.0.10100 releases with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1. The compatible versions for vCenter 8.0.0.10100 are Kubernetes 1.21, 1.22 and 1.23. The supervisor cluster deployed with vCenter 8.0.0.10100 is Kubernetes 1.23.10.

My VMware team has told me that each vCenter will ship with a specific K8 release and upgrading vCenter is the way to upgrade your Tanzu Kubernetes versions. In addition to the vCenter and Tanzu Supervisor Cluster being tied at the hip, VMware will support the current and two prior K8 releases on each vCenter version.

VMware, for its part, doesn’t do much to help the confusion of versioning – as Tanzu has its own versioning, separate from vCenter and separate from the Kubernetes releases. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid version 1.6.1 has K8 version 1.23.10 as its release. TKG 1.5.4 was K8 1.22.9, TKG 1.4.2 was K8 1.21.8.

Demo YAML File

Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vsphere-tmm/vsphere-with-tanzu-quick-start/master/manifests/tkc.yaml

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.18
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]           #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage          #Default PVC storage class

Troubleshooting the Issue

The first thought is, can my supervisor cluster see the library of Kubernetes images? How can I verify that? Google results point me to a post from Anthony S p i t e r i w i t h s o m e h e l p f u l t r o u b l e s h o o t i n g c o m m a n d s . After verifying that my content library was linked correctly, I ran the following command:

kubectl get virtualmachineimages

This output is a good sign. I can see that I have a LOT of images that are available to this namespace. That’s promising, but no silver bullet why I’m getting this error. Digging a bit further into Google results, I hit another kubectl command:

kubectl get tanzukubernetesreleases

BINGO. In the output, I noticed that the version I requested in the YAML was not “READY” or “COMPATIBLE” in the list.

What needs to be altered to allow this to run on vCenter 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1?

Its a simple change – just adjust the distribution version number to 1.21, 1.22, or 1.23. The error is very helpful, in that it says it can’t find a compatible version.

Working YAML

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.23
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]            #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage           #Default PVC storage class

Further assumptions – for this file to work, you need to have created a “kubernetes-demo-storage” storage policy and assigned it to the namespace where you’re running this YAML. You also need to have the default VM Class of “guaranteed-small” assigned to the namespace and available for consumption. If that’s in place, run kubectl from the same directory as the YAML file and voila, you will get a working Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster for workloads!

kubectl apply -f ./tkc.yml

Happy clustering!

January 6, 2023 0 comments

VMware

VMUG is (still) donating proceeds of Advantage Memberships to Girls Who Code

by Philip Sellers January 4, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

The holidays may be past, but goodwill and charity don’t need to end. VMUG members who subscribe or extend their VMUG Advantage membership will get a 10% discount on the membership and enfuse a contribution Girls Who Code. All that is needed is to to check out with code GIRLSWHOCODE.

VMUG is offering an extra charitable benefit to members who subscribe to VMUG Advantage through Jan 14, 2023. It is a new year, new budget – save 10% plus feel good helping young women learn to code!

VMUG members selected one of four nonprofits by a Twitter poll, with beneficiary being Girls Who Code.

Members who subscribe to Advantage still have some time to get in and help this non-profit while also getting great benefits of your own. VMUG Advantage membership gives members evaluation licenses of many VMware products for use in your home lab and for learning, it gives training discounts and a discount to VMware Explore conferenc events. Advantage also gives members access to TestDrive by VMware.

January 4, 2023 0 comments

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vExpert Virtualization VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 Certificate Replacement via SSH

by Roger Lund October 29, 2022

written by Roger Lund

Today, I had an Interesting one. As this was a new install of VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0, or at least within a few days. And low and behold, it has a expired Certificate!? This is a technical write up, with the steps I performed to fix it in my own lab.

When I logged into the Host I Saw the following.

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That isn’t good, lets go fix it.

Step 1. Google.

I found this write up by Jesus Vigo in Security

”

How to regenerate certificates on VMware host servers

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-regenerate-certificates-on-vmware-host-servers/

“By default, VMware host servers, like ESXi hosts typically generate new certificates when the hypervisor is installed on bare-metal hardware. Through the process of configuring the host and allocating resources, it is common for the server configuration to undergo many settings changes as you harden your device.

