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Storage

What drives HPE Synergy and makes it Composable?

by Philip Sellers May 31, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last week, I posted about HPE’s Synergy Platform – their vision of Composable Infrastructure. My post had a hard slant towards the hardware components of the solution because that is the world that I generally live in. I received some comments about the post and I always appreciate that kind of feedback. I don’t always get it correct when I write and this is less about being right or wrong than not painting the complete picture. And in full disclosure, the two people I was talking with are not HPE employees – both were industry folks at other companies.

So, what did I miss in post one? Primarily, I shortchanged the software component of the solution and one friend pointed out, the hardware alone does not make this a composable or even software-defined solution. So, let’s dig a little deeper into what HPE has laid out during my briefings and see if I can’t paint a fuller picture.

Composable, driven by Software

The software that drives Synergy Platform is two pronged. I covered the Synergy Composer and the Synergy Image Streamer to some degree in the first post. The software is installed as a physical hardware module. Each module has a specific job and a specific application running on it, but they also work together.

As a recap, Composer is the management interface. Composer is able to manage a large pool of Synergy Frames [up to 21] and their connected resources. It is based on HPE OneView – also a management software – but it has been customized and extended for the Synergy Platform. Utilizing OneView as the base for the system gives Synergy an API to build upon.

HPE-Synergy

OneView is a strong management system built around server profiles. In OneView, you create a definition – a server profile – that includes all of the settings that get instantiated on the hardware. This metadata can include server settings down the BIOS, the network definitions, the storage definition, and firmware/driver levels. Profiles can be cloned and as of OneView 2.0, the idea of profile templates was added. Templates allow you to set definitions and then clone out individual profiles with different IP and names, but they retain the tie to the template. With templates, you may change a setting, like the networking configuration or firmware level, and then push out that change across all the profiles created from it. During the next reboot, these settings are applied. This is great for firmware and driver patching or for adding a new network uplink to a cluster of ESXi hosts, for example. All of these features are great for IT operations working with traditional IT infrastructure.

Synergy Platform, however, has goals beyond easing management of traditional IT. It is targeted at new-style IT or cloud-centric IT. So, building upon the base of server profiles, Synergy Composer takes the server profiles and adds some additional personality – and VMware administrators may see a lot of similarities between what Composer does and how Virtual Appliances work in vSphere. You can set IP and naming conventions for deploying systems in mass with Synergy – so Composer has to adopt these functions into its toolset – but it also adopts the ability to pass that configuration to the booting OS. So, what’s I’m rambling and trying to explain is that Synergy Composer encompasses the OS personality, in addition to the hardware personality. When I think of the OS personality – it is the ‘what makes each node different’ versus the hardware personality as the ‘what makes them the same.’

API & a different audience

One of HPE’s major goals with Synergy Platform was to expose everything available in the GUI management interface as an API, also. And beyond that, they wanted it to be as simple as possible to create and deploy an instance of compute. HPE’s focus here – I’ll admit – almost seems obsessive to allow compute to be created or torn down with a single line of code. Another major goal was to allow developers to call and create compute instances in their own language – in code – where they feel most comfortable. It is an appeal to a very different audience than the IT operations staff that HPE is normally catering to with their hardware solutions.

All of that said, the API makes it possible for forward-thinking administrators to automate and extend their processes into other systems. The API makes it possible to tie and automate server creation into the ticketing system, regardless of which vendor created the ticketing. It makes it possible to include these processes into scripted processes in enterprise batch solutions or anywhere else. It opens up an endless set of possibilities.

Streaming the OS

The OS personality is handled in conjunction with the Image Streamer. The streamer holds the golden master images of the OS that will run on the server profiles when they are deployed to compute nodes and powered on. The Image Streamer takes an OS image, presents it over iSCSI to the host, and then boots the system. While Image Streamer could do this for traditional OSes, it is not targeted there. The Image Streamer is intended to be used with stateless OS deployments – like ESXi hosts or container hosts. This means that the boot process needs to include a scripted process to fully configure the host. The settings for each instance is provided from Composer and the individual profile. vSphere offers very similar stateless ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy. The difference here is that you’re using iSCSI to boot instead of PXE.

Cattle versus Pets

Very similar to how you view applications deployed on Docker, to realize the maximum benefit of Synergy, your compute nodes should be viewed as cattle and not as pets. For anyone not familiar with this analogy, here’s how it goes. In traditional IT, you view your servers as pets – your cat or dog. You know your pet by name and when they get sick, you take them to vet and you’ve have surgery to get them well again. But, if you were a cattle farmer with thousands of cows, you treat each cow differently. You don’t name them, though they might be assigned a number for tracking. And while you might give them medicine, you wouldn’t carry it to vet and give it surgery to make it well again. You’d likely shoot a sick cow and move on. Harsh, I know, but that’s reality.

The same thing is true when you change from traditional virtual machines to containers. With our traditional virtual machines, each one may start as a template, but once it is deployed, it deviates from that template and there is no relationship to it. If you need patches, you install the same update on each VM. On the other hand, containers have a limited lifetime. They exist to do a single thing. If it gets sick, you kill the process and restart new. If you need an upgrade, you don’t do those update steps against 1000 containers. You restart them from a new master image with the updates integrated once.

OS in the Synergy Platform will adopt the cattle mentality to realize the maximum benefit of the platform. The combination of the Composer and Image Streamer will allow IT departments to use the same mentality and benefits of scale that exist with containers at the physical hardware level with the container hosts, virtual hosts and with individual OS deployments.

Composer and Image Streamer gives IT the necessary workflow tools to achieve the vision of becoming a cattle farmer in the IT operations.

Traditional IT, too

Even though the vision and maximum benefit of Synergy Platform requires a change in how you view and operate your IT hardware, everyone in the industry realizes that all traditional IT is not going away anytime soon. The trick is finding a flexible solution that can provide you infrastructure for both traditional IT and cloud-centric IT. According to HPE, Synergy Platform can do this for IT.

Even though a lot of what makes Synergy different and composable is the Synergy Composer and Synergy Image Streamer, these two components can continue to run traditional IT systems side-by-side with the new-style IT.

Companies that adopt Synergy Platform will need to be somewhere down the transformation pathway for the solution to make sense. If a company is still engrained in traditional IT systems and operation, Synergy makes no sense to them. This solution is targeted and most beneficial to companies that are attempting to run both traditional IT and build new, cloud scale applications at the same time. Cloud scale is about agility and the time required to react to business needs. It is also about handling demands of a very uncertain or dynamic workload. It is about decoupling the applications into smaller and more-manageable pieces. For IT operations, managing both of these is a challenge. Managing both of these types of infrastructure in a single solution is compelling.

