Since its existence, the IT industry has been a prime player in the musical chairs game of company acquisitions with products merging into a third-party portfolio, sometimes leading to odd combinations like eBay buying Skype in 2005. Some of these acquisitions worked brilliantly like when EMC acquired VMware while others not so much. In any case, the transition is never easy and it takes time to reach a confident level of stability.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ll have most likely heard about the news of the VMware acquisition in the last week of May. After almost 20 years of being under the umbrella of a parent company with EMC and then Dell, VMware managed to stay independent for… 6 months before Broadcom took the role of the bigger fish (remember that scene in Star Wars episode one underwater on Naboo?).

What’s the Big Deal About Broadcom Buying VMware?

On the 26^th of May 2022, VMware announced that they received and accepted an unsolicited acquisition offer by Broadcom for $61B. This is almost $50 per share above the closing price the day before. The whole IT community, especially VMware-minded folks were taken by surprise by this announcement as it was completely unexpected. Broadcom being in a different playfield than VMware, many wondered what was the play there.

I have to say I was not familiar with the inner workings of Broadcom and their business strategy. The reason is that I usually don’t care that much about this type of C-level news as I am mostly interested in the technology itself and playing with the products. However, this one hits us directly as it will change VMware’s direction drastically whether we want it or not in the long run.

After reading various sources about the subject, two main approaches to the news seemed to emerge:

• • VMware is doomed, move everything to Azure Stack HCI or to the cloud, Broadcom will milk the company dry and everyone will leave.

We saw a lot, and I mean a lot of negativity around this acquisition. I myself am concerned about it because I am passionate about all areas of virtualization and I think VMware is a cool company with good values and an amazing community. However, it was a mixed bag as a lot of these overly dramatic comments came from former employees or internet trolls while other very reasonable folks also had negative but interesting takes on the merger. That isn’t to say that it won’t happen as there are solid and concerning facts around how Broadcom deals with company mergers but we don’t have a crystal ball, unfortunately.

• • The deal is set to close in November so no need to panic and let’s see what happens.

I had a chat with a few contacts of mine at VMware and the attitude is very much different. Now, this is to be expected as this is their bread and butter but the consensus seems to be a “wait and see” type of deal. Although I’ll say that absolutely no one (except shareholders that will buy new yachts) is happy about this acquisition. The period between now and the close of the deal is going to be a very sensitive and crucial time for VMware/Broadcom as the decisions taken may drive a lot of top talents out.

Innovation Through Acquisitions

In the mid-2000 up until today, VMware established itself as the uncontested leader in server virtualization. However, the focus has shifted quite dramatically from server virtualization to application. The application being the core of the business, virtualization is now a commodity and servers should be replaceable in a matter of minutes. This change drove VMware to address different areas of the SDDC so as to not lose the race of innovation, an incredibly fast and ruthless one in the world of IT.

Through company mergers, it has been VMware’s strategy in the last few years with no less than 22 company acquisitions since 2018, they even have a dedicated page with the listings! This allowed the virtualization giant to expand its reach into the cloud, security and modern apps areas.

This has actually been a fairly criticized strategy by a number of folks that deemed VMware lacked innovation and simply took shortcuts by buying technologies. While there is some truth in that, it is and has always been how the IT landscape works. On top of that, some of the products developed by these companies get included in the VMware portfolio and benefit from the sales, marketing and direction power of a large company to drive it to the finish line.

Why is Broadcom Really Buying VMware?

According to Broadcom’s official communication, the main driver behind this deal is to diversify the company’s activity away from the core business of selling semiconductors. The global shortage in the microchip supply chain was what initiated this global company acquisition frenzy with CA technologies and Symantec which they acquired for $18.9B and $10.7B respectively a few years back.

By acquiring VMware, Broadcom boosts its access to the SaaS and Cloud worlds through the VIP entrance. Combined with previous software company acquisitions, this will generate subscription-based, recurring revenue which has a much higher profit margin than hardware. On top of that, VMware has a large customer base and solid industry following that can only benefit Broadcom in the long run.

According to Broadcom’s communication, the plan would be to rebrand as VMware. Now whether it will be the software division or the whole company is unclear. However, this looks very much like when Avago acquired Broadcom and rebranded as such (the stock ticker still is AVGO).

What Does the Broadcom Acquisition Mean for VMware Users?

This is the million-dollar question among VMware customers these days, what does it mean to me and my organization? Well, big customers will probably be fine as Broadcom’s strategy is to focus on the top payers and offer them solid service to ride this train for as long as possible. This does mean that smaller customers may be neglected a bit in the process.

“Broadcom explained during an event in November 2021 how they plan on focusing only on the top paying customers”

Now I am not sure about what this means in practice; is it cuts in the support pipeline in favor of TAMs and Success 360? Is it simply related to the increase in the license prices? Probably both, regardless, history doesn’t play in the favor of small customers as CA technologies and Symantec customers saw prices increases along with a decrease in customer support quality and R&D after the products moved under the Broadcom umbrella since the company shifted the focus to these big customers as mentioned previously.

What Should VMware Customers Do Now?

It is still way too early to make any rash decision as the deal will take time to close and the new strategy won’t be executed immediately. However, there are already a few things you can start thinking about before Broadcom cracks down on VMware’s inner workings:

• • Renew your maintenance contracts before a potential price hike.

• • Upgrade all your VMware products to the latest major versions if you haven’t done so yet.

• • Reach out to your VMware representative to try and get a written agreement on a license price freeze for the duration of your maintenance contract at least.

• • Evaluate your SDDC’s state and review your roadmap. Without being too dramatic, it is good to have a contingency plan. Should you go deeper down the VMware locked-in eco-system or should you wait a bit and get more flexibility somehow? Maybe invest more in cloud services, vanilla Kubernetes or try out different hypervisors like OpenStack in a POC environment? What would a 10%/15%/20% price increase mean to your company?

• • Discuss this with your VMware admins and understand what this means for them. Some might be concerned about their job or career prospects.

My Thoughts

This was a very different blog than what I am accustomed to writing. I am as far as it gets to a financial expert as my interest lies elsewhere in technology. This was however with interest but also mixed feelings that I wrote this piece as I am not sure what to make of this announcement. Will this increase VMware’s revenue and bring more cool products and innovations? Or will it be the end of VMware as we know it and every employee adds “open to work” on LinkedIn? We don’t have the answer at this point; however, tech recruiters will be incredibly busy in the next few months and you should expect solicitations if you are in this space.

This is a tough time for VMware employees that have good reasons to be concerned seeing how Broadcom seems to deal with profit over other areas of the company (tech guy naivety put aside, shareholders are unfortunately the most important variable).

If you are concerned about the merger, hopefully, the last chapter will give you a few options to look at, if you have a different take on the situation, please drop it in the comments to share your view.

The post What Will the Broadcom Acquisition Mean for VMware Users? appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

Virtualized environments are highly resilient to hardware failures thanks to redundancy and mechanisms such as vSphere HA. VMware Site Recovery Manager solves the challenges related to orchestrating a disaster recovery plan, a major concern for every organization. In this article, we will demonstrate how to set up VMware site recovery manager and get you started on your disaster recovery journey.

A Disaster Recovery Plan, also called DRP, is what may very well save the day should a datacenter wide outage happen. Whether that is flooding, fires, tornadoes, history is plagued with stories of companies going under because they didn’t have a proper disaster recovery plan in place.

Note that when things are fine, Site Recovery Manager is also useful as a planned migration tool to move virtual machines across datacenter with minimal outage. However, this article will focus just on the DR application.

If you want to dive deeper into backup and disaster recovery, download the Backup Bible – at over 200 pages, it’s the complete guide to backup and DR and completely free! Learn more about the Backup Bible

DR Planning, Testing and Documentation

Although this blog is about setting up VMware Site Recovery Manager, I want to quickly touch base on the “soft” topic of the actual organization of a DR. The day things go sideways and management decides it’s time to invoke DR, you don’t want to waste time scrambling through the network shares (which may be down) looking for old documentation, or worse, know that there isn’t one…

These situations are stressful enough and the team’s energy is best focused on following pre-defined steps that you know ensure a successful recovery. An efficient way of achieving this is to follow these steps:

• • Documentation:

• • • Document the recovery steps, communication channels, actors, special cases, etc in a document that is accessible by everyone in the team.

• • • Keep the documentation up to date whenever a change is made. Make it an integral part of your workflows.

• • • Ensure all the members of the team are familiar with the procedure and get VMware site recovery manager training.

• • Testing:

• • • Run planned disaster recovery tests regularly in partnership with the customer (internal or external), at least twice a year to ensure it is working properly.

• • • Get all team members to run DR tests. You don’t want to rely on only one or two colleagues for such a critical piece of work.

• • New VM protection:

• • • Make sure the VM provisioning workflow includes setting up site replication.

Refer to our blog on the subject for more recommendations about disaster recovery, RTO/RPO…

You will also find lots of valuable content in this Q and A session with Andy and Eric.

Site Recovery Manager Components

First off, I want to clarify some confusion that is often brought up between vSphere Replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager. SRM is an orchestrator. It doesn’t perform any sort of replication. The file copy is handled by vSphere Replication (VM) or through storage array volume replication (LUN).