Must-read security coverage

Among the hardening steps your organization may employ, joining an Active Directory (AD) domain helps administrators to simplify management of underlying hypervisor used to host virtual machines (VM) by centralizing the management of user accounts and groups allowed to access to the server, as well as what changes they are authorized to make.

SEE: Information security policy template download (Tech Pro Research)

However, while the process to join the server to AD may be straightforward, it can and certainly will consistently fail if the SSL certificates used by the VMware host are expired, invalid, or otherwise corrupted. These all pose a difficulty in getting the server to authenticate domain accounts, which will leave users unable to maintain the server until it is resolved. But how can you fix this once it’s happened? Or worse yet, if you’ve never been able to join it to the domain in the first place?

“

Ok, lets get to it!

First lets enable SSH, Go to Manage , Services.

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Select TSM-SSH, Name SSH and Click start

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next, lets login via ssh. I used Putty.

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Lets move to the dir that has the SSL keys to back up the keys. Per the above write up.

cd /etc/vmware/ssl

Then run the following.

mv rui.crt rui.crt.bak mv rui.key rui.key.bak

But I got the following error.

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So we are going to move on.

Next type /sbin/generate-certificates

Then /etc/init.d/hostd restart

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Looks like that worked, lets see!

Log back into the VMware Host via the web interface.

Ta da!

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Make sure to disable SSH, or reboot to do so.

Thanks for reading

Roger L

October 29, 2022 0 comments

Big Data Cloud Datacenter News Storage Virtualization VMware

StorCentric’s Retrospect Adds Anomaly Detection to Ransomware Protection in Retrospect Backup 18.5

by Phil Marsden April 2, 2022

written by Phil Marsden

New Data Protection Solution Strengthens StorCentric’s Data-Centric Security Portfolio

Walnut Creek, Calif.— February 15, 2022 — Retrospect™, a StorCentric company, today announced the general availability (GA) of Retrospect Backup 18.5, featuring new anomaly detection, customizable filtering and thresholds, and enhanced ransomware protection to help businesses quickly detect and protect against malicious attacks. With deeper Microsoft Azure Blob integration for Immutable Backups and integrated cloud bucket creation, Retrospect Backup 18.5’s anomaly detection and ransomware protect bolsters StorCentric’s data-centric security approach to organizations’ critical infrastructure.

Ransomware is a huge global threat to businesses around the world. Beyond the high-profile attacks, including Colonial Pipeline, JBS, Garmin, and Acer, many people now personally know a colleague whose business was attacked. According to Coveware, most corporate targets are small and medium businesses. 72% of targeted businesses have fewer than 1,000 employees, and 37% have fewer than 100. Businesses are projected to have paid out $20B in 2021, a 100% Y-o-Y increase for the last four years, and it’s only going to get worse with new business models like RaaS: ransomware-as-a-service. With Retrospect Backup 18, businesses can protect their infrastructure with immutable backups for ransomware protection.

Beyond protection, organizations need to detect ransomware as early as possible to stop the threat and remediate those resources. Retrospect Backup 18.5 includes anomaly detection to identify changes in an environment that warrants the attention of IT. Administrators can tailor anomaly detection to their business’s specific systems using customizable filtering and thresholds for each of their backup policies, and those anomalies are aggregated on Retrospect Management Console across the entire business’s Retrospect Backup instances or a partner’s client base with a notification area for responding to those anomalies.

“As ransomware continues to grow in prevalence, businesses can leverage Retrospect’s new anomaly detection to quickly identify when ransomware has infected their infrastructure and rely on their immutable backups to restore any lost data,” said JG Heithcock, General Manager, Retrospect, a StorCentric Company. “Anomaly detection is integrated into Retrospect’s policy-based workflow and with our hosted service, Retrospect Management Console, to ensure customers and partners are notified about anomalies as soon as they happen.”