Final thoughts

Does Synergy Platform solve all of the management headaches of deploying traditional and cloud-scale? No. There are management headaches above the physical layer, but having a consistent platform for both at the physical level could be beneficial. All IT shops are faced with resource constraints the the more standardization, the better.

When moving to cloud-scale, one of the first conversations has to be ‘where do we have the most similarity and mass that it makes sense to invest in the workflow and automation that makes cloud-scale work?’ It makes sense to standardize and try to maximize the benefits. It is a large portion of the cloud-scale appeal and benefit.

Next week, I head to HPE Discover in Las Vegas. I fully expect to hear more about Synergy Platform and where it is in the release-to-market timeline. As an aside, I have not seen the interface and software actually running Synergy Platform. I saw some early concepts back in December at HPE Discover in London, but I really have not spent any time hands-on with the software. This is one reason I subconsciously avoided talking detail about it in the first post. I post what I know and what I’ve observed – not simply what I’m told by marketing folks [no offense to them]. I would really love that opportunity next week.

May 31, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

What is Composable Infrastructure and where is it targeted?

by Philip Sellers May 24, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last month, just before the flooding, I was onsite at HPE in Houston, TX, for a Tech Day focused on the HPE Hyper Converged and Composable Infrastructure portfolio. I have since had a chance to reflect on everything I had learned about HPE’s Composable strategy – and the larger industry direction of containers and orchestration are it is all taking us. There are potential benefits and lots of hurdles in both of these major initiatives in the industry. The reason behind these concepts and solutions is delivering faster results and flexibility for IT organizations. And while at the Tech Day, I was able to get dig in again and refresh what I’d heard and learn more detail around HPE’s Composable strategy.

What is Composable Infrastructure?

I’ve had the opportunity to drill into HPE’s and the broader industry definition of Composable Infrastructure a couple times in the past year. HPE released Synergy Platform last December at HP Discover in London. This was the first purpose-built hardware platform for composability, but the people I talked with in HP warned me that it would not the only platform.

Composability is the concept of being able to take standard compute, storage and networking hardware and assemble them in a particular way using orchestration to meet a specific use case. When your use case is completed, you can decompose and recompose the same components in a different way to meet new needs. Beyond that point, it also includes the concept of being able to do this with hardware on demand as your usage and requirements change throughout the day. For peak work loads, you may need to compose infrastructure to run a billing cycle and then decompose and recompose the same to be web front-end servers for E-Commerce during a peak usage – like Black Friday. The key here is orchestration and with the orchestration, speed.

In many ways, Composable Infrastructure provides a pool of resources similar to how virtualization provides access to a pool of resources that can be consumed in multiple ways. The critical difference is that these are physical resources being sliced and diced without a hypervisor layer providing the pooling.

Characteristics of Composable Infrastructure

HPE has a strict definition they are following for Composable Infrastructure. If any of these characteristics are missing, they will not classify a solution as Composable, no matter how close it may resemble it.

Unified API
- Single line of code to abstract every element of the infrastructure for full infrastructure programmability
- Bare-metal interface of infrastructure as a service
Software-Defined Intelligence
- Template driven workload composition
- Automation to enable streamlined operation of the system (HPE calls it frictionless operation)
Fluid Resource Pools
- Single infrastructure of disaggregated pools
- Physical, virtual and containers
- Auto-integrating of resource capacity

The API is straight forward, along with the ability to use templates to define and automate system builds. Fluid resource pools also makes sense if you’ve spent any time with a virtualization technology. The point that didn’t immediately make sense is the ‘frictionless operations.’

In terms of frictionless operations, what HPE is talking about today is automation and workflow tools within the management interface to streamline the upgrade processes required on the system. Those may include upgrades in the OS images and it may include firmware and driver bundles along with the management interface rollups.

Self-Healing Infrastructure

Now, take this concept & definition a step forward and layer on monitoring and mitigation software. What becomes possible is a self-healing infrastructure, reacting to events and remediating them on its own. Self-healing is a compelling concept, but so far attempts have been far from exceptional and its really tough to achieve. There is an huge amount of work required in standardization and orchestration that just don’t fit with traditional IT software and OS concepts. Where I say traditional, HPE is using the word legacy or old-style. They’re talking client-server applications – the commercial, off-the-shelf software so many Enterprises are running today.

But looking into the future, HPE can see that self-healing can be realized with cloud-native, scale-out software solutions. And it is betting that if it can build a physical infrastructure capable of programmatically assembling and disassembling systems on-demand, that is can power this self-healing future.

HPE Synergy Platform

HPE Synergy Platform is the hardware HPE believes will power the future of on-premises, cloud-native IT along with the flexibility to host legacy applications in the same pool of resources.

While examining Synergy Platform at Discover, I first noticed that the hardware platform looks very similar to a HPE BladeSystem chassis. It is different in the number of compute nodes and the dimensions of those compute nodes and the networking. But physically, it looks very much like a BladeSystem. What occurs quickly to you is that you have new capabilities like adding a disk shelf that spans two compute bays and provides a pool of disk that can be shared throughout a Synergy Frame (not called chassis anymore).

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Storage-Module-and-480-660-620-and-680-Compute-Modules_low

Compute

Blades become compute nodes, but the concept is much the same. The form factor does not change much – you have half-height and full-height options for compute nodes in Synergy. The dimensions are larger to accommodate a fuller range of hardware inside of the compute node. Starting with a half-height blade, HPE is offering the Synergy 480 Compute Node. It is a similarly equipped Gen9 server to meet similar use cases as the BL460c.

Another change in Synergy, the slots for compute nodes no longer restrict you to a single unit – there is no metal separation between the compute bays. You can do double width units in Synergy, in addition to full-height. HPE is making use of that with a double width and full height Synergy 680 Compute Node. The 680 is an impressive blade with up to 6TB of RAM across 96 DIMM slots and quad sockets. It is a beast of a blade. Other full-height option are the Synergy 620 and 660 Compute Nodes.

Composer & Image Streamer

Orchestration is really what sets Synergy Platform apart from the c7000 blade frames from HP. The orchestration is achieved by modules on the Synergy Platform management modules.

First, the Synergy Composer is the brains and management of the operation and it is built on HPE OneView. From an architecture stand-point, a single Composer module can manage up to 21 interlinked frames. Each frame a two 10Gig management connections – on a Frame Link Module – that can be link frames together. Each frame connects upstream to a frame and downstream to another and this forms a management ring. Using this management network, the Synergy Composer is able to manage all 21 frames of infrastructure. Although each frame has a slot for a Composer management module, only one is required and a second can be added in a different frame to establish high-availability.