VMware Site Recovery Manager: Download

• • Disaster Recovery orchestrator.

• • Does not replicate virtual machines.

• • Subject to paid license.

• • Can leverage VM-based replication or array-based replication.

vSphere Replication (VM-based replication): Download

• • Copies virtual machine files to the remote site over the LAN.

• • Relies on vSphere Replication agents on the ESXi hosts.

• • The VR appliance contains the VR management and an embedded replication component.

• • Can be used on its own (license included in most vSphere editions such as Ess+, Standard, Ent+, Desktop…).

Array-Based replication

• • Uses a middle man called Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) which enables SRM servers to communicate with the storage array.

• • Storage Array volumes are replicated using the array’s mechanism over the SAN.

• • Smallest item of granularity is the datastore.

In this blog, we will be using vSphere Replication. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, you can see in the diagram below how the components communicate with each other.

“Component’s interaction in VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.4”

Note that there are several architectures you can put in place in SRM with multiple sites. In this article however, we will stick to the dual “Protected site” and “Recovery site” as this is the most widely spread scenario.

VMware Site Recovery Manager License

Like most VMware products, it comes with an unrestricted 60-days evaluation VMware Site Recovery Manager license. When the license expires you can no longer add VM to existing protection groups or create new ones.

VMware site recovery manager licenses let you protect a specific number of virtual machines and come in a pack of 25 VMs. Note that you need to install a VMware Site Recovery Manager license on each site where VMs are protected.

“VMware Site Recovery Manager license lets you protect a number of VMs.”

The product comes in two editions: Standard for organization that don’t need to protect more than 75 VMs and Enterprise for those that need more or require additional features such as stretched storage support, vvol… See the table below for a comparison of the 2 editions.

“VMware Site recovery manager license comparison”

Network considerations

Bandwidth

Before getting stuck in, you might want to ensure the link between your protected and recovery sites offers sufficient bandwidth for the replication to occur. I would like to recommend the vSphere Replication calculator. A free online VMware tool that will help you estimate your needs in terms of bandwidth, storage, windows etc…

Component communications (TCP ports)

You also want to ensure that the correct TCP ports are open so the infrastructure components can communicate.

Refer to the VMware documentation to get the exhaustive list of network ports:

• • Network Ports for Site Recovery Manager

• • Services, Ports, and External Interfaces That the vSphere Replication Virtual Appliance uses

VM network on recovery site

Although we won’t spend too much time here as this blog is already way too long, this section is probably one of the most important ones. When dealing with workload replication across sites, the network is often the pain point that needs to be addressed quickly and be properly understood.

There usually are 2 options when it comes to it, arguably 3 if you like to live dangerously:

• • Re-IP (IP customization)

If your sites are routed (they should be) and using different subnets, you will need to modify the IP of the VMs as part of the recovery process to put them in the destination network. This usually brings a whole lot of interesting surprises and discussions with the Apps and Dev teams if the services running in the servers don’t fully rely on DNS records (hardcoded IPs) in which case they will surely break.

This model is complicated to maintain in VMware Site recovery manager but works in most legacy network environments.

• • Overlay networks (Network virtualization)

If your organization uses network virtualization techniques such as NSX-T in order to overlay layer 2 networks over routed layer 3, you won’t need to re-IP anything as the same subnet is available in both sites.

This setup makes maintaining site recovery manager very simple at the expense of a more complicated network architecture.

• • Stretched VLANs (don’t do this)

I’m only putting this here because more companies that I would like to admit still do it. You may be tempted to connect an inter-site black fiber to edge switches and span the VLANs across sites? While this sounds like an easy enough solution, it brings issues such as broadcast domains spanning across sites, exposing both datacenter to the consequence of a network loop for instance.

Site Recovery Manager 8.4 Installation and Configuration

Step 1: Deploying Site Recovery Manager Appliance

In this section, we deploy the VMware site recovery manager appliance in both the protected and recovery site.

Note that in our example here, the protected site is called “Site B” and the recovery site is called “Site C”.

• • First, download the appliance from my.vmware.com. Extract the content of the “bin” directory from the ISO file to a folder on your machine.

• • Log into vCenter and Right-click on the inventory object where you want to deploy it then select Deploy OVF Template.

Note that you can deploy the SRM Manager in another vCenter than the one that will be protected (as opposed to vSphere Replication).

• • Check Local file and select the content of the bin directory you extracted from the ISO file and click Next.

• • I will skip some of the steps that are common to all OVF deployments. Here I did set a name and a compute resource beforehand.

• • In the Configuration pane you get to choose the size of the site recovery manager appliance. I obviously selected 2 vCPU for my lab environment.

• • • 2 vCPU: Protect up to 1000 VMs

• • • 4 vCPU: Protect more than 1000 VMs

• • Plan for 20GB of space in the storage section. I also set it as thin but that will depend on your own policy…

• • In the Network section, make sure to select a network that will let you have the right communication fluxes open. Refer to the Network Considerations section for more details on that.

• • You then get to configure the appliance. As usual, make sure the DNS records have been created beforehand and use FQDNs as much as possible.

• • Finally, review the configuration and hit Finish to kick off the deployment of the appliance.

Once the deployment is finished, proceed with deploying the second Site Recover Manager appliance in the recovery site.

Step 2: Deploying vSphere Replication Appliance

As mentioned previously, Site Recovery Manager is the orchestrator (the brain), whereas vSphere Replication is the one doing the heavy lifting work of replicating the virtual machines to the recovery site (the muscles).

Note that, as opposed to the VMware site recovery manager appliance, the vSphere Replication appliance must be deployed in the vCenter instance managing the resources to protect/recover.

Unsurprisingly, the deployment process is very similar to the Site Recovery Manager appliance shown above.

• • First, download the appliance from my.vmware.com. Extract the content of the “bin” directory from the ISO file to a folder on your machine.

• • Right-click on the inventory object where you want to deploy it and select Deploy OVF Template.

• • Check Local file and select the content of the bin directory except for the “AddOn” files and click Next.

• • Again, I skipped to the configuration pane where you select 2 vCPU or 4 vCPU. I chose 2 vCPU in my lab but selecting 4 will ensure better performances in a larger production environment.

• • In the Network section, make sure to select a network that will let you have the right communication channels open. Refer to the Network Considerations section for more details on that.

• • Again, go ahead and create the DNS records to use FQDNs for the new server.

• • Leave the vService bindings section as default (not that you can change it anyway).

• • Complete the wizard and hit Finish to kick off the appliance deployment.

Once the deployment is finished, proceed with deploying the second vSphere Replication appliance in the recovery site.

Step 3: Configuring Site Recovery Manager Appliance

The process of configuring the appliance itself is as easy as it gets, as long as the network side of things has been taken care of properly. All we have to do here is to connect the Appliance to its site’s vCenter server.

• • First, open a web browser on the site recovery manager appliance’s configuration page at https://site-b-srm.lab.priv:5480 and log in with admin and the password you set when deploying it.

• • Once you’re in, you can change some of the settings of the appliance should you need to. If everything looks in order, click on CONFIGURE APPLIANCE to connect it to your vCenter.

• • In the Configure wizard, you start by connecting the PSC (Platform Service Controller). If you want to use a named service account such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with Active Directory, it needs to have SSO admin permissions in vCenter. Here we used the default SSO admin account. When you hit Next you may have to accept the PSC’s certificate’s thumbprint.

Note that we are connected to site-b-srm here so we will be connecting to site-b-vcenter.

• • Next you have to select a vCenter server. If your vCenter servers are connected in Enhanced Linked Mode like mine, select the one that is local to the site you are configuring. You may have to accept the thumbprint of vCenter this time.

• • Finally, enter a name for the site, an email for notifications and leave the rest as default. You would only have to change the other fields in the case of shared recovery sites implementations.

• • Now review the configuration details and hit Finish to complete the connection.

• • The new site and vCenter should now appear in the Summary pane of the appliance and the notification in the top right corner should be successful.

• • Now if you log out of vCenter and log back in, you should see the Site Recovery plugin which wasn’t there before.

Again, go through the same process to configure the appliance on the recovery site (Site C in my case).

Step 4: Configuring vSphere Replication Appliance

Now that the site recovery manager appliance is taken care of, let’s do the same thing with vSphere Replication. I will show the screenshots to offer a uniform write-up but you’ll see that the process is very similar to what we did for the site recovery manager appliance.

• • Open a web browser on the vSphere Replication appliance’s configuration page at https://site-b-vr.lab.priv:5480/ and log in with admin and the password you set when deploying it.

• • Again, you can change some settings if needed, otherwise, head over to CONFIGURE APPLIANCE.

• • Type in the details of the PSC, which is most likely the same as your vCenter since external PSCs are now deprecated, and accept the certificate thumbprint.

• • Then select the vCenter that is local to the site you are configuring. Again, if you don’t have Enhanced Linked Mode, you will only see one vCenter here.

• • Finish by setting up the site name and email address as we did previously and complete the wizard.

• • Just like with site recovery manager, the summary pane should now show the site’s details.

When you are done with the first site (Site B here), proceed with configuring the recovery site (Site C).

Step 5: Sites pairing

At this point we have laid down the foundations by deploying and configuring the appliances. Only now will we start configuring site recovery manager itself. The first step of doing so is to pair the protected and recovery sites together.

