vFrank

Essense of virtualization

Cohesity at VMworld Barcelona 2018

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VMworld Barcelona is only a few weeks away. I am very excited about joining my 19th VMworld! For the past 3 years I have been to VMworld working for Cohesity and I look forward to meet many friends from the community.

You are probably thinking about what Cohesity is planning this year at the show. Trust me it is going to be something you don’t want to miss. Here is the complete agenda: http://www.cohesity.com/vmworld2018/europe/

Tuesday night we are having an amazing party that you can register for here: http://events.cohesity.com/cohesitypartyBCN

If you are a Queen fan don’t miss out! The Break Free Queen Tribute Show is the best in Europe.

The list of the VMworld’s I have participated in:

  1. 2007 – San Francisco
  2. 2008 – Cannes
  3. 2008 – Las Vegas
  4. 2009 – San Francisco
  5. 2010 – Copenhagen
  6. 2011 – Copenhagen
  7. 2012 – Barcelona
  8. 2013 – San Francisco (VMworld Speaker)
  9. 2013 – Barcelona (VMworld Speaker)
  10. 2014 – San Francisco
  11. 2014 – Barcelona
  12. 2015 – San Francisco
  13. 2015 – Barcelona
  14. 2016 – Las Vegas
  15. 2016 – Barcelona
  16. 2017 – Las Vegas
  17. 2017 – Barcelona
  18. 2018 – Las Vegas
  19. 2018 – Barcelona

Awarded vExpert 2018

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Received confirmation Friday night that I was awarded for my help to the community as vExpert for 2018. This is my 9th consecutive year as vExpert. The vExpert program was launched in 2009 – but I did not apply before 2010 where I got my first award.

Congratulations to all of my fellow vExperts. It is a community that helps on so many levels.

Now it is time to spend the rest of 2018 contributing to the community.

Thanks VMware! You have amazing products.

vCenter er nede, hvad gør du?

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Hvad ville du gøre hvis dit vCenter blev utilgængeligt i morgen og hvilken indflydelse ville det have på din forretning? Svarene falder typisk i to kategorier:

  • Mit vCenter er ikke kritisk for min produktion og hvis det er nede installere jeg blot et nyt og forbinder det til mine ESXi servere.
  • KRISE! Hvis mit vCenter er nede er der ikke self-service, overvågning og styring af de virtuelle resourser. Jeg er på dybt vand!

Det er er en gammel kendt udfordring i et hvert datacenter. Hvordan beskytter man sin VMware mangement stack og får den hurtigt online igen med en lav RTO. VMware udvider sine management produkter. Hvor man tidligere kunne nøjes med en enkelt vCenter server består de fleste miljøer af adskillige servere til håndtere den daglige drift og rutiner. Den er i dag udbygget til:

  • vCenter (med intern eller ekstern database)
  • vRealize Operations Manager
  • vRealize Automation Center
  • vReaize Log Insight
  • NSX Manager
  • PSC (platform services controllers)
  • SDDC (VMware Cloud Foundation)
  • Management AD og DNS

Udover disse VMware services er der også flere administrative servere som IT afdelingen er afhængige af som kan tilføjes som kritiske komponenter til en disaster plan. Med det Software Defined Data Center er det ikke som tidligere hvor vCenter var “nice-to-have” – er det nu blevet til en kritisk funktion der altid skal være online. Hvis vCenter er nede skaber det problemer for ting som

  • Selv-provisionering af nye virtuelle maskiner
  • Overvågning
  • 3′ parts produkter der kommunikerer med vCenter

I et tilfælde hvor der er nedbrud eller datatab på management stacken er man ilde stedt. Hvordan bringer man stacken online når vCenter og evt. management AD og DNS er nede? Er din platform til beskyttelse 100% uafhængig af dem? Med stor kompleksitet er det muligt at bygge et system med traditional software som kan håndtere dette. Men hvordan tester man det? Hvordan sikrer man at alle windows servere benytter lokale service accounts og ikke AD konti? På hvilken måde kompromittere dette sikkerheden? Hvad med faren for Ransomware når traditional software kører på Windows og i værste tilfælde bliver backup data kryptereret og utilgængelig?