Synergy Image Streamer is all about the boot images. You take a golden image, you create a clone-like copy (similar to VMware’s linked clones) and you boot it, when the image is rebooted, nothing is retained. Everything about the image must be sequenced and configured during boot. Stateless operation is very much a cloud-native concept – requiring the additional services to be deployed in the environment – like centralized logging – to enable the long-term storage of data from the workloads. Composer also takes into account updates and patching by allowing the administrator to commit these to the golden master and then kick off a set of rolling reboots to bring all the running images up to date. Just like Composer, the Image Streamer also only needs a single module or two for redundancy in two different frames.

Management in Synergy is made to scale and eliminate the need for onboard management modules and a separate software outside of the hardware to manage many units.

OS Support for Streaming and Traditional OS Support

At launch, Synergy’s Image Streamer supports Linux, ESXi and Container OSes with the full benefit of image, config and run. The images are stateless, meaning nothing is retained when the system reboots. Windows was not supported with the Image Streamer as of December. The Synergy and composable concept is clearly targeted at bare-metal deployments of cloud-native systems.

Now, even though you can’t use the Image Streamer to run Windows or stateful Linux on Synergy, it doesn’t mean they wont’ run. It is still possible to create a boot disk and provision it to a compute node (boot-from-san, boot from USB or SD, etc.). For compatibility, you can use Synergy compute note like a traditional rack-mount or blade server. Of course, when you do, you lose all of the potential benefits of the platform from its imaging and automation engines.

The Fabric

The Synergy Fabric the other huge differentiating factor with Synergy Platform. A single frame is probably not what you’ll see deployed anywhere. Synergy is built to scale up within the rack – with up to 5 frames interconnected to the same converged fabric that provides Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI across all of the frames. Synergy uses a parent/child module to extend the managed fabric across multiple frames. A parent module is inserted in one frame and child modules in up to 4 additional frames. Similar to Composer and Image Streamer modules, the interconnect modules on Synergy uses a pair of parent modules in different frames to achieve high availability. Management of the interconnect modules and fabric is a single interface and utilizes MLAG connections between the modules to communicate management changes.

Shared Local Disk

StoreVirtual is a primary use case with Synergy Platform and HPE expect many users will choose their VSA to do software defined storage in Synergy. But it is hard to get enough disks to matter in the blade form factor. To allow for this, HPE is also showing off a new disk shelf that can fit into two compute bays on a frame. The HPE Synergy D3940 disk shelf can hold up to 40 small form factor disks that can be carved out and consumed by any of the compute nodes in the frame. One important limitation here, however, is that the local disks are only accessible inside of a single frame. The SAS module used for these disks is in a separate bay and is separate from the fabric. So all the disks need to be presented to compute within the frame.

However, StoreVirtual to the rescue. Either bare metal StoreVirtual or more likely as a VSA, the StoreVirtual can take those local disks and present them in a way that they can be consumed or clustered with compute in other frames. All 40 disks may be presented to a single StoreVirtual instance and then clustered with 2 additional StoreVirtual instances in other frames – and then the fabric can consume the storage from StoreVirtual. The great thing is you have choice as a consumer to instantiate and then recompose these resources as needed on Synergy.

Who benefits from these characteristics?

It is critically important to note that you can run traditional workloads side-by-side with cloud-native workloads. While cloud-native benefit more from the Image Streamer and account for stateless OS operation, traditional IT workloads can be run on the same hardware. From the Composer, you can assemble a traditional server, with boot from SAN or boot from local disk in the compute node and run a client-server application. This flexibility is important as organizations attempt to build the new style apps but need to support existing applications. It means that a single hardware platform will be able to deliver both. Unfortunately, organizations that choose to run legacy systems on Synergy won’t be able to fully realize all the benefits Synergy Platform has to offer since most do not apply to these legacy workloads, but having the flexibility is key.

From my viewpoint, no company is going to buy into Synergy simply to run legacy applications on it. The real benefits are for companies that are planning or in the middle of application transition. For companies who have not begun the transition process, Synergy and Composable Infrastructure is going to be a tough sell – because they’re not thinking in ways where the benefits Synergy delivers matter.

May 24, 2016 1 comment

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Nutanix Announces New Release with 4x Performance Improvement

by Shawn Cannon February 22, 2016

written by Shawn Cannon

The Nutanix web-scale computing platform is getting an upgrade! A new release was announced on February 16 that promises 4x performance improvement for any workload without additional hardware or software license. Some snippets from the press release are below:

SAN JOSE, Calif. – February 16, 2016 – Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company, today announced a new release of its web-scale computing platform that delivers up to 4x performance improvement for any workload with no additional hardware or software license, freedom to choose hypervisors without lock-in, and built-in machine learning capabilities that increase operational efficiency. Nutanix solutions for building and operating enterprise clouds uniquely deliver the agility, pay-as-you-grow consumption, and operational simplicity of the public cloud without sacrificing the predictability, security, and control of on-premises infrastructure.

To support the increasing demands of modern businesses, an enterprise cloud platform must include a web-scale infrastructure fabric that delivers resiliency, availability, predictable performance across a wide range of enterprise applications. In addition, it should incorporate seamless application and data mobility, invisible operations with one-click simplicity through built-in machine intelligence, extensive automation and rich analytics, and a security-first design. The 4.6 release of the Nutanix software extends the company’s technology leadership and provides a platform that furthers its mission to deliver invisible infrastructure to elevate IT.

Delivering Continuous Value with 4x Better Price/Performance
Enterprise clouds must offer versatile performance for traditional and next-generation enterprise applications, delivering value back to businesses through continuous innovation. Acropolis 4.6 includes more than 25 powerful software enhancements that increase system performance by up to 4x compared to earlier versions. Current customers can get these benefits through a simple software upgrade at no additional expense. These enhancements increase performance across the full portfolio of Nutanix appliances, including the recently updated NX-9000 all-flash model. Customers benefit from:

Better performance across a wide range of enterprise application workloads, e.g., powering up to 30,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes in just 8U of rack space, as validated through the Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP)

Delivering the industry’s fastest storage I/O performance across hyperconverged all flash solutions with over 1 million storage IOPS in just 4U of datacenter space.

Up to 4x price/performance gains on existing investments to deliver as low as $0.35/IOPS, better than top-selling all-flash arrays which also suffer from complex management and additional networking requirements.

As with public clouds such as AWS, wherein cost reductions achieved due to innovation and scale are passed back to the customer on an ongoing basis, customers deploying enterprise clouds powered by Nutanix also benefit from ongoing price/performance improvements on their existing investments without additional costs.