• • Log in one of the vCenter servers > Home > Site Recovery. If you don’t see this icon, you need to log off and log back in for the plugin to show up.

• • In the Site Recovery pane, you should see both site recovery manager and vSphere replication instances with a green checkmark on all of them. Click on OPEN Site Recovery.

• • This will redirect you to the Site Recovery dashboard where you will manage SRM. Click on NEW SITE PAIR.

• • In the Pair Type window, select the local vCenter Server.

• • • If you use Enhanced Linked Mode like in this screenshot, check “pair … in the same SSO domain”.

• • • Otherwise, leave “pair … in a different SSO domain”.

• • Then you select the remote vCenter server to pair it with.

• • Check both Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication checkboxes in the Services pane.

• • If you left the default self-signed certificates, you will be asked for both site recovery manager servers to trust the thumbprint of the remote SRM and vCenter instances.

• • Review the changes by making sure everything is in the right place and hit Finish to enable sites pairing.

The site pair should now appear in the dashboard of Vmware Site Recovery Manager.

Step 6: Resource mappings

We are now at a point where both sites are aware of each other and are awaiting further configuration. We now need to make VMware site recovery manager aware of resource associations from one site to the other, called resource mappings. This will save us from doing it individually for each virtual machine in the protection groups.

We must map folders, compute (named resources), network and storage policies if your organization leverages them.

• • In the main dashboard of VMware site recovery manager, under the new site pair, click on VIEW DETAILS.

This will let you configure everything related to this pair, including mappings.

Network Mappings

VMware Site recovery manager will use the network mappings to know which portgroup to connect recovered virtual machines to in the recovery SDDC.

Note that this process is fairly simple from a site recovery manager perspective. However, it is critical that the portgroup used in the recovery site offers the same gateway and firewall rules as the one in the protected site, unless you use IP customization, which adds a layer of complexity. Refer to VM network on recovery site mentioned earlier for more details on this.

• • Go to Site Pair > Configure > Network Mappings then click on New. Note that Site B (a.k.a. our protected site) is selected by default.

• • In the wizard, you can select to prepare mappings manually or automatically. In Automatic mode, the system will map networks with the same name. A popular choice when many portgroups are involved

• • Check the objects you want to map and click ADD MAPPINGS.

• • Check everything in the Reverse mappings section as it will be used during failback.

• • You can select a test network to use when you trigger a test DR. By default, an isolated temporary network will be used. Note that if you do want to use a test network, you obviously need to ensure there will be no IP conflict.

• • Review the mappings configuration and hit Finish.

Folders Mappings

We then move on to mapping the VM folders. The process is very similar to the Network mappings.

• • Go to Site Pair > Configure > Folders Mappings then click on New.

• • Again, you get to choose how to map the resources. This time I chose Manually to show you the difference.

• • Here you will need to map and add them one by one.

• • Apply the reverse mapping here as well and finish the wizard.

Resource Mappings

Last but not least, we will map the compute resources which include resource pools, standalone hosts, vApps, or clusters

• • Go to Site Pair > Configure > Resource Mappings then click on New.

• • This section can’t be done automatically. Select the source and destination resources to pair and click ADD MAPPINGS.

• • Don’t forget to enable the reverse mappings to ensure failback works and finish the wizard.

Step 7: Setting up protection

We have now completed the setup of the basic underlying infrastructure necessary for our Disaster Recover activity. Production environments will obviously have a lot more mappings to go through than this simple lab setup.

This “protection” step includes several things to configure in order for our DR plan to be ready:

• • Configure VM replication.

• • Create Protection Groups (PG).

• • Create Recovery Plans.

This step must be properly thought out from an organizational point of view as this is where you set your RPO and how you actually orchestrate the recovery of your workloads. Before cracking on, we suggest you take some time to define how you want to group virtual machines, what RPO is needed for which VMs and decide an order in the recovery process.

For best practices regarding setting up the protection, refer to VMware’s considerations.

Configure VM replication

Let’s start with enabling the actual replication of the virtual machines.

Note that all the VMs in a replication configuration have the same settings (direction, RPO, schedule…). You will need to create different replications for different configurations.

The available RPO range is from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

• • Still in our “Site Pair” interface, go to Replications, check the direction of the replication and click NEW.

• • The Configure Replication wizard starts with selecting the vSphere Replication Server. Leave the pre-selected Auto-assign unless you need to manually choose a specific one.

• • Next, select the Virtual Machines you want to replicate using this configuration.

• • Select the Datastore at the recovery site and set the appropriate disk format and storage policy.

Select seeds: You can speed up the replication process by physically moving the VM files to a storage medium in cases where the bandwidth between the sites is too small. Once copied, the seeds (files) are detected and avoid replicating a first full.

• • The Replication Settings is very important as we are setting up the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and general replication such as:

• • • Enable Point in time instances to adjust the snapshots of the source virtual to keep.

• • • Guest OS quiescing for VMs supporting it.

• • • Network compression for VR data to save network bandwidth and help reduce the buffer memory used on the VR server at the expense of CPU usage.

• • • Encryption for VR data. Note that it is automatically on for encrypted VMs.

• • You can specify new or existing protection groups directly from the wizard but we’ll do it manually in the next section.

• • Finally, review your replication settings and hit Finish.

• • You can hit Refresh to follow the VM copy. At the end, the replication should be successful.

• • If you look inside the datastore at the recovery site, you will find a folder with the replicated VM files in it.

Create Protection Groups

A protection group (pg) is a collection of virtual machines that VMware Site Recovery Manager protects together. There are different types of pg with array-based replication, VVOLs, vSphere replication, however, they can be mixed together in a recovery plan (more on that later).

With protection groups, VMware Site Recovery Manager will create placeholder VMs in the recovery site with the right mappings, which is part of the upside of using Site Recovery Manager and not just vSphere Replication on its own.

Disclaimer regarding protection group design: In this example, I created a pg for the web nodes and one for the database in order to show you 2 different groups in the UI. However, in real life you would more likely either create a pg per application stack for high granularity or wider ones, at the department level, for instance, to reduce complexity.

• • Browse to Protection and click NEW.

• • Give your protection group a name and a description that quickly and clearly identify the type of workloads it protects. You also need to choose the direction of the protection.

• • In the Type section, select Individual VMs (vSphere Replication).

• • Select the virtual machines to add to the protection group.

• • In the Recovery Plan section, I created a new plan named SaaS stack.

• • The protection groups should now show up in the UI.

Again, creating different protection groups for web and db nodes don’t usually make much organizational sense so you want to really think this through with your peers.

Create Recovery plans

In VMware Site Recovery Manager, recovery plans are flexible, customizable and automated run books that orchestrates the recovery process (VM start/stop order, network addresses to use…).

• • A recovery plan includes one or more protection groups.

• • A protection group can be part of multiple recovery plans.

In the screenshots below we already created a recovery plan in the protection group wizard so we’ll see how to configure it here.

• • Go to Recovery Plans > “RP Name”. You can see in the Recovery Steps the order of the recovery scenario. In our case, we want to start the DB before the web nodes.

• • You should find your protection groups in the Protection Group tab. If not, add them.

• • Now click on Virtual Machines > Select the VMs to start first (databases in our case) > right click > Priority Group > 1 (Highest).

• • You can then configure the start-up order you want for the other VMs in the list.

• • You can go further if you click on Configure Recovery in the context menu, you will get additional options for the VM such as VM dependencies, power options as well as IP customization (a.k.a. re-IP).

More information about IP customization in the VMware Site Recovery Manager documentation.

Step 8: Testing Recovery Plan

Now that the Recovery Plan is created, it is time to test it. As we mentioned earlier, it is important to test your disaster recovery infrastructure regularly to ensure it works when you need it.

Keep in mind though, that the Test functionality of the site recovery manager will only start the VM and check for the VMware Tools by default. This is fine to check that SRM works, but it is not enough in a production environment. You should schedule a dedicated maintenance window to recover (not test recover) the production workloads at least twice a year.

Testing recovery plans does not impact production as long as the test network doesn’t incur an IP conflict.

Note that the network used for the test is the one specified in the network mappings section, which by default is isolated.

• • In the Recovery Plans tab, make sure the plan is ready for test or recovery and click TEST.

• • In the wizard you can choose to replicate the changes that occurred since the last replication. Checking it simulates a planned failover while leaving it unchecked simulates a disaster recovery scenario where the source VM is unavailable.

• • There isn’t much to review in the second window, click on Finish to start the Test recovery plan.

• • You can monitor the progress of the job in the recovery plan page and follow what action is being performed. Note that, by default, it will wait for the VMware Tools before proceeding to the next step.

If you want to skip the VMware Tools check you will need to configure it on the VM in the recovery properties.

• • Once the job is finished, you can look in the vCenter at the recovery site and you will find the recovered virtual machines in running state. Again, the source VMs are not impacted and remain running.

• • Once you are happy with your DR test, hit the CLEANUP button to remove the test environment and reset the plan to ready state.

• • Click Next in the Cleanup wizard.

• • Click Finish to run the cleanup operation and complete the test scenario.