Til at løse dette er der behov for at se på problemet med friske øjne. Der er behov for en løsning der opfylder følgende

  • Baserer sig ikke på Windows og backup data er immutable
  • Har ingen afhængigheder af AD og DNS
  • Kan benyttes selvom vCenter er utilgængelig
  • Kan udføre en Instant-Mass-Restore og bringe ALLE administrative servere online med det samme og som en gruppe.
  • Simpel og alt inkluderet i et system (ikke 4-5 forskellige produkter og producenter)
  • Ingen single point of failures.

Hos Cohesity løser vi dette elegant og din management stack er beskyttet og muligt at lave recovery på få sekunder. De unikke funktioner ved Cohesity:

  • Policy baseret beskyttelse
  • Alt-i-et-system (de-dupe storage, backup software, databaser, always-online, fuld HA for alle komponenter software og hardware.)
  • Instant-Mass-Restore: Recovery af 5 eller 50 maskiner på få sekunder
  • SnapTree: Alle backup punkter er fully hydrated og instant-recoverable. Ingen baggrunds IO operationer for at lave syntetiske fulls
  • Test/Dev: Mulighed for at teste recovery når som helst og validere det virker

Hvis du ønsker at få en demo at dette i dit eget datacenter så tag kontakt.

Hvis du vil læse mere om hvordan Cohesity beskytter den fulde VMware Management Stack inklusive cloud foundation så læs mere her:

http://www.cohesity.com/vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-cohesity-white-paper/

Video Demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtAoCi4HcX4

Disaster Recovery and site redundancy with Cohesity

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I have written several blogs on how Cohesity protects your data at the primary site. Cohesity protects the following workloads today:

  • Virtual Machines on VMware
  • Physical Windows and Physical Linux
  • Granular restore of: Files, Folders, MS SQL, MS Exchange and MS SharePoint

All built in-to an infinite web-scale hyper-converged platform that scales linearly with your data growth.

But where it gets even more interesting is how Cohesity will simplify and potentially improve your DR solution. Everyone will agree that the first priority is to have an off site copy of the data. Once we have that we have to consider the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) How much time do you want to spend to bring the data back online.

Cohesity is now changing what we can expect from our DR solutions. By leveraging a policy based approach to data protection. (blog here) We now simply define how many local and remote copies we want of our data. We then apply that policy to virtual machines or physical servers. This operation will take less than 1 minute for an inexperienced VMware administrator 🙂

One option could be:

  • Local backup retention: Daily backup keep for 30 days
  • DR backup retention: Daily backup keep for for 7 days AND Monthly backup keep for 3 years

If we need to recover from our disaster site, this is where Cohesity truly shines. Since everything is self-contained inside the Cohesity OS (management interface, backup software, de-dupe storage) we just need the Cohesity Cluster and a standalone ESXi host to perform the restore. If the ESXi host is without any storage no problem. In fact Cohesity will let you run VM’s on your disaster site directly from a Cohesity NFS based datastore presented to the ESXi host. The restores are instant because of our own SnapTree technology.

Command line update ESXi 6

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Updating a standalone ESXi host is a very easy process with the built-in esxcli command. Here is the high-level process

NOTE: All ESXi embedded patches are cumulative. It means it contains ALL patches. You only need to download the latest version and can safely ignore the rest

  1. Download the latest ESXi Embedded Installable from here: http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/findPatch.portal
  2. Upload the downloaded bundle do a datastore accessible by your ESXi host. I use the built-in datastore browser
  3. Put the ESXi host in maintenance mode
  4. Login with SSH to the ESXi host
  5. Use the following command to update: esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/local/ESXi600-201610001.zip
  6. Reboot the ESXi host
  7. Exit maintenance mode

Here are some pictures of the process:

Picture 1: ESXi version 3620759 before the update

screenshot-2016-10-30-20-49-41

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture 2: Use the datastore browser to upload the downloaded ESXi bundle to a datastore

screenshot-2016-10-30-20-52-04

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture 3: esxcli software vib update

screenshot-2016-10-30-20-57-53

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture 4: After reboot ESXi updated to 4510822

screenshot-2016-10-30-21-01-07

 

DataProtection 2.0 – Policy Driven with Cohesity

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After a hectic #VMworld week it is good to be back in Copenhagen. At Cohesity we had a very busy week and we were doing live demos 3-days straight without any interruptions. The demos are interactive and we get asked a lot of questions such as:

  • Do you support replication to another Cohesity cluster on a DR site?  YES
  • Do you support Physical Windows and Linux? YES
  • Do you support object level restore for MS SQL, SharePoint and Exchange? YES
  • Do you support native archival to the cloud such as Azure, Amazon, Google? YES
  • Do you support tape? YES

All of the basic requirements to replace the current backup solutions is already in place. We support the applications you have today.  Why are people considering moving away from what they have to something new? Let me sum it up

  • Simplicity! – The backup software runs natively in a hyper-converged system platform that can scale to infinity
  • Policy Driven! – All protection is policy based (more on this later)
  • Test / Dev environment! – Do more with the backup data. Every backup is a fully-hydrated snapshot on the Cohesity platform. Example: You can spin up 20 virtual machines in as little as 10 seconds – no data need to be copied due to patented SnapTree technology.
  • Analytics! – Let the backup data be more than insurance. Use it with built-in apps like “pattern search” and “password detector” to run analytics on copies of production data.

During the demo of Cohesity all of these things shines. PowerPoint presentations does not do the product justice. One of the features we demo is our Policy Driven approach to protection of data. 

Lets say we have a customer with the following data retention policy for their tier 1 data

  • Daily backup kept for 30 days
  • Monthly backup kept for 180 days
  • Yearly backup kept for 3650 days
  • Replicate daily backup to DR site and keep it for 1480 days
  • Archive every monthly backup to the cloud and keep it for 3650 days (Azure, Amazon, Google, Openstack, Custom S3, Tape)

It will only take a few minutes to put the numbers in a policy. Below I have created the “Gold Protection Policy”. Once we have the policy we simply need to attach it to a VM / Folder / Cluster / DataCenter / TAG in vCenter. Then the VM will be protected with the policy.

cohesity_policy_gold

Home Lab reinstall – vSphere Host Client is awesome

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Last year I blogged about my home lab and it has been running stable for more than a year. I never found the need to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 since everything just worked.

My old configuration was:

  • 2x Intel NUC5i5MYHE with i5-5300U processor and Intel VPRO/AMT technology
  • 16 GB DDR3L Kingston Memory
  • Kingston E50 240GB SSD
  • 32GB Sandisk Cruzer fit USB Key
  • Synology NAS used as shared NFS datastore
  • ESXi 5.5 and vCenter 5.5

I wanted to get my home lab upgraded to 6.0 update 2 to stay current but at the same time I thought about my vCenter and shared storage usage. I only have a few VM’s running at home, and to be honest I don’t need shared storage or a vCenter for my usage. I had some 800GB Intel S3700 SSD available and choose to go down the route with local storage. One of the reasons for my usage of vCenter is that I access it from a Mac. I need the web client.

After installing the first NUC with a local SSD I tried to login in to the new HTML5 Host Client. What a pleasant surprise. The client is FAST, efficient and works from Chrome on my Mac Book. I deployed a few VM’s and even on my small dual-core NUC running on local S3700 SSD the VM’s performed great. I will probably deploy a vCenter Appliance on my second NUC, but for the home lab it is not really needed.

screenshot-2016-10-14-23-40-11

Project Graveyard – Cohesity to the rescue

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Three weeks into my new role as a Cohesity Sales Engineer it is time to summarize the experience so far. It has been busy three weeks with a lot of customer and partner meetings and at the same time ramp up on all things technical on the platform.

The conversations with customers and partners have had phenomenal feedback. There is definitely a gap in what they offer today and how Cohesity can help them. No one else is offering a true web-scale secondary storage platform that will help the customer with multiple use-cases. There are so many entry points into a customer with Cohesity. I have written other blogs about the Cohesity use-cases and I suggest you start here if you need to learn more.

graveyard

One meeting with a large Scandinavian company was especially interesting. They have a graveyard project where they need to archive virtual servers up to 10 years and be able to restore them and retrieve data. File level restore is not enough, they need to be able to quickly spin up systems that consists of 10 virtual servers or more and access the complete system and get the data out. Once the data is retrieved they will shut down the servers and put them back in the archive. Of course with no changes to the data.

They are in the phase of figuring out how to handle this and they invited Cohesity to a meeting to present how we could solve this complex use-case.

We quickly realized that this