Removing Hypervisor Lock-In To Enable Infrastructure Choice for Traditional and Next Generation Apps
Public cloud services provide a single runtime environment, which while suited to some applications is a poor fit for others. In the new era of enterprise clouds, flexibility and choice are fundamental tenets, allowing businesses to run traditional enterprise applications such as databases and VDI as well as next-generation big data and DevOps applications uniformly and consistently on the best runtime environment for each application. This release extends the ambitious Acropolis App Mobility Fabric (AMF) with critical software updates that give IT teams the freedom to pick the right virtualization environment for their applications, and the flexibility to switch easily in order to reduce costs or simplify operations. New features include:

1-click Hypervisor Conversion – Switch the hypervisor running on a Nutanix system from VMware vSphere to the built-in Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) in a completely automatic operation that can be completed in minutes with minimal disruption and risk.

Cross-hypervisor DR and Backup – Rapidly recover from a site failure by failing over VMs from one site to another location running a completely different hypervisor. Perform automatic backups of VM-level data from one Nutanix system to another running a different hypervisor. IT professionals can choose the best hypervisor for each environment to minimize virtualization license costs.

Making Datacenter Operations Invisible With Built-in Machine Intelligence
Enterprise clouds require machine intelligence and automation to simplify complex operations from many clicks to a single click, and eventually from a single click to zero-touch management. New in this release is Prism Pro, a datacenter automation solution with a unique search-first interface and customizable dashboards that bring unmatched simplicity to a diverse set of IT operations.

Prism Pro features the new X-Fit™ technology with foundational machine intelligence built into the platform, delivering streamlined operations for every workload. With X-Fit™, the platform now includes self-learning capabilities that continuously improve prediction accuracy and the quality of automated decisions over time. Prism Pro leverages X-Fit to power automation and intelligence across a variety of operations, such as smart capacity management. This technology pits multiple predictive algorithms against one another, picking the best fit and making actionable recommendations to eliminate over-provisioning without increasing risk to application performance.

A link to the press release can be found here.

February 22, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter Storage vSphere

Install VMware tools on Centos 7

by Roger Lund February 19, 2016

written by Roger Lund

I was standing up some Centos 7 boxes in VMware vSphere. And I figured I would blog on the steps to install VMware Tools.

The below Steps are taken from http://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/CentOS_7.html

“CentOS 7 documentation covers information on how to install the operating system in a virtual machine. For additional information about the operating system, refer to the instructions included in the installation media.

CentOS 7 documentation includes the following topics:

VMware Compatibility Guide

Installation Instructions

To install CentOS 7 in a virtual machine you can use either the standard CentOS distribution CD or the boot floppy/network method. The following installation instructions are for standard distribution CD.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, verify that the following tasks are complete:

Read General Installation Instructions for All VMware Products.
When creating the virtual machine, do not attempt to use BusLogic SCSI adapter. CentOS 7 does not include a driver for the adapter.

Installation Steps

Insert the CentOS 7 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive.
Power on the virtual machine to start installing CentOS 7.
Follow the prompts to complete the installation.

Set the storage location for installation. In the INSTALLATION SUMMARY screen, in the STORAGE session area, select INSTALLATION DESTINATION.
Change the Base Environment and select Add-Ons to install. In the INSTALLATION SUMMARY screen, in the SOFTWARE session area, click SOFTWARE SELECTION.CentOS 7 includes Open VMware Tools. The default Base Environment is Minimal install, which only has basic functionality.
- For Minimal install and Virtualization Host environments, Open VMware Tools is not available during installation.
  After CentOS 7 installation, to install Open VMware Tools, using root privileges, run the command:
  # yum install open-vm-tools
- For other types of Base Environments, to install Open VMware Tools, select the Guest Agents Add-On.
- If this Add-On is not listed, the Base Environment already includes Open VMware Tools and installs it by default.
Click Done.

Click Begin Installation to continue.
Set root password and create new users, as needed, in the CONFIGURATION screen.

VMware Tools in an CentOS 7 Guest

Use the guest OS provided Open VM Tools or install VMware Tools, as needed.

Open VM Tools

Open VM Tools is the open source implementation of VMware Tools and consist of a suite of virtualization utilities that improves the functionality, administration, and management of virtual machines on VMware hypervisors. VMware recommends using the Open VM Tools redistributed by the operating system vendors. To use Open VM Tools:

Add the vmhgfs Driver
If you use the file sharing feature by using Shared Folders in VMware Workstation and Fusion, install the vmhgfs driver in the virtual machine. This driver is not included inbox in the operating system. Installing the additional vmhgfs driver does not disturb the other inbox VMware drivers or Open VMware Tools. To install this driver:
1. Install Open VMware Tools.
2. Install the traditional TAR Format VMware Tools that is bundled with VMware Workstation or Fusion products.
Add the deployPkg Tools Plug-in
If you are using the virtual machine as a template or if it will be protected by SRM (Site Recovery Manager), then install the deployPkg Tools plug-in. To install this plug-in:
1. Create a file, /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo, with the following content:
  [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="yes" overflow="visible"][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="no" center_content="no" min_height="none"][vmware-tools]
  name = VMware Tools
  baseurl = http://packages.vmware.com/packages/rhel7/x86_64/
  enabled = 1
  gpgcheck = 1
2. Install the package:
  $ sudo yum install open-vm-tools-deploypkg
  See knowledge base article 2075048, Installing the deployPkg plug-in in a Linux virtual machine, at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2075048.

For additional information, see:

Knowledge base article 2073803, VMware support of open-vm-tools, athttp://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803.
Knowledge base article 2073804, VMware support for Linux inbox VMware drivers, athttp://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073804.

VMware Tools

For additional information on VMware Tools, see knowledge base article 1014294, General VMware Tools installation instructions, at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014294.

Knowledge Base Articles for CentOS 7

The following link refers to knowledge base articles on operating system specific issues. See VMware Knowledge Base for a list of known issues about the operating system.

VMware Compatibility Guide

The VMware Compatibility Guide Web site lists supported guest and host operating systems and provides related support information.”

Here we go.

[email protected]’s password. I entered the password.
# yum install open-vm-tools -y

Then I wanted to update Centos as well.

yum update -y
shutdown -r -t now

Now lets look at the VM in the vSphere client.

Now we have Running VMware Tools!