Step 9: Executing Recovery Plan

In the previous test section, we started a copy of the protected VM in an isolated network in the recovery environment while the source VM was kept running. Now we will execute the recovery plan which will switch the workload to the recovery environment.

Note that there are 2 methods for Site recovery manager to execute a recovery plan:

• • Planned Migration: Replicate recent changes to the recovery site and cancel recovery if errors are encountered.

• • Disaster Recovery: Attempt to replicate recent changes to the recovery site, but otherwise use the most recent data. Continue recovery even if errors are encountered.

In this example, we will be performing the planned migration.

• • On the recovery plan page, make sure the status is Ready and click on the RUN button.

• • Here you need to check a box to ensure that you understand what you are about to do, i.e., shut down the production workload and switch over to the recovery environment. Here we select the Planned Migration scenario and click NEXT.

• • Click Finish to launch the operation. I shall reiterate that there will be an interruption of the service for the duration of the switcheroo.

• • Once the operation is completed, you will notice in vCenter that the source virtual machines are switched off.

• • We ran a ping for the duration of the recovery which took less than 2 minutes for 2 Ubuntu VMs in order to visualize the actions performed automatically. Now keep in mind that this is the most basic of use cases so don’t expect your DR to run in 2 minutes.

• • You should also find the plan status on Recovery complete. Notice the warning about your workloads not being protected. This is because there is no protection in the other direction yet.

Step 10: Re-Protect and failback

When a recovery plan is executed, the workloads are switched to the recovery site but what happens when you want to go back to normal and move them back to their original site?

This is known as the failback process which consists of making the recovered VM into the protected virtual machine (the protected site becomes the recovery site) and execute the recovery plan in the other direction.

Reprotect

• • In the recovery plan window, click on the REPROTECT button in the warning banner.

• • Again, you need to check the box to make sure you understand this operation cannot be undone.

• • You can then click Finish to launch the Reprotect operation.

Note that the Reprotect operation has no impact on the state of the VM. It simply turns the original protected VM into the replica. You will actually notice that the icon in vCenter changes to the one with 3 squares next to it.

Failback

The process of failing the virtual machine back to its original site is exactly the same as executing a recovery plan because it is just that.

Exporting reports

VMware Site Recovery Manager includes an export functionality to extract the operations in various formats such as html, xml, csv, xls and doc. That way you can provide your management or clients a proof that a test or actual recovery has been performed.

• • Go to Recovery plan > History > Export all.

• • Select the format that works for you, we chose html below and click Download or Open in new tab.

• • The looks of the report is a bit simplistic but it includes the core information you are most likely after.

Is this Sufficient?

Although this was a pretty lengthy article, we have only scratched the surface of what VMware Site Recovery Manager can do to orchestrate your disaster recovery or planned migrations, especially in the recovery plan options and parameters. You can also get VMware Site Recovery Manager training on the VMware hands-on labs.

Whilst VMware Site Recovery Manager will be suitable for basic and non-essential workloads for more important environments such as business dependent applications you will need something more comprehensive and reliable. That’s why most companies turn to third-party vendors who specialise in these types of software. If you feel like VMware site recovery manager doesn’t quite fit the bill for you in terms of technical features or price point, make sure to check out Altaro VM Backup and Replication.

You may also want to have a look at setting up some automation to reduce the operational overhead of maintaining VMware Site Recovering Manager by leveraging the SRM PowerCLI module.

In this article, we only covered the on-premise aspect of VMware Site Recovery Manager but be aware that VMware offers cloud-based disaster recovery solutions such as VMware Site Recovery and DRaaS.

Again, if you are new to the disaster recovery terminology, we strongly suggest you make sure you understand RPO/RTO and draw up a disaster recovery plan before starting configuring your replication, protection groups, recovery plans etc… For everything you need to know about backup and DR, grab your free 200+ page copy of The Backup Bible.

The post VMware Site Recovery Manager + vSphere Replication Install Guide appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

There are few things in IT that are simultaneously ultra-important and as neglected as backup and disaster recovery. Many organizations don’t put enough prioritization into their backup/DR strategy and either do not review it regularly or just plain don’t have one. In this article, we answer your questions about backup & disaster recovery to help you protect your data more securely.

The questions gathered below were generated from a webinar in which I teamed up with the author of The Backup Bible, Eric Siron, to explain the key considerations any organization will need to ask itself to put together a strong and reliable backup and disaster recovery strategy. If you didn’t attend the session, you can watch the recording of that webinar right now! If you already have a plan in place, we also cover the practical steps you can take to improve your current setup and be up to date with the latest advances.

NOTE: If you asked a question during the webinar you don’t see it in the list below, we did consolidate some of the similar questions so we don’t repeat ourselves. Additionally, if you think of any additional follow-up questions you didn’t get the chance to ask or you just think of now, be sure to put them in the comments section below.

Common Backup and Disaster Recovery Questions

What kind of training do you recommend for intermediate level internal IT staff regarding backup and DR?

A. I would recommend you have them read the Altaro Backup Bible that we referenced throughout the webinar. It is designed with all skill levels in mind and is vendor agnostic by design.

Is Cloud Backup Ransomware Free?

A. I don’t believe that there is any system anyway cloud-based or otherwise that is ransomware free at this point in time. Cloud backup may be harder to infect with ransomware due to the semi-disconnected nature of cloud technology, but any media that is online and accessible is a potential target.

What are the best practices for protecting backups from ransomware?

A. We have an ebook and on-demand webinar covering this topic at length

Do you think it is correct to think of an SME with many departments as a “Group of SMBs” and so approach each department backup/DR plan as if it was an SMB?

A. Great question and in general this would be a good approach. However, each organization is different and your information gathering stage of your backup/DR plan will help you determine if approaching your organization in this way will be viable or not.

What is the most effective way to protect physical servers instead of VMs?

A. You’ll want to use a product that supports providing backup services for physical devices such as Altaro Physical Server Backup.

Regarding Offsites and Air-Gaps, when we switch to cloud storage we have no ability to periodically commit to portable disk and thus have 2 copies of offsite data?

A. In generalities, yes, but there are ways around this issue. Some cloud vendors are starting to support immutable storage, which would help address this in terms of ransomware. Additionally, your cloud storage vendor may have mechanisms in place to allow additional copies to be moved elsewhere at the storage level. Finally using a backup provider that allows offsite copies to more than one more offsite location would help address this as well.

What is the possibility of making two backups of a VM locally to two different locations (Backup Servers) at time of backup? Any problems with this? Offsite is not an option at this time.

A. If your backup application supports multiple storage targets, that’s likely the cleanest option, however, if you have a solution that does not support multiple targets, then storage replication could be a viable option or a simple copy job could work ASSUMING you get the timing right. You don’t want the copy job to the secondary location running as the backup is happening. Then you run the risk of the secondary local backup being invalid.

More and more clients are requesting long term archiving of backups in the cloud. O365 covers this already, but how would you approach this for Hyper-V/VMware due to storage costs?

A. Leveraging a backup vendor that natively supports object-based storage with a cloud provider like Azure Blob Storage. This type of storage is cheap and effective for long term data retention.

 Is it best practice to have different offsite retention than onsite?

A. There is no direct answer or best practice for this. The needs of your organization will dictate this.

Is a physical backup server or a virtual backup server better?

A. This depends on the backup solution and storage hardware you have in play. If you want to leverage SAN or Network storage you’ll likely be using a VM. However, if you have disks in a local server, it may make more sense to run your backup software on a physical server instead.

What kind of retention policy would you apply to a 2-hour RTO/RPO?

A. One typically does not dictate the other. Both your retention policies and RTO/RPOs will be dictated individually based on organization need.

How do you explain to clients/managers that they need to protect Office 365 data when the assumption is that Microsoft takes care of data protection?

A. To start, you are correct in that it’s an assumption that Microsoft handles data protection. We actually have a document that addresses this concern here that may help.

Altaro Product Questions

Is the Altaro API read-only, or can you make configuration changes through it?

A. You can actually make modifications with it as well! Detailed information on the API can be found here!

How powerful does the backup host need to be in order to run boot-from-backup?

A. Based on your planning you’ll want a hypervisor in your environment to have enough free resources to run at least a couple of VMs in this manner. I would base this off your application set. If you have an application that’s deployment spans 2 different servers, plan on having those free resources available at all times.

Can Altaro Backup be leveraged in a hybrid cloud deployment?

A. You can certainly use Altaro VM backup to protect the on-premises VMs and use an Azure storage account as an offsite backup target. Additionally, you could recover those workloads into a nested Hyper-V instance in Azure if desired. Additionally, you have Altaro Office 365 Backup available as well for the protection of your Office 365 Data

How good is Altaro VM Backup when dealing with sensitive apps such as SQL, Active Directory, and Exchange?

A. Altaro VM Backup makes full use of Volume Shadow Copy so we can fully protect SQL, AD, and Exchange workloads. We can do full and granular recoveries of Exchange. Paired with the AD Recycle Bin we can facilitate full protection of AD. In terms of SQL, beings we use VSS, we can fit into any recovery strategy with SQL when paired with a SQL Maintenance plan.

Will Altaro Backup Products allow me to do file-level backups of my file server?

A. Yes

Can Altaro Products Leverage Tape as a Storage Target?

A. We do not support tape storage at this point in time.

What are the dependencies for boot from backup?

