VMware on AWS was a huge announcement at VMworld this year, this week at AWS Re:invent has seen a host of new announcements around this service including the ability to leverage AWS services over an Elastic Network Interface to the VMware Cloud on AWS. I don’t think this was unexpected. Before we get started with VMware Cloud on AWS there are a couple of things you’ll need, firstly the account structure would require an “VMware Cloud SDDC account” this is purely there to run those software defined data centre resources, this is owned and operated completely by VMware.   There is then also a requirementRead More →

Announced at the end of August at VMworld in Las Vegas was VMware on AWS, nothing new here as this was spoken about a year ago, but things are now moving towards being available. From the small bit of exposure, I have seen it really does look like they have done a great job in making things seamless between an on premises vSphere deployment and the new vSphere offering on AWS. Let’s firstly look at what VMC looks like. What do you get if you want to spin this up? Minimum 4 ESXi Hosts 36 Cores, 512GB RAM 8x2TB NVMe SSD for vSAN HA, vMotion,Read More →

My First VMworld This was my first ever VMworld considering I have held my VCP and been a member of the vExpert community for several years. When I was telling people this they were shocked. It just so happens that over the course of the last 10 years I have either been transitioning or just not in the list to attend. I wanted to put this post together really to one remind me of what went on but also to give some insight into what sessions were attended if anyone wanted to take a watch when they become available. Saturday It did not disappoint! IRead More →

Welcome back and today’s post is really talking about one of my favourite features from VMware but also I want to touch on a little how Veeam can use Tags to protect your workloads.  The powerful world of tags and being able to assign this little tag to a virtual machine, datastore or pretty much all objects within the vSphere inventory. You may decide to tag virtual machines based on OS or possibly in order of importance, the old adage of Gold, Silver, Bronze and paper this coupled with other technologies that can consume this tag profiling can really help automate a lot more withinRead More →

Day 9 – Post 9, I wrote this prior to knowing the outcome of the US presidential vote…. I stand by if Donald Trump at the time of publishing this is President then we are going to be in a world of pain as a world not just the US! EDIT – so the above happened and maybe there is a complete post on its own here to reflect on the news I woke up to this morning, but I am not as shocked as I thought I would be. Having spoken throughout my night to a lot of my American friends who seem fineRead More →

Introduction to OnDemand Sandbox from Storage Snapshots This new feature from Veeam was released in version 9 on January 12th 2016, probably my favourite feature that came in the new release, simply because it takes a great technology that is rarely used because of the manual steps required and allows for these steps to be automated. Meaning you get this great technology in an automated fashion allowing to perform lots of test and development on production storage and no extra storage cost. Basically with OnDemand Sandbox from Storage Snapshots we are able to take existing storage snapshots, create a segregated, full performance copy of productionRead More →

The reason for this post is to tie in with the last post but give you a step by step guide on how to create the “FlexClone On Steroids” Create backup / Snapshot only job The following steps are required for that scheduled snapshot job that can be ran during business hours this is not a requirement for this however I have found it quite useful in having a scheduled point in time snapshot to then go and create a FlexClone from. Create Application Group The creation of the Application Group only has to be done once and this is really there to determine theRead More →

I have created this walkthrough so that you can customise you home demo labs. The vCenter Single Sign-On login page is now written using regular HTML and CSS. This means you can actually now customize the login page with Veeam backgrounds. It’s not supported by VMware, but for home lab it’s a great add on and custom way of displaying more company marketing. But because of this you may wish to backup the following files to ensure you can roll back if you need to do so. There are two specific files that you will want to take a look at, the first is unpentry.jspRead More →

I have been asked by a number of people since joining Veeam about the NetApp Storage Snapshot Support in version 8 of the software. This is the reason for this post to try and outline the Why and the How use cases for the Veeam & NetApp Storage integration. Firstly I want to go over the process of Veeam and any non storage snapshot enabled array (not supported with Veeam today) Veeam uses the VMware snapshot technology, when taking a backup we need to ensure that everything is consistent this is either done by using Veeam Application Aware Image Processing which will talk to theRead More →

First of all I want to explain about an tool that has been out for some time. MAT4Shift. MAT4Shift is a script framework/tool for automating migrations from VMware ESXi to Microsoft Hyper-V. It is powered by Project Shift which was created by NetApp and requires a NetApp FAS Storage System. Project Shift powered by NetApp was a collaboration of many different divisions within NetApp to be able to shift a workload from one hypervisor to another, MAT4Shift provided he ability to go from a VMware ESXi environment to a Microsoft Hyper-V environment leveraging NetApp FlexClone Technologies and Data ONTAP. This now brings me onto OnCommandRead More →