Roger L[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

February 19, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter News Storage

Atlantis Computing Expands HyperScale Lineup

by Michael Davis January 16, 2016

written by Michael Davis

Atlantis Computing has expanded their hyperconverged lineup with the HyperScale CX-4; a new offering targeting both ROBO deployments and smaller SMB customers. The two node CX-4 features 4TB (usable capacity) of all flash storage, 10GbE networking, 48 CPU cores, and up to 1.5TB of RAM in a tidy 2U package starting at $43,000 with three years of 24/7 support (4 hour parts replacement). This price point places it among the lowest cost hyperconverged appliances on the market with Chetan Venkatesh, Atlantis CEO, calling it a game changer for ROBO customers.

To make deployment easier and faster if a customer provides the IPs Atlantis will ship units with all the networking pre-configured along with connection details for the Atlantis Manager virtual appliance whether running centrally or on the ROBO appliance. Additionally the check boxes of inclusive data protection, high availability and disaster recovery are all ticked.

The expanded HyperScale lineup now includes the CX-4, CX-12, and CX-24 which are available on Dell’s FX2 modular server platform. This marks the first time Dell’s FX2 platform has been used for a hyperconverged appliance and allows for 10GbE networking between nodes without a separate 10GbE switch. Dell based CX series appliances are available through Dell distributors and channel partners in the US, Europe and Middle East. Fans of Lenovo, Cisco, SuperMicro, and HP will be pleased to see the entire lineup available from those manufacturers as well.

For more details and to configure your own, head over to Atlantis Computing.

January 16, 2016 0 comments

Cloud Datacenter Storage Trends

Data proximity is driving analytics to the cloud

by Philip Sellers January 13, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

shutterstock_149459630 Unique, new types of datasets are forcing companies to investigate cloud-powered analytics to tap into data that can steer a company’s direction and its decision making. These datasets have challenging characteristics that require moving the analytics platform and not the data that should be mined.

A few months ago, I was part of a briefing from Teradata, one of the largest data warehouse and analytics software vendors in the world. Teradata announced that they would be bringing their analytics platform to Amazon Web Services and offering their data platform on a utility based consumption model. But it wasn’t the announcement as much as the reason that I found really interesting on the call. According to Teradata, data proximity is one of the key driving factors to move analytics onto cloud platforms like Amazon’s.

Big Data has been an industry buzzword for several years, now. Working for a medium business, its occurred to me that big data and big data problems just were outside of my area of concern. We don’t have that much data, I thought, but I have realized I was wrong. You don’t have to be a big business to have big data problems and benefit from the analysis of big data sets. The rate at which data is being generated has exploded in the last couple years and it will continue to explode in years to come because of new innovation.

New datasets

First, there are massive amounts of data being generated online through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. This data has the potential to provide insights into customer perception and concerns for any brand and company, if they can tap into the data and make sense of it.

Sensor data is another major area of concern. Enterprise has long had appliances with sensors that report back environmental conditions in data centers. Hardware vendors have built sensors into their servers and racks to report back hot-spots and cold-spots and look at optimal power usage and optimize operational costs. But the truth is that Internet of Things is bringing a massive expansion of sensor data. Everything from your toaster to light bulbs have sensors and data that can be tapped for different uses. Depending on the business and use cases, there are massive datasets created by these devices that may have use cases for the enterprise.

As another example, municipalities are increasingly deploying cameras throughout their territory to watch for accidents and gain visibility when crimes occur. Video takes an immense amount of storage and event more than just storing the data, making sense of that data once it is acquired is more than a human and manually perform. This requires an automated software method to analyze and make sense of the video data being transmitted.

A common trait

All three of these examples share one common trait. The data generated exists outside of the corporate firewall – the usual place where analytics platforms are run – and sometimes outside of the control of the enterprise – as is the case with Internet sites and sensor data from products sold to customers. This presents the idea of data proximity and locating the analytics platform closer to the data it should mine.

Data proximity is an interesting concept. Cloud services – like Twitter, Facebook and other social services – have created a ton of new data but it is not necessarily data that needs to be transported and stored within the confines of the corporate firewall. Datasets like video are far too large to be transported once they are at rest and this may also be a driving factor for locating the analytics closer to the dataset.

Teradata’s solution

The Teradata Database on AWS is the solution announced in October. Running on the Amazon Web Services, it offers customers a pay-as-you-go consumption model with self-provisioning services and scale up capabilities. It joins Teradata’s existing Teradata Cloud offering that is a dedicated analytics platform hosted by Teradata in its datacenters. While the Teradata Cloud is targeted at high-performance analytics, the Teradata Database on AWS is targeted at middle ground customers who need a reliable, production analytics platform with the economies of scale and pricing of utility cloud computing.

In addition to allowing the software to run on AWS, Teradata also announced optional advisory services to assist customers with the setup and configuration in AWS. The white-glove configuration allows customers a well-supported environment configured by professional with years of experience, rather than a do-it-yourself approach to getting your own analytics running in the cloud.

teredata1

Teradata Database on AWS intends allow companies of all sizes to run a powerful analytics platform, locating it closer to the datasets it needs to investigate while enabling adoption with a more approachable cost.

January 13, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Is the StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central native data protection better than ISV methods?

by Philip Sellers December 10, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Almost a year ago, I was introduced to a new backup technology that worked natively between 3PAR and StoreOnce. HP called it Express Protect and Flat Backup and targeted VMware environments with the technology. I must have missed the fact that when it was shown off it was branded as StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central. VMware backups are a large percentage of our overall enviroment and so its a particular pain point, so I was very interested to see if this could solve some of the pain.

What is StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central?

The StoreOnce RMC story begins within the 3PAR software line with the 3PAR Recovery Manager software. This was optional software that allowed application aware snapshots on 3PAR arrays for data protection. These snapshots were a way to do application consistent protection and rollback with the the storage array. StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central is an extension of this technology that takes the same application consistent 3PAR snapshots and ships those over to the StoreOnce data protection arrays. Now, in true StoreOnce style, the snapshots on 3PAR are tracked and deduplicated and only changes are ever sent over to the StoreOnce array, making for efficient and fast backups.

While 3PAR Recovery Manager has specific version for many different products including VMware, Oracle, Microsoft SQL and other products, StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central is strictly for VMware at this time.

How does it work?

According to HP staff I spoke with, StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central a typical backup with StoreOnce RMC would look like this:

The StoreOnce RMC uses the vCenter API to snapshot all of the VM’s on a particular 3PAR Virtual Volume.
Once snapshots complete, the 3PAR takes an array snapshot of the VMFS datastore.
Another call is made to the VMware API and the VM-level snapshots are removed. You no longer need them because you have snapshot at the array level.

If this is the first backup, then all of the data is shipped over to the StoreOnce and deduplicated as it arrives.
If this not the first backup, only the changed blocks from the snapshot are then shipped to the StoreOnce backup device directly from the 3PAR.