A. More information on boot from backup can be found here.

Is Nutanix AHV Supported?

A. Not at this time

Can you use the boot from backup feature in Altaro VM Backup to recovery files granularly from a Linux VM?

A. Yes you can! Simply boot the machine with boot from backup, and give it a new IP/Hostname prior to connecting it to the network, or put it on a private/internal vSwitch and conduct the file retrieval from the host system.

Does Altaro VM Backup have support for multiple offsite copies with different schedules?

A. We can backup to multiple offsite locations, however, the copy to the second location is completed sequentially and cannot be scheduled separately.

After the boot from backup process restore has complete how long will the restored server be offline to roll in the changes captured during the restore?

A. Tough to put an actual number on this, but the answer will depend on how much data changed throughout the restoration period and the speed of your disks.

Altaro is just the software correct?

A. Correct, you provide the hardware you want to use for the solution.

The post Your Backup & Disaster Recovery Questions Answered appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

In honour of the initial publication of The Backup Bible, I’ve extracted the top 10 most important messages from the book and compiled them into a handy reference.

The Backup Bible is a free eBook I wrote for Altaro that covers everything you need to know about planning, deploying and maintaining a secure and reliable backup and disaster recovery strategy. Download the Backup Bible Complete Edition now!

Plan for the Worst-Case Scenario

We have lots of innovative ways to protect our data. Using HCI or high-end SANs, we can create insanely fault-tolerant storage systems. We can drag files into a special folder on our computer and it will automatically create a copy in the cloud. Many document-based applications have integrated auto-saves and disk-backed temporary file mechanisms. All of these are wonderful technologies, but they can generate a false sense of security.

One specific theme drives all of my writing on backup: you must have complete, safe, separate duplicates. Nothing else counts. Many people think, “What if my hard drive fails?” and plan for that. That’s really one of your least concerns. Better questions:

• What if I make a mistake in my document and don’t figure it out for a few days?
• What if the nice lady in the next cubicle tries to delete her network files, but accidentally deletes mine?
• What if someone steals my stuff?
• What if my system has been sick but not dead for a while, and all my “saved” data got corrupted?
• What if I’m infected by ransomware?

Even the snazziest first-line defences cannot safeguard you from any of these things. Backups keep a historical record, so you can sift through your previous versions until you find one that didn’t have that mistake. They will also contain those things that should have never been removed. Backups can (and should) be taken offline where malicious villains can’t get to them.

Plan for the Worst Case-Scenario #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Use all Available Software Security and Encryption Options

Once upon a time, no one really thought about securing backups. The crooks realized that and started pilfering backup tapes. Worse, ransomware came along and figured out how to hijack backup programs to destroy that historical record as well.

Backup vendors now include security measures in their products. Put them to good use.

Use all Available Software Security and Encryption Options #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Understand the Overlap Between Active Data Systems and Backup Retention Policies

The longer you keep a backup, the taller the media stack gets. That means that you have to pay more for the products and the storage. You have to spend more time testing old media. You have to hold on to archaic tape drives and disk bus interfaces or periodically migrate a bunch of stale data. You might have ready access to a solution that can reduce all of that.

Your organization will establish various retention policies. In a nutshell, these define how long to keep data. For this discussion, let’s say that you have a mandate to retain a record of all financial transactions for a minimum of ten years. So, that means that you need to keep backup data until it’s ten years old, right? Not necessarily.

In many cases, the systems used to process data have their own storage mechanisms. If your accounting software retains information in its database and has an automatic process that keeps data for ten years and then purges it, then the backup that you captured last night has ten-year-old data in it.

Does that satisfy your retention policy? Perhaps, perhaps not. Your retention policy might specifically state that backups must be kept for ten years, which does not take the data into consideration. Maybe you can go to management and get the policy changed, but you might also find out that it is set by law or regulation. Even if you are not bound by such restrictions, you might still have good reason to continue keeping backups long-term. Since we’re talking about a financial database, what if someone with tech skills and a bit too much access deletes records intentionally? Instead of needing to hide their malfeasance for ten years, they only need to wait out whatever punctuated schedule you come up with. Maybe accounting isn’t the best place to try out this space-saving approach.

Understand the Overlap Between Active Data Systems and Backup Retention Policies #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

High Availability is a Goal, Not a Technology

We talk a lot about our high availability tech and how this is HA and that is HA. Really, we need to remember that “high availability” is a metric. How about that old Linux box running that ancient inventory system that works perfectly well but no one can even find? If it didn’t reboot last year, then it had 100% uptime. That fits the definition of “highly available”.

You can use a lot of fault-tolerant and rapid recovery technologies to boost availability, but a well-implemented backup and disaster recovery plan also helps. All of the time that people spend scrounging for tapes and tape drive manuals counts against you. Set up a plan and stick to it, and you can keep your numbers reasonable even in adverse situations.

High Availability is a Goal, Not a Technology #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategies are Not the Same Thing

If your disaster recovery plan is, “Take backups every night,” then you do not have a disaster recovery plan.

Backup is a copy of data and the relevant technologies to capture, store, and retrieve it. That’s just one piece of disaster recovery. If something bad happens, you will start with whatever is leftover and try to return to some kind of normal state. That means people, buildings, and equipment as much as it means important data.

The Backup Bible goes into much more detail about these topics.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategies are Not the Same Thing #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Backup Applies to Everyone in an Organization, so Include Everyone

The servers and backup systems live in the IT department (or the cloud), but every department and division in the organization has a stake in its contents and quality. Keep them invested and involved in the state of your backup and disaster recovery systems.

Backup Applies to Everyone in an Organization, so Include Everyone #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

One Backup is Never Enough

I said in the first commandment that for a proper backup, you must have complete, safe, separate duplicates. A single duplicate is a bare minimum, but it’s not enough. Backup data gets corrupted or stolen just as readily as anything else. You need multiple copies to have any real protection.

Whether you take full backups every week or every month, take them frequently. Keep them for a long time.

One Backup is Never Enough #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

One Size Does Not Fit All

It would be nice if we could just say, “Computer, back up all my stuff and keep it safe.” Maybe someday soon we’ll be able to do that for our personal devices. It’s probably going to be a bit longer before we can use that at the enterprise scale. In the interim, we must do the work of figuring out all the minutiae. Until we have access to a know-it-all-program and a bottomless storage bucket, we need to make decisions about:

• Using different retention policies on different types of data
• Using different storage media and locations
• Overlapping different backup applications to get the most out of their strengths

As an example of the last one, I almost always configure Microsoft SQL to capture its own backups to a network location and then pull the .bak files with a fuller program. Nobody really backs up and restores Microsoft SQL as well as Microsoft, but just about everyone has better overall backup features. I don’t have to choose.

One Size Does Not Fit All #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Test It. Then Test again. And Again…

Your backup data is, at best, no better than it was the last time that you tested it. If you’ve never tested it, then it might just be a gob of disrupted magnetic soup. Make a habit of pulling out those old backups and trying to read from them. Your backup program probably has a way to make this less tedious. Set bi-annual or quarterly reminders to do this.

Test It. Then Test again. And Again… #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning is a Process, Not a One-Time Event

The most important and most often overlooked aspect of all backup and disaster recovery planning is employing a “set and forget” mentality. Did you set up a perfect backup and disaster recovery plan five years ago? Awesome! How much of the things that were true then are true now? If it’s less than 100%, your plan needs some updating. Make a scheduled recurring event to review and update the backup process. Remember the 6th commandment. Hint: If you feed them, they will come.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning is a Process, Not a One-Time Event #Backup10Commandments #BackupBible – Tweet this

Free eBook – The Backup Bible Complete Edition

I’d love to be able to tell you creating a backup and disaster recovery strategy is simple but I can’t. It takes time to figure out your unique backup requirements, business continuity needs, software considerations, operational restrictions, etc. and that’s just the start. I’ve been through the process many, many times and as such Altaro asked me to put together a comprehensive guide to help others create their own plan.

The Backup Bible Complete Edition features 200+ pages of actionable content divided into 3 core parts, including 11 customizable templates enabling you to create your own personalized backup strategy. It was a massive undertaking but hopefully, it will help a lot of people protect their data properly and ensure I hear a fewer data-loss horror stories from the community!

Download your free copy

The post The Ten Commandments of Backup appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

World Backup Day 2021 is nearly upon us (31 March) and, as always, we like to mark the occasion by giving back to our favourite people in the world: IT admins! Get a free $/€/£20 Amazon voucher when starting a free trial of Altaro VM Backup or Altaro Office 365 Backup and tell us about your funniest IT catastrophe for a chance to win one of our grand prizes!

What Would We Do Without Backup?

Answer: cry a lot more probably. As World Backup Day approaches, we’re reminded of all the mishaps, backup scares, and near-catastrophes that we’ve experienced over the years. Now that remote working is the new normal we have even more possibilities to lose data than ever before since home networks are often unsecured.

Furthermore, malicious attacks are on the rise as sadly many people are out to exploit these vulnerabilities. World Backup Day is a reminder of how fundamental backup is to the modern IT admin.