Retrospect Backup 18.5

Included in Retrospect Backup 18.5:

* Anomaly Detection: Detect anomalies in systems based on customizable filters and thresholds tailored to individual environments.
* Retrospect Management Console Integration: View anomalies across a business or partner’s entire client base in a single pane of glass.
* Improved Microsoft Azure Blob Integration: Set individual immutable retention policies for different backup sets within the same Azure Storage Container.
* Streamlined Immutable Backup User Experience: Automatically create cloud buckets with immutable backups supported by default.
* LTO-9 Support: Includes support for LTO-9, with capacities up to 18TB (45TB compressed).

Channel Partner Validation

“Ransomware comes up so frequently now that companies need tools like anomaly detection and immutable backups to detect and defend their core data from threats, and enabling IT admins to adjust the filtering and alert thresholds helps companies tailor the detection algorithm to their needs,” said Reuben Herfindahl, Owner of Digital Brigade.

“Retrospect’s new anomaly detection can help businesses proactively identify threats as soon as their backup runs. With Retrospect’s immutable backups, they know they can restore their backups if ransomware has infiltrated their network,” said Terry Noonan, License My Software LLC.

Pricing and Free 30-Day Trial

Retrospect Backup 18.5 is a free upgrade to Retrospect Backup 18, the award-winning ransomware protection solution. For Retrospect Backup pricing details, please visit: https://www.retrospect.com/store. To request a free 30-day trial, please visit: https://www.retrospect.com/try.

About Retrospect

Protecting 100 Petabytes in over 500,000 homes and businesses in over 100 countries, Retrospect provides reliable backup and recovery tools for professionals and small- to- midsize businesses with Retrospect Backup and Retrospect Virtual, covering physical servers and endpoints, virtual environments, and business applications. With three decades of field- tested expertise, Retrospect meets the needs of organizations that require the highest level of recoverability. Retrospect is a proud member of the StorCentric family of brands. For further information, please visit: www.retrospect.com.

About StorCentric

StorCentric provides world-class and award-winning storage solutions. Between its Drobo, Nexsan, Retrospect and Vexata divisions, the company has shipped over 1M storage solutions and has won over 100 awards for technology innovation and service excellence. StorCentric innovation is centered around customers and their specific data requirements, and delivers quality solutions with unprecedented flexibility, data protection, performance and expandability. For further information, please visit: www.storcentric.com.

April 2, 2022 0 comments

VMware

Workaround Instructions for CVE-2021-21972 and CVE-2021-21973 on VMware vCenter Server (82374)

by Roger Lund March 5, 2021

written by Roger Lund

New VMware KB that I wanted to outline.

“The vCenter Server team has investigated CVE-2021-21972 and CVE-2021-21973 and have determined that the possibility of exploitation can be removed by performing the steps detailed in the Workaround section of this article. This workaround is meant to be a temporary solution until updates documented in VMSA-2021-0002 can be deployed.

Impacted and Fixed vCenter Server Versions:

Version	Impacted Versions	Fixed Version	Release Date	VAMI/Release Notes Build Number	Client/MOB/vpxd.log Build Number
7.0	All versions prior to 7.0 U1c	7.0 U1c (or later)	2020-12-17	17327517 (or later)	17327586 (or later)
6.7 VCSA	All versions prior to 6.7 U3l	6.7 U3l (or later)	2020-11-19	17138064 (or later)	17137327 (or later)
6.7 Windows	All versions prior to 6.7 U3l	6.7 U3l (or later)	2020-11-19	17138064 (or later)	17137232 (or later)

Version	Impacted Version	Fixed Version	Release Date	Build Number
6.5 (VCSA and Windows)	All versions prior to 6.5 U3n	6.5 U3n (or later)	2021-02-23	17590285(or later)

“

More info https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/82374

March 5, 2021 0 comments

Datacenter Software VMware

VMware vRealize Automation bring infrastructure as code

by Philip Sellers June 22, 2020

written by Philip Sellers

In April 2020, VMware released vRealize Automation 8.1 – an incremental upgrade to vRealize Automation 8 – which includes a number of new features. Kubernetes support has been enhanced, Red Hat Openshift support has been introduced, approval policies have been added, support for Powershell in ABX and in vRealize Orchestrator, NSX and networking updates, RBAC enhancements and a slew of other new features.