What are the advantages of this versus ISV software?

It is much more efficient than backups with ISV software for a combination of reasons. The first is the change tracking between the StoreOnce and 3PAR to know what blocks were altered and need to be moved to the StoreOnce. The second is the nature of the StoreOnce deduplication, which is purpose built for deduplicating and rehydrating data for backup applications. The third is it is over native storage protocols without a separate piece of software in between – the actions happen directly between the 3PAR array and the StoreOnce array.

A second advantage is that the control of backups moves from a backup administrator to the application owners – like the VMware administrator and appears in their native management tools. The current StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware puts a plugin into the VMware Web Client that allows the VMware administrator to setup, scheduled, control and monitor their own backups in a view they are very familiar with.

But what about tape? And what about my existing backups?

Ok, you’ve got me there. If you have compliance or policies that dictate you need tape or archival copies of data, you’ll need your ISV software to handle that. But HP is also thinking of those use cases and as long as your ISV software supports a single API, they will be able to pickup and handle data stored by StoreOnce RMC from any of its supported primary storage arrays and move it to tape. But that’s all future and its up to the individual ISV to add support for this capability. At this time, even HP’s own Data Protector doesn’t offer this.

HP’s vision is to take a single control appliance and make it work across their line of storage platforms and may also extend to third parties in the future. Here’s a HP ChalkTalk that explains more about StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central and about the vision moving forward. Its fairly clear, other applications beyond VMware are slated for support in the future.

December 10, 2015 2 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

HPE introduces Synergy, a hardware platform for composable infrastructure

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced its first major new platform last week during HPE Discover in London. The new platform is named Synergy and is based around the idea of composable infrastucture – hardware that can be programatically composed into the desired form for a specific use case. The Synergy platform follows up on the Project Synergy concept HP introduced during the June Discover event in Las Vegas. While HPE has been working with third-parties to get support for its API for composable infrastructure, it was also creating the new generation of hardware needed to power the concept.

HPE staff says that Synergy is a completely new hardware platform built to enable the composable concept. In many ways, the Synergy platform looks like a next-generation C7000 blade chassis. There are quick, noticeable differences.

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Pulled-out_low

HPE Synergy 12000 Frame with 12 compute nodes and the Synergy Composer module pulled out

Synergy trims down the number of compute slots from 16 to 12. When asked why – HPE execs told me that the goal of the Synergy platform was to power compute for the next 10 years and that meant flexibility not density as a primary concern. Some peer bloggers scoffed at the 10 year future for the platform, but as an HP customer, that is the lifetime I have received from my existing C7000 BladeSystems as a platform, which are approaching a 10 year anniversary.

With the Synergy platform, there are some terminology changes. HPE engineers told me that they are moving away from the term blade and refer to the servers as compute nodes. The interconnects become the fabric in the Synergy platform. And lastly, the core chassis that everything plugs into is known as a frame.

In an attempt to future-proof the new platform, HPE created a mid-plane in the frame that is photonics capable – meaning, when photonics come to market, there are pathways to utilize them in this chassis. The midplane has also been simplified, according to HPE engineers and there is a bit more breathing room mean for cooling around the servers. Utilizing the additional space, the new compute nodes will have the same number of DIMM slots as their rackmount counterparts, allowing them to stack as much RAM and removing any downside to the converged platform.

Solving issues of scale

While the physical hardware largely resembles the C7000 BladeSystem chassis, HPE set out to solve several of the problems that exist with the C7000 when trying to create a composable infrastructure platform.

First, Synergy embraces HPE OneView as the management platform, removing the onboard administrator management. OneView lives within the Synergy Composer, a management appliance that exists in one of the two appliance bays located on the left side of each of the Synergy platform frame.

Second, Synergy scales better using OneView by allowing a single Synergy Composer to manage up to 20 frames. The Frame Link Module is built to connect frames over greater distances over normal twisted pair, copper cables (CAT5, CAT6, etc.). For redundancy, another Synergy Composer can be placed into an appliance bay in a different frame and the pair mirror one another with failover capabilities.

Solving issues of the OS

Third, Synergy introduces an all-new Synergy Image Streamer – another type of appliance module that sits in an appliance bay – allows for all the boot images required for systems to be stored centrally and managed. The idea behind Image Streamer is to bring many of the same benefits of virtualization to a physical world. Images are stored in the streamer and combined into a Server Profile which includes all of the BIOS settings, WWN and MAC address settings and . The bootable image is presented to the compute node over iSCSI to allow for boot. The complexity of the iSCSI configuration is masked away from the user and handled by Synergy Composer. A second Image Streamer can also be added to another frame for redundancy and the two mirror one another.

The Image Streamer squarely targets OS models without persistent data. Currently, Linux, VMware ESXi and Docker are currently supported OS models with Image Streamer. The boot image is stored as a Golden Master in the Image Streamer and this golden image is forked and combined with a ‘personality’ containing the IP address, hostname and other settings that are applied against the image at boot. The personality can include necessary steps to configure the OS, such as esxcli commands to perform configuration after boot. It is worth noting that Windows is not currently on the list of supported OSes. To patch your OS, you boot the golden image, integrate your changes and then recommit the golden image. At this point, you are able to recompose all of your assigned compute nodes, reboot them and you’re instantly patched. If a patch causes an issue, you are able to roll back to previous state just as easily with a reboot.

Using the Image Streamer doesn’t prevent users from running traditional workloads – like local booting or boot from SAN Windows cluster nodes with SAN storage. Traditional servers can be configured and setup next to Image Streamer profiles. HPE engineers see the Image Streamer as the ultimate flexiblity

Improving connectivity

Another major change is around the fabric and connectivity of the Synergy platform. Since the storage and network have converged even in the C7000 years using FlexFabric modules, Synergy continues this converged theme by utilizing the same Virtual Connect technology of the C7000 and extending it so that a single controlling Virtual Connect module in a one frame can be physically connected to child fabric modules in additional frames. The single Virtual Connect allows for centralized control of Virtual Connect over multiple chassis – or frames. The modules can be daisy chained to simplify management and mobility between compute nodes. The benefit is flexibility to reassign the same server profile to a compute note in a wider range of chassis. The C7000 would almost certainly limit you to blades in the same chassis as reassignment options – due to boundaries of the WWN and MAC ranges.