Where would we be without it? Let’s not find out

Let’s Celebrate a World with Backup

if you’re a Microsoft 365/Office 365, Hyper-V or VMware user we hope you enjoy this treat we’ve prepared for you: a guaranteed £/$/€20 Amazon voucher when you use your trial of Altaro Office 365 Backup or Altaro VM Backup, and a chance to win one of our Grand Prizes when you share your funniest IT catastrophe with us!

Learn more about our World Backup Day Promotion

What will you spend your money on?

The post Back up your VMs and get a $20 Amazon voucher appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

Update: Atlaro Backup Software now comes with full 24/7 support across all our products at no extra cost! Our support promise is to be available for all our customer needs round the clock, with a guaranteed 24/7 call response of less than 30 seconds direct to a product expert – no entry-level agents or passing you around. Find out more about our outstanding customer support

Update: Altaro Backup v8 has now been released – find out about the newest features

We’ve been working hard here at Altaro to deliver a few major new features for your favorite backup and recovery application. We hope you’ll love them!

Introducing Altaro VM Backup 7.6

We always take customer and community feedback very seriously when it comes to determining what comes next, and once again we’ve delivered on some of the most commonly requested features for Altaro VM Backup. These will also become available in the Cloud Management Console (CMC) in a few days’ time.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for Local Backups

One thing that we’ve been asked for quite frequently is a way to improve RPOs (Recovery Point Objective). In our new release, CDP was developed from the ground up with a focus on improved RPOs. With CDP, you can back up your VMs as frequently as every 5 minutes, thereby achieving an RPO of up to 5 minutes. This means that in any situation where you could run into data loss, you’re losing minutes of data as opposed to hours or days, which is a BIG win.

CDP is available in the Unlimited Plus edition of Altaro VM Backup.

Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS) for Local Backups

While Altaro VM Backup has had the ability to retain data for long periods of time, we’ve received requests for a feature that would provide efficient storage for local backups beyond daily and continuous backups. This is where GFS comes into play.

Normal Retention Policy:

• High-frequency CDP Backups for 4 hours
• A maximum of one backup an hour until the retention policy ends

With GFS Archiving enabled

With GFS archiving enabled, Altaro VM Backup also keeps the following backups, on the time periods shown below, all starting from the time of the last successful backup:

• 1 backup per week for 12 weeks
• 1 backup per month for 12 months
• 1 backup per year for 2 years.

As you can see, this feature effortlessly allows you to periodically store backup data for much larger lengths of time than previously possible. This allows you to provide further efficiency for your backup storage.

GFS Archiving is available in the Unlimited and Unlimited Plus editions of Altaro VM Backup.

30-day free trial with full access to Altaro VM Backup
(Unlimited Plus Edition)

Other Notable Improvements

Support for VMware 6.7 updates

In April 2018, VMware rolled out updates to VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN – both are now version 6.7. Altaro VM Backup v7.6 is fully compatible with the VMware 6.7 updates.

Change Block Tracking Updates for 2012/2012R2

In situations where customers are backing up VMs on Hyper-V 2012/2012R2, there were some headaches with CBT whenever a host rebooted, or when VMs migrated between cluster nodes, or whenever an upgrade of Altaro VM Backup occurred. CBT would stop working and would likely have to be reset. We’ve included enhancements in 7.6 to address this and CBT will now continue working in these situations.

Concurrent Retention, Restore, Backup, and Offsite Copy operations on the same VM

In previous versions of Altaro VM Backup, only one operation could be performed on a VM at a time. This caused the following pain points:

• If a retention policy operation took hours to complete, then backups and restore operations would be queued until the retention job was completed
• If an Offsite Copy to Azure took days to complete, then backups and restore operations would be queued until the retention job was done
• If a Restore, File Level Restore or Boot from Backup operation was active then no backups for that Virtual Machine could take place until they were finished.

In the new release these limitations have been addressed, allowing backup administrators to restore and take offsite copies without delaying any backups whether they are scheduled or done via CDP.

What about GDPR?

As many of you have likely heard, GDPR is the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation that comes into effect on May 25, 2018. This new regulation dictates how EU citizen data is processed and handled. This not only applies to EU-based companies, but also to companies that provide products and services to EU residents as well as companies that have an EU national on their payroll. The penalties for non-compliance are steep, with fines ranging upwards of 20 million Euros in the worst cases.

We’ve had many questions here at Altaro about how we fit into the GDPR picture. We address a number of the requirements of this new regulation by providing continuous data protection, data encryption, storage location control, and verification testing amongst other things. If you’re interested in more information on GDPR and how Altaro VM Backup can assist with compliancy, we have just the write-up for you HERE.

Wrap-Up

We’re always working on improving the experience and performance of your backup services. We firmly believe that backup and recovery shouldn’t be a difficult thing to do, so we strive to bring you the best features available in the simplest way. We hope you enjoy this release and be sure to keep an eye out as we have lots more in store for 2018!

With that in mind, if you’d like to try out the product for yourself, you can download a 30-day full-featured trial and test out the application in your own environment! After the 30 days, the product becomes free to use for 2 VMs forever. Try it out and let us know what you think!

If you have questions or further feature requests be sure to let us know in the comments section below!

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The post Announcing the latest update to Altaro VM Backup: Continuous Data Protection appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

With 2018 just around the corner, I’m always surprised at how fast time flies, faster than I would like it to. This year has been a great one for VMware having closed off Q3 with $1.98 billion in revenue, an increase of 11% over the same period last year. More importantly, VMware users had plenty of new toys to play with and very little to complain about. I’m hoping 2018 will be as exciting. So, for those of you who are new to this blog or to VMware in general, here are a few highlights from 2017 and a brief assessment on what to expect in 2018 tucked in at the end.

vSphere 6.5 Unleashed

Released end of 2016, vSphere 6.5 tops my list as one of the major VMware events. This release delivers a number of very interesting features and enhancements, too many to mention; vCenter Server native HA, built-in backup and restore, encrypted virtual machines and vMotion traffic, RESTful APIs and much more.

The addition of vSphere Update Manager to vCenter Server Appliance was certainly most welcome making vCSA, hands down, the preferred deployment option. Here’s a summary of what to expect for those who have yet to try it out.

• VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.5.0d
• VMware vCenter Server 6.5.0d
• VMware Tools 10.1.7
• VMware PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1

vSphere 6.5 on Steroids

It’s barely mid-2017, and VMware decides to up the ante by releasing vSphere 6.5 U1. Update 1 brings with it support for larger environments and even bigger virtual machines. This is immediately apparent with 5000 hosts and 50,000 running VMs in a single domain compared to the previous 30k limit!

VSAN also got the treatment. For starters, vSAN 6.6 is now supported in vSphere Update Manager. This means you can apply vSAN related updates in a more controlled fashion.

vCenter Server for Windows 6.5 users will be happy to learn that Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2 and 2016 SP1 have made it to the list of supported external databases.

This vSphere 6.5 Update 1 post builds-up on the points just mentioned if you’d like to learn more.

HTML5 trumps Flash

This HTML5 client was born as a VMware Fling which is still an ongoing standalone project despite the client now being part and parcel of vSphere 6.5. As of 6.5 U1, the vSphere Client offers 90% of the functionality found in the Adobe-based vSphere Web Client. While I personally haven’t had that much of a bad experience using vSphere Web client, the majority of users beg to differ. Well, the afflicted will be happy to learn that the client’s days are numbered. It’s worthy HTML5 based successor will soon be taking to the throne.

In 8 New & Useful vSphere Client Features, I go over some note-worthy features you’ll find in vSphere client (HTML5).

Fancy a vSAN?

VMware has revolutionized the SDDC world with the introduction of vSAN. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by should know about vSAN and how it pools local drives on ESXi hosts to give you one big distributed shared datastore replacing traditional SAN deployments. Combine this with an effortless setup and you have a winning number. With over 7000 customers and 3 industry awards, vSAN 6.6 now supports Data-at-rest encryption, HA management via the ESXi host client, Degraded Device Handling (DDH), lowered costs and better scalability.

Introducing vSAN 6.6 pretty much covers all there is to know about, so do give it a good read. I also included a few links worth looking at for completeness sake.

• VMware vSAN 6.6 Release Notes
• VMware VSAN has six dot six appeal
• vSAN 6.6 Stretched Cluster Demo

Amazon Web Services and VMware

During VMWorld 2017, VMware announced AWS as its new public cloud offering thus parting ways with vCloud Air, VMware’s public cloud solution. In a nutshell, users can now deploy vSphere environments using Amazon’s bare-metal server and robust infrastructure. Thanks to Amazon’s global reach, you are now free to deploy or extend datacenters to pretty much anywhere on the planet.

The official VMware site has a lot to cover on the subject.

Azure Clouds looming on the Horizon

To remain in theme, VMware Horizon Cloud takes your desktop infrastructure and applications and moves it to the cloud. This sees a departure from what was, until now, a predominately on-premises solution. Users now have the option to deploy VMware Horizon to the cloud or in a hybrid fashion using a mix of VMware products and technology.

May 2017, VMware announced that it will be offering Horizon Cloud on Microsoft’s Azure platform. Read Nina Seth’s Get Ready for VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure for an overview of what promises to be a great intermix of technology and vendors partnership.

