vCloud – vBrainstorm.com

If you’ve noticed that my blog posts have been a bit light over the last year, I am happy to finally tell why. Last week, my first book published. It was many months in the making, a lot of effort and it is now in the wild. PowerCLI Cookbook is written to be a guide for beginners to intermediate scripters who want to learn more about PowerCLI. The format is a Packt Publishing Cookbook, which is a step-by-step guide on how to create complex scripts and routines to solve certain problems. Although each recipe solves a specific problem, the recipes also cover ways to explore the PowerCLI objects and discover how to do similar things for other problems.

The real power of PowerCLI comes from the native PowerShell pipeline and well-formed data objects. The book covers both of these to help readers get a handle on how to leverage these features in ways that help create scripts for any purpose administering vSphere and vCloud.

I summed up my whole intent for the book with a tweet this week…

If you’re repeating the same steps in #vSphere more than once, there’s an easier way & #PowerCLI Cookbook shows how http://t.co/E2CVdRpOgx

— Philip Sellers (@pbsellers) April 2, 2015

The book is available from Amazon in print and as a Kindle ebook and is also available from the Packt Publishing website. Packt also has the first chapter available for free as a sample on their website.

Some highlights

Put together an automation script for configuring ESXi hosts

Configure and manage vCenter Server and vSphere clusters
Automate DRS share balancing in clusters
Use and manage vSphere snapshots on virtual machines

Manage DRS affinity group memberships by building custom functions
Auditing vSphere configuration by leveraging native PowerShell commands
Create objects with data for reports and format output

Use VMware Tools and PowerCLI to execute native commands in the VM guest OS
Extend the PowerCLI reach by using ESXCLI objects1
Perform vCloud administration

and much much more…

By the Numbers

247 Pages
77 step-by-step recipes

10 Chapters
9 months, start to finish

Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform. But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director. Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of virtual machines. The new integration in Data Protector offers the ability to setup dynamic backups which can encompass changing workloads by integrating that the top level, vCloud layer.

Data Protector can be pointed directly at a particular vCloud organzation and will be able to backup anything under that organization with a single checkbox. Regardless of how much or how often the systems under that organization changes, Data Protector will still protect it completely. The integration fully supports the vCloud vStorage API’s which allows for full, application consistent backups by utilizing VMware’s snapshot capabilities. The snapshots will call into the VM’s tools and will even coordinate a consistent snapshot with the OS running inside of the VM. This ensures the most reliable data recoveries possible.

The new vCloud Director integration joins a slew of additional new capabilities within the Data Protector 7 release, including support for the StoreOnce deduplication technology at any level within the backup process. StoreOnce deduplication has been fully baked into the software in Data Protector 7 allowing for deduplication at the end-point, in transit or at rest on the StoreOnce deduplication device. It also allows for portability of thin backups without the need for rehydration, saving both bandwidth and time.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Below is a video demo of the vCloud Director integration into HP Data Protector. You can get a good idea of how simple the interface for the vCloud integration is within the backup console. To an existing customer, the interface looks almost identical to the vSphere integration that has existed for several years.