HPE-Synergy-with-Storage-Module-pulled-out_low

In addition to Virtual Connect, there is also a 12Gb SAS storage module that allows connectivity to Synergy D3940 Storage Modules located in the frame, like the one pulled out in the picture above. The new storage module can be equipped with up to 40 small form factor drives that can be grouped and presented to the compute nodes in the same frame. This would allow disks to be attached and presented as local storage or served up as a StoreVirtual VSA within an ESXi host.

Ship date & pricing

Synergy platform is expected to go on sale at the end of first quarter in 2016 and ship to customers during second quarter of 2016. Pricing has not been announced.

For deployments utilizing the Image Streamer with full redundancy, a minimum of three frames will be required, according to HPE engineers. This allows the necessary management NICs for redundancy with the Image Streamer and redundancy with the Composer appliances. This aligns the Synergy platform with larger environments that need flexibility and the ability to shift and adapt workloads often and on the fly.

December 8, 2015 1 comment

Datacenter News Storage

Deltaware Data Solutions Presents: Our First Annual Emerging Technology Summit

by Roger Lund October 30, 2015

written by Roger Lund

Exciting news! We have a even more of a amazing lineup for our ETS that is being hosted by Deltware Data Soluions. I will say that this event has been a huge undertaking for us, and that it will be the first of our Annual events around emerging technology. I ask that you please support the vendors by attending, and showing support for our event.

The event:

At Deltaware Data Solutions, we’re celebrating the new movie with a Star Wars themed Emerging Technology Summit to make sure all of our Jedi’s are ready for upcoming changes in IT. Join us for an educational forum showcasing emerging technologies and meet keynote speakers Stephen Foskett and Greg Schulz! You’ll also hear from three industry experts and visit vendor booths to meet companies with emerging technology one on one. Learn how emerging tech can make your data center environment better, faster, and ready to take on the future of IT. Attendees have a chance to win real lightsabers and R2-D2 droids so your IT environment will be ready for anything and you’ll be ready for The Force Awakens!

Keynote Speakers:

Greg Schulz – Founder of Storage IO

Greg has been in the IT business for over four decades and has many areas of expertise ranging from services, storage, networking, and hardware & software development. He is also the author of two books, “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” and “The Green and Virtual Data Center”, and contributor to several other projects.

Stephen Foskett – Founder of Tech Field Day

Stephen Foskett is a vendor-independent IT/business consultant to end users, managing services at companies like Contoural, Nirvanix, and now as Foskett Services. He is a contributing editor, columnist, and feature writer for industry publications, most notably Storage magazine. He often speaks at industry conferences and was awarded Microsoft MVP status in the area of File System Storage in 2008.

Guru Chahal – Vice President of Product at Avi Networks

On board with the founding team since the inception of Avi Networks, Guru helped define the product, drove initial customer development, product messaging, and technical partnerships. Prior to joining Avi Networks as the Vice President of Product, Guru was an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he focused on networking, security, cloud, data analytics, and infrastructure management. Before his work with LSVP, Guru was the Director of Product Management at Cisco Systems for the Unified Computing System product line – a multi-billion dollar business for Cisco.

Guru joined the UCS team before it shipped, helped define the product strategy and roadmaps, and was ultimately instrumental in ramping UCS traction. Before his time at Cisco, Guru held operational roles at Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco Systems), and Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). An alumnus of Harvard Business School and Purdue University, Guru holds several patents in networking.

Scott Davis – Chief Technology Officer at Infinio

Scott Davis is Chief Technology Officer at Infinio, a venture-backed storage startup company where he drives product and technology strategy and was formerly CTO of VMware’s End User Computing Business Unit. He was instrumental in driving product and technology strategy spanning the breadth of VMware’s product lines and also served as VMware’s Chief Data Center/Storage Architect and Field CTO. A recognized expert in virtualization, clustering, operating systems, file systems, storage, and end-user computing technologies such as VDI, graphics protocols and mobility/EMM, Mr. Davis has held senior engineering and business management roles with both startup ventures and established industry firms. Prior to joining VMware, he was President, CTO and Founder of Virtual Iron Software, which was acquired by Oracle and became the core of OracleVM. Prieviously, he was CTO at Mangosoft, an Internet software and storage company with pioneering peer-to-peer clustering, caching and file system products. Scott began his career at Digital Equipment Corporation where he was Technical Director for the industry-acclaimed VAXCluster and VMS Volume Shadowing products, as well as DEC’s Windows NT clustering technology (later sold to Microsoft as the genesis of Microsoft ‘Wolfpack’ Cluster Server). Scott holds 17 US patents for clustering, storage and virtualization technologies and his products have won awards at Comdex, Demo and LinuxWorld.

Jeremiah Dooley – Principal Architect of Technology Solutions at SolidFire

Jeramiah Dooley is a Principal Architect, focusing on VMware, OpenStack and SolidFire converged infrastructure solutions. He brings more than 17 years of technology and design experience to his industry efforts.

He was most recently part of the VCE Office of the CTO, working with technology executives around the world on strategies to converge and transform IT infrastructure and operations. Previously, he was the global SME for Service Provider business development, multi-tenancy and vCloud Director design as part of the Field Enablement team within the VCE Corporate Engineering Group. He also developed Service Provider and Vertical Solutions for VCE, helping customers by providing pre-tested and validated guidelines for running different applications on Vblock platforms, including Cisco Unified Communications, VMware vCloud Director, and ESRI ArcGIS Server among others.

Prior to joining VCE, Mr. Dooley was the Director of Engineering for Managed Services at Peak 10, a regional service provider based in Charlotte, NC. He directed the overall strategy, design and development of Peak 10’s Managed Services platform, which included the company’s Cloud Services, Data Protection, Managed Storage, Managed Security Device Management and BC/DR divisions. He has also held technology positions in the healthcare, legal and telecommunications fields during his career.

Event Agenda and Schedule

7:30 am – Registration begins

8:00 am – Keynote – Greg Schulz, Founder of Storage IO

Topic: Bridging the IT Emerging Technology Gap

8:45 am – Scott Davis, CTO at Infinio

Topic: Disruptive Innovations in Enterprise Storage

9:30 am – Jeremiah Dooley, Principal Architext, Technology Infrastructure at Solidfire

Topic: Storage Architecture and Data Services: The Real Flash Revolution

10:15 am – Guru Chahal, Vice President of Product at Avi

Topic: The network is NOT the problem! Deploy fast and debug faster with Avi

11:00 am – Open hours where attendees can visit vendor booths, attend breakout sessions, and eat lunch

Vendor booths open from 11 am – 2 pm
Lunch Served 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Breakout Sessions:
- 11:00 am – Marco DiPasquale, Nexenta
  Topic: Data Armageddon and How Object Storage is Attempting to Address it.
- 11:30 am – Sirish Raghuram, Platform9
  Topic: Not-So-Extreme Makeover: Uncovering the Private Cloud Hidden in Your Existing Virtualized Infrastructure
- 12:00 pm – Leo Leung, VP of Corporate Marketing at Scality
  Topic: Software Defined Storage: Myths and Realities
- 12:30 pm – Krishna Subramanian, COO at Komprise
  Topic: Learn how to get infinite capacity with your storage
- 1:00 pm – Jay Holzkamp, Micron
  Topic: Using flash effectively in a virtualized environment
- 1:30 pm – Stephen Foskett, Founder of Tech Field Day
  Topic: The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance

2:00 pm – Keynote Speaker – Stephen Foskett

Topic: Out of the Lab and Into the Datacenter – Which Technologies are Ready?