Containers, the small big things

Docker this and Kubernetes that, there’s no denying that containerization is a hot topic. VMware in typical fashion, have outdone themselves with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) 1.2.1, the latest version of VMware’s containerization technology at the time of writing. VIC takes a different approach to the traditional way of doing containers. By deploying container hosts and containers as virtual machines, VIC allows users to leverage vSphere’s advanced features like HA, DRS, and vMotion for better performance and reliability. Better still, users familiar with Docker will still be able to use Docker’s endpoints and commands making for a gentle learning curve.

For more details, have a look at these two posts. I also recommend watching the video right after the links.

• A first look at vSphere Virtual Integrated Containers and how to deploy them
• How to deploy vSphere Integrated Containers fast and easy

All Shields Up

A little something for the security folk and VMware admins alike. As an application-level security solution, AppDefense is a new technology that makes ingenious use of machine learning. What processes are running in your environment? What triggers them? What tasks are they performing? Once answered, these and similar questions are used to determine the normal behavior, or a profile, of a virtual machine and the applications it runs. The profile is then used to establish a behavioral baseline. Once baselines are in place, controls and procedures are used to monitor, and if necessary, block unwanted behavior that deviates from the norm. For example, a never seen process found executing on several machines is probably malware and will be flagged and actioned as such by AppDefense.

Give the following video a watch. You will better understand what AppDefense is all about.

Big Data

Fresh out of VMworld 2017, VMware announced a new edition to the vSphere family; the Scale-Out edition, a vSphere 8-CPU license pack that enables you to quickly build or virtualize existing High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters for Big Data workloads.

NSX Duality

In February 2017, VMware announced that the highly popular NSX product-line is now split in two; NSX for vSphere 6.3 (NSX-v) and NSX-T 1.1. Matt de Vincentis outlines the major differences in Introducing VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 & VMware NSX-T 1.1 VMware blog post. If you’re new to NSX, give the next video a watch.

Our VMware NSX – Abstracting the network layer introduces what NSX is all about.

The Internet of Everything

The IT world is ripe with buzzwords. IoT, the Internet of Things, is yet one more buzzword we mortals have to contend with. For the uninitiated, IoT refers to the recent craze of hooking anything that runs a TCP/IP stack to the Internet notwithstanding security implications. This includes baby monitors, webcams, smartphones and tablets, smart TVs, refrigerators, power outlets and lighting, our smart house … you get the picture!

Since the trend is also catching up at the workplace, VMware and partners are busy working on VMware Pulse IoT, an enterprise-grade management tool that allows managers to have complete visibility and control of any IoT device brought inside an organization.

Will it be 6.7 or 7.0?

vSphere has always been the cornerstone of every VMware-based infrastructure whether it’s deployed on-premises or in the cloud. I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon. vSphere 6.5 introduced a ton of new features but there’s always room for improvement.

2018 will be the year we will witness the demise of vCenter Server for Windows and the ill-fated vSphere Web Client; this much we’ve been told. Some are clamoring for the return of the thick client but I don’t think VMware has any plans on reviving it anytime soon. Instead, the focus has shifted completely on the vSphere client (HTML5) so here’s hoping that by the next vSphere release, the client will live up to the hype that’s been built around it.

Speaking of new releases, I heard rumors that the next vSphere release will be 6.7 and not 7.0 as many are expecting. Again, these are just rumors and even then, who cares about release numbers, honestly? I suppose that like many, it’s the new shiny stuff everyone is interested in, hence why I’ve enrolled in the new vSphere beta program. Can’t wait to start testing. The novelty here is that, unlike previous editions, the beta program is not tied to any particular release of vSphere. Instead, users will be able to test added functionality and features as they find their way in a release. The option is to either test on-premises using downloadable betas or on VMware hosted environments for a wider and richer testing experience.

Carbon Black

Yes, it does sound like some black ops unit or a code-name for some covert operation but, though still exciting, it’s nothing like that. Instead, it’s a joint effort between VMware and Carbon Black, a leader in next-generation endpoint security. The idea is to combine VMware’s AppDefence with Carbon Black’s CB Defense to provide a one-stop solution that stops known and unknown attacks targeting applications in your datacenter. The solution combines three main elements Enforcing Known Good Application Behavior, Detecting Unknown Threats, and Automating and Orchestrating Response as described here. The solution should be available to the general public by Feb. 2018.

Blockchain

With blockchain promising earth and heaven to all and sundry, it’s no wonder VMware caught it on their radar. A prototype was in fact announced at VMworld 2017. Built on top of the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework, Blockchain on vSphere (BoV) allows users to deploy the acclaimed distributed ledger technology via a few commands.

Although BoV deployment seems relatively easy, an admin must still possess some experience with container technology such as Docker and Kubernetes, Linux, and Python to a lesser extent. BoV is still in research phase but expect it to be commercialized sometime during 2018. It is currently available for download as a Fling.  I’ve also linked the VMware video that shows you how to deploy BoV.

Without a doubt, 2017 has been a great year for VMware and users alike. I wish I could see into the future to learn what VMware will be up to in 2018, but sadly I can’t! In the meantime, here at Altaro, our VMware blog has surpassed the 150th mark. We believe that our content keeps getting better and better judging from the feedback received. So, thanks a bunch for that. We also have great plans for 2018, so make sure to stay tuned for some surprises to come.

On that closing note, here’s wishing happy holidays to everyone. Have a fantastic 2018!

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The post 11 Reasons Why VMware Won 2017 (& Why 2018 Could be Even Better) appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

Colin Wright, VP Sales in EMEA for Altaro software, accepts the award

The post Altaro VM Backup Voted Best Backup Product of the Year 2017 appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

The annual US edition of VMworld 2017 has come and gone. For us European folk, VMworld Europe will be held in Barcelona during the second week of September. If you’re lucky enough to be attending, surely, you will not be disappointed as there’s a lot going on with some pretty new exciting stuff heading our way. Here’s a rundown of what we think are the most 5 exciting VMware announcements released last week during VMworld 2017.

5. vSphere Scale-Out Edition

Don’t be fooled, Big Data is not just another buzzword. The amount of data being generated every minute is astronomical. And it’s growing exponentially. The need to sift through it, detect patterns and extract that which is actually useful, is even more pressing. To do this, you need both storage and ample computing power. Enter vSphere Scale-Out edition. VMware took the core features and components gracing vSphere – vCenter Server standard is to be purchased separately – and packaged together with a convenient 8-CPU license pack so you can quickly build or virtualize existing High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data workloads. The benefits VMware quotes on virtualizing HPC and Big Data workloads are basically axiomatic and apply to any type of virtualized workload;

• Dramatic Resource Utilization – better-utilized server resources when compared to running workloads exclusively on physical servers. Up to 10% performance increase (virtualized Spark cluster).
• Simplified Compute Node Creation – a compute cluster can easily scale up by cloning VMs.
• Network Flexibility – Distributed switching provides a single pane for managing the network complexity intrinsic to distributed systems such as Big Data clusters.

The vSphere features included are as follows:

ESXi, vMotion, Storage vMotion, vShield Endpoint, Virtual Volumes, Storage APIs, Storage Policy-Based Management, Storage I/O Control, Network I/O Control, SR-IOV, Content Library, Host Profiles, Auto Deploy, and Distributed Switch.

The bottom line is, vSphere has just got re-branded as an affordable solution to those looking into setting up a new or virtualizing their HPC and Big Data environment.

4. VMware HCI Acceleration Kit

With small businesses in mind, this new kit delivers vSphere and vSAN at an affordable price. SMBs can now deploy a 3-node vSphere Standard and vSAN standard cluster with single-processor ESXi hosts for a very affordable $7,850. There’s no limit on the number of hosted VMs however note that HCI deployments are limited to one per site. Using a ReadyNode solution (VMware hardware partners), a full deployment that includes hardware and VMware licenses will cost you roughly 25 grand. More information is available here.

3. vRealize Network Insight 3.5

A while ago, I covered vRealize Log Insight highlighting the operational visibility it provides for the hosts and virtual machines comprising your environment. You can read about Login Insight here and here. vRealize Network Insight 3.5 is equivalent to vRealize Log Insight only that it gives you insight – excuse the pun – on what goes on at the network and security layers given an NSX enabled environment.

The latest 3.5 version unveiled at VMworld 2017 brings along a new NSX Edge Health Dashboard, IPFIX integration, support for Brocade MLX, Check Point firewall and HPE Oneview and a PCI compliance dashboard for NSX Distributed Firewall. You can learn more about Network Insight here.

2. AppDefense

Now here’s something the security conscious folk, and geeks alike will surely dig. I highly recommend you watch the following video first to get a better idea of what AppDefense is all about.

In a nutshell, AppDefense is an application-level security solution that uses machine learning to build workload profiles – what processes are running on a machine? What triggers them? What task do they perform? etc., for an existing environment. Once a “normal” behavioral baseline is established, you can implement controls and procedures to restrict behavior that deviates from a given baseline; an example would be a never seen process executing on multiple machines which would be typically associated with malware and similarly undesirable software. I’m definitely looking forward to testing this one out!

1. VMware on AWS

VMware has conceded, at least for now, that it cannot win in a head-to-head battle against IaaS heavyweights such as Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace. So, as the saying goes, if you can’t fight them, join them. And this is precisely what VMware did as is evident by the recent VMware on AWS initiative. So, yes, it’s now official. You can run VMware’s SDDC offerings (vSphere, vSAN, NSX) on Amazon’s IaaS platform.