Let me be honest – calling vRealize Automation 8.0 or 8.1 the same name as the previous product is actually a disservice. This is an entirely new product and way of automating infrastructure for VMware. The new product is modern and itself containerized and modular in the way that VMware built and distributes the software. It introduces modern concepts like code pipelines, continuous delivery and infrastructure as code definitions.

Components

vRealize Automation 8 is made of 3 major components – Cloud Assembly, Code Stream & Service Broker. Also packaged is Orchestrator, which has been closely coupled with the legacy vRA for many years.

Cloud Assembly is the portion of the product used to create blueprints and workflows. This is the section that allows us to create infrastructure as code definitions for templates that can be deployed. Cloud Assembly allows for common definition of deployments through the abstraction of infrastructure. This allows the IaC definitions to be normalized while allowing the specifics to be mapped back for operational purposes. For instance, in AWS or Azure, you have a specific VM image and sizing to be determined. In vSphere, those options are a combination of choices of vCPU, RAM and disk space. Cloud Assembly allows you to setup definitions – t-shirt sizes, if you like – that defines small on vSphere as 2 vCPU, 8GB of RAM, 40Gb of Disk space and maps that to a specific SKU for a matching cloud instance.

Code Stream is a code pipeline allowing for continuous delivery. It is a DevOps tool with integrations to other tools that developers will be using to create software.

Service Broker is the catalog or portal for users to access and request services. This is the primary interface for non-infrastructure users. Governance is also built into Service Broker. In addition to blueprints created in Cloud Assembly, some services can be surfaced directly into Service Broker, like AWS Cloud Formation Templates.

Architecture Diagram

The new vRealize Automation is made up of Kubernetes orchestrated containers.

June 22, 2020 0 comments

VMware

VMware vCenter users are entitled to free 25 OSI licenses of vRealize Log Insight #FreeVMwareStuff

by Philip Sellers December 12, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

Its not news, but I find that a lot of folks still don’t realize that they are entitled to free benefits from VMware, included with their vSphere licenses. In this #FreeVMwareStuff post, I want to focus on vRealize Log Insight.

Anyone who has entitlement to VMware vCenter also gets 25 OSI licenses for vRealize Log Insight. This means you can collect logs from your vCenter and 24 more ESXi hosts. For a lot of users, that may include all of their ESXi host logging to vRealize Log Insight.

NSX users also get their own flavor of Log Insight if you purchased NSX 6.2.4 or better.

What is vRealize Log Insight?

vRealize Log Insight is two things: 1) it is a syslog server and 2) it is a UI and search interface built to help VMware users discover conditions in their vSphere environment. The major advantage is having the search of a consolidated repository of logs. Even if you setup logging on each host, this means you have to go host to host to troubleshoot the logs. Log Insight offers you the advantage of a centralized location for logging.

Because it is centralized, it can also do some basic analysis of the logs and show you how many of a single problem may be occurring and across which hosts. Users will get access to both the raw logs and to the interpreted logs.

The UI is a big benefit in addition to search capabilities – you have filters and ways to look for exactly what may be occurring in an environment.

Free?

Yes, that’s right – its free – to start anyways. vCenter Server users get 25 OSI (Operating System Instance) licenses – meaning you can connect up to 25 operating systems to this vRealize Log Insight server. To move beyond that, additional licensing is needed.

Full licensing also gives you features you want – including clustering and and HA for vRealize Log Insight.

NSX users get vRealize Log Insight for NSX for free for users of 6.2.3 or higher. There is no additional charge for this product and it is included with your NSX licensing – no restrictions.

Getting Started

There is a great post from Altaro that outlines the steps to deploy and create a vRealize Log Insight appliance and get your vSphere linked to it. https://www.altaro.com/vmware/vrealize-log-insight-a-first-look-and-how-to-deploy-it/

This post first appeared on Techazine.com and was reposted here. For more great VMware content, check out Phil’s blog at Techazine.com

December 12, 2018 0 comments