3:00 pm – Wrap-Up

Event Time and Location

November 10th at 8:00 am – 3:00 pm

Westin Edina Galleria Hotel

3201 Galleria | Edina, Minnesota, 55435

Directions | Parking

Register

Additional Vendors that will have booths:

Micron

Scality

Xangati

Silverpeak

Nutanix

Raritan

Nexgen

BigSwitch

Data Dynamics

Gridstore

Rubrik

Nexenta

Komprise

Platform9

Coho Data

October 30, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage VMware

Introducing Altaro VM Backup

by Shawn Cannon September 9, 2015

written by Shawn Cannon

Altaro is introducing a new version of their backup software that now adds support for VMware. The previous version was called Altaro Hyper-V Backup. The name change reflects support for backing up VMs regardless of Hyper-V or VMware. I had the opportunity to Beta test the new version and I wanted to share with you the results of my testing.

First things first, what do I install the Altaro software on? It has to be installed on one of the following operating systems:

• Windows 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows 7 (64-Bit)
• Windows 8 (64-Bit)
• Windows 10 (64-Bit)

In my lab environment I had access to a Windows 2008 R2 system so that is what I installed it to.
Here are the versions of VMware that are supported in this new version:

Versions of VMware supported:
• VMware vSphere 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0
• VMware vCenter 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0
• VMware ESXi 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0

In our lab we are running 6.0. All the prerequisites have been met. The installation of the Altaro software is very simple. Accept license agreement, tell it what path you want to install it and click Install. Like I said, simple!

After the software is installed, fire it up. You will be presented with the screen below:

Since this is the Altaro instance that I want, I will choose this machine and click Connect. This will send you to the dashboard. Now you need to add your VMware hosts. To do this, click on Setup > Hosts and click the Add Host button to get the wizard below.

I have a vCenter server in my lab so I am going to click on that option.

Enter your vCenter server name and admin username and password. Click Test Connection to make sure your credentials are working properly and then click Next. You will be presented with the hosts that the vCenter instance knows about.

Click Finish and the hosts will be added.

Next we need to setup our backup location. This can be a local drive on the Altaro server or a network path. For my lab test I am using a local drive on the Altaro server. To add the backup location, go to Setup > Backup Locations and click the Add Backup Location button.

I am going to click Physical Drive and click next and choose my D drive. I can specify a folder if I want the backups to always go into a certain folder. Once I have decided I just click finish and the backup location is set.

Now let’s setup a VM for this backup location. While I am on the Backup location screen there is an inventory view of all the VMs known to Altaro as shown below.

To assign VMs to my D drive backup location, I just select the VMs on the left and drag them over to the D drive. I am going to set TTYLinux to this location.

As you can see in the shot above TTYLinux will now use D as its backup location. Click SAVE CHANGES at bottom right to save these changes. If you forget to do this, the software will remind you.

Now let’s setup a backup schedule. To do this go to Setup > Schedules.

There are 2 default backup schedules already set: M-F at 10 PM and Sa-Su and 10 PM. I am going to use the Sa-Su 8 PM backup schedule. To do it, you just drag and drop the VMs to assign to that schedule. Click SAVE CHANGES to save it.

That is the basics of setting up Altaro for backing up VMware VMs. I will now cover a few other options of interest, the first one being Backup Retention.

To view the default options for backup retention, go to Setup > Retention Policy.

By default you will see the following retention policies: Never delete, 2 weeks, 1 month and 6 months. These are default policies for local and Offsite copies. You can create your own as well. You simply drag and drop the VMs to the proper retention policies that you need and click SAVE CHANGES.

You can take a backup at any time by going to Virtual Machines > Take Backup

Just click the machine you want to backup and click the red TAKE BACKUP button. I already did that and you can see in the screenshot that a backup is running for TTYLinux.

Restore options are what you would expect from backup software. You can do a full restore or a granular restore, which in Altaro’s case is file level restore or Exchange Item Level Restore.

There is also a Sandbox and Verification option so you can mount backups in a sandbox to test restores. I will show you a full restore in the sandbox so I can power a backup on to verify it was a good backup. To test in sandbox, go to Sandbox & Verification > Test & Verify Backups.

I want to test a full restore so for Step 1 I am selecting that. Click Next to proceed to Step 2.

Check the backup locations to test. In my test environment this will be the D drive so I have checked that. Click Next to process to Step 3.

The VMs you can test a full restore of are shown. I only have one VM although for some reason it is showing twice. I will just select the first one and click Next to proceed to Step 4.

Step 4 are the restore options. You can pick the backup you want to restore. If you have multiple backups of the VMs you can select the instance you want to test. You can also choose the host and datastore to restore to. I chose a different host and datastore to test with. Click Perform Test Restore to start the process.

A green notification will appear that tells you to go to the Dashboard to monitor the progress. Click the green button to head over there.

Once the test restore is complete you will see the VM in your vCenter inventory. The VM name will be similar to TTYLinux-Sandbox-2015-09-09 19-59 but it does not look like it actually puts the VM into a different network group to truly sandbox the VM off from the original. You would need to assign this VM to a different network to not interrupt the production VM. Having to do this manually is not ideal and I would recommend to Altaro that this be added into a future release. Once assigned to a “sandbox” network, power it on to make sure it works. When you are finished testing, power the VM down and delete it.

Overall Altaro is a very nice and easy to use solution for backing up VMware VMs. I like the fact that all the VMs you would assign to storage, backups, retention, etc show on the same screen as what are are trying to configure. That way you can easily select VMs from the left pane to drag and drop to the right pane. I would rate it 4 out of 5 stars as it has all the main features you would want in backup/protection software. The only negative for me is the sandbox feature missing the ability to choose a different network as part of the test restore.

For product information, please visit the Altaro VM Backup site. You can also pull up the latest user guide here.

September 9, 2015 0 comments