VMware on AWS has been marketed as a service running VMware Cloud Foundation on AWS but will also happily live on other cloud platforms such as those from Rackspace and IBM Bluemix.  If you want to outsource your on-premises VMware VMs to the cloud, VMware on AWS is one solution worth looking into.

Wrap Up

As with previous editions, VMworld certainly did not disappoint. VMware has upped the ante in the security department with AppDefence, an application-level security solution that employs machine learning to protect your environment. Renewed insight on NSX enabled environments is now possible thanks to vRealize Network Insight 3.5.

For small businesses, the HCI Acceleration Kit is one prayer finally answered; a fully licensed hyper-converged infrastructure is finally affordable at $25K. I should also mention the newly announced SaaS subscription services such as Discovery and Wavefront. Also worth a mention, is the continued support for OpenStack with VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) 4.0 now supporting containers, vRealize Automation Integration, Live VM resizing and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS).

As always, our VMware blog provides a number of post covering most aspects of vSphere and more. Have a look at The Complete List of VMware Articles for more details.

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The post Top 5 Most Exciting VMworld 2017 Announcements appeared first on Altaro DOJO | VMware.

I took some time to revisit my contribution to the Altaro VMware blog, along with that of other writers. I’m now well past my 100th published blog post and keeping track of what I’ve written to date is fast becoming a nuisance. To this effect, I’ve divided all the VMware posts into 12 generic topics as listed below. This should help me, and you as a reader, find what you came looking for quicker.

Clicking on any of the balloons below, takes you to a list of posts specific to the labelled topic. Clicking on a section’s header, will take you back to the top of the page where you can select another topic if needed.

Upgrading

vCenter and PSC

• 3 ways to update vCenter Server Appliance 6.5
• A quick look at upgrading to VCSA 6.5
• Migrating from vCenter Server for Windows 6.0 to vCSA 6.5
• Upgrading to vSphere PSC 6.5 using the Windows installer
• Upgrading vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) to 6.0 Update 2
• Using the Windows vCenter to vCSA Migration Tool (by Ryan Birk)

ESXi

• Patching and upgrading ESXi using ESXCLI commands

vSphere Components

• 4 ways to downgrade the VM hardware version
• How to upgrade datastores to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5

Installing

ESXi

• Deploying vSphere ESXi 6.5
• Installing ESXi on a bare-metal server

vCenter

• How to install vCenter Server 6.5 for Windows
• How to install vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 from scratch
• How to install vCenter Server Appliance v6.0
• How to set up Enhanced Linked Mode and more
• How to run an unattended vCSA installation
• How to install vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 U1 from Linux

Nesting and Labs

• How to set up a vSphere home lab for FREE
• Deploying nested ESXi is easier than ever before
• How to set up a nested vSphere 6 environment – Part 1
• How to set up a nested vSphere 6 environment – Part 2
• How to set up a nested vSphere 6 environment – Part 3
• Building a vSphere 6.5 Home Lab (by Ryan Birk)

Guest Operating Systems

• How to install Kali Linux on VMware
• How to install Windows Server 2016 on VMware

Misc VMware Products

• How to install vRealize Orchestrator 7.3
• vRealize Log Insight – A first look and how to deploy it
• How to install VMware Workstation Pro on a Linux host

Monitoring

• How to set up vRealize Log Insight agents on Windows and Linux
• How to monitor ESXi with Nagios Core – Part 1
• How to monitor ESXi with Nagios Core – Part 2
• How To Use vSphere Alarms To Monitor VMware Environments
  

Management

vCenter

• 3 Ways to Properly Manage vCenter Server Services
• A better way to manage your vSphere inventory
• How to schedule tasks on vCenter Server
• How to brand the vCenter SSO logon page
• How to add disk space to vCenter Server Appliance

VMs and Templates

• How to convert a Hyper-V VM to run on vSphere
• vSphere VM Templates – A Complete Guide – Part 1
• vSphere VM Templates – A Complete Guide – Part 2
• vSphere VM Templates – A Complete Guide – Part 3
• vSphere VM Templates – A Complete Guide – Part 4
• How to Clone VMs Without vCenter in 5 Easy Steps
• How to manage disk space on VMware Linux Virtual Machines
• Enabling clipboard copy and paste on vSphere VMs

VMware Tools

• Learn how to deploy VMware Tools on Linux
• How to update the VMware Tools package on ESXi
• VMware Tools Troubleshooting on Windows (by Ryan Birk)

Troubleshooting

• How to deal with orphaned virtual machines
• How to terminate unresponsive virtual machines in vSphere
• 10 ways to troubleshoot poor VM performance
  
• 5 Awesome Tips to Troubleshoot vMotion
• “Unable to connect to the MKS” Error – How to fix it
• How to add missing network cards on cloned Linux virtual machines

Storage

• Of storage, protocols and datastores – Part 1
• Of storage, protocols and datastores – Part 2
• How to extract content from VMDK files
• Configuring Storage DRS in vSphere 6.x (by Ryan Birk)

Networking

• VMware NSX – Abstracting the network layer
• vSphere Networking Basics – Part 1
• vSphere Networking Basics – Part 2

Availability

Backup

• Backing up VCSA 6.5 natively using FTPS
• Restoring VCSA 6.5 using the FTPS method
• How to natively backup VCSA using IIS and HTTPS
• Backing up and restoring the vCenter Server vPostgres database

DR & HA

• Disaster Recovery with vSphere Replication – Part 1
• Disaster Recovery with vSphere Replication – Part 2
• How to deploy a vCenter HA cluster – Part 1
• How to deploy a vCenter HA cluster – Part 2
• Setting up VMware High Availability on a vSphere cluster
• VMware Fault Tolerance as implemented in vSphere 6.0

Security

Patching

• All you need to know about vSphere Update Manager – Part 1
• All you need to know about vSphere Update Manager – Part 2
• How to patch ESXi with Update Manager

Firewall

• How to create persistent firewall rules on ESXi
• Managing the ESXi firewall

Hardening

• How to join a vCenter Server instance to Active Directory
• Securing vCenter Server using roles, privileges and permissions
• How to join ESXi to Active Directory for improved management and security
• An introduction to vSphere Security Hardening
• How to secure vCenter SSO User Accounts
• How to unlock vCenter SSO domain accounts from the command line

Misc

• Testing VM encryption in your home lab using Docker
• How to reset the root password for VCSA 6.x
• vSphere 6.5: What’s new with security (by Ryan Birk)

Features

• An HTML5 Web Based Client, finally!
• An introduction to VMware Host Profiles
• An Overview of vSphere 6 content libraries
• The VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
• Why IT Admins Adore vMotion.. And Why You Should Too
• VMware EVC Mode Explained
• How to Set up VMware vApp in vCenter Server in 4 steps
• Learn how and when to use vSphere Snapshots
• A first look at vSphere Virtual Integrated Containers and how to deploy them
• How to set up VSAN using a nested environment
• How to use VMware compatibility tools
• Testing ESXi Auto Deploy in a nested environment
• vSphere 6.5: The scoop on Proactive HA (by Ryan Birk)
• How-to navigate the VMware 6.x Host Client (by Ryan Birk)
• Introduction to ESXTOP Part 1 (by Luke Orellana)
• Introduction to ESXTOP Part 2 (by Luke Orellana)

Informational

• 101 Free VMware Tools
• Is ESXi free? Let’s put it to the test
• Is VMware Support Good Value For Money?
• A quick look at VMware vSphere Editions and Licensing
• Learn how to license vCenter, ESXi and vSAN
• Altaro VM Backup 7.1 now supports vSphere 6.5
• Hardware Assisted Virtualization and ESXi CPU requirements
• Say hello to vSphere 6.5
• The Anatomy of a VMware Virtual Machine
• vCenter Server for Windows and vCSA compared
• What’s new in vSphere 6.0 Update 2
• How to install vCenter Server Appliance v6.0
• Getting started with VMware. Everything you need to know.
• vSphere 6.5 Update 1 – What’s new
• A Newbie’s Guide to ESXi and VM Log Files
• Top 5 Most Exciting VMworld 2017 Announcements
• 8 features new to VMware Workstation 14 Pro

PowerCLI

• A PowerCLI Primer – Part 1
• A PowerCLI Primer – Part 2
• How to generate a VSAN HTML Report with PowerCLI
• Fixing VM folder naming discrepancies
• How to find orphaned vSphere VMs using PowerCLI
• How to generate a vSphere report using PowerShell
• How to use the Invoke-VMScript PowerCLI cmdlet
• Managing ESXi services using PowerCLI
• Migrating ESXi hosts and distributed switches using PowerCLI
• PowerCLI Script – Deploy VMs and Configure the Guest OS (by Andy Syrewicze)
• 5 PowerCLI Cmdlets that every Administrator should know! (by Ryan Birk)
• VMware PowerCLI: Getting Started Part 1 (by Luke Orellana)
• VMware PowerCLI Part 2: Basic Use and Syntax (by Luke Orellana)

vSphere API and command line

• Exploring the vSphere API with Managed Object Browser
• Top 20 Essential ESXCLI commands you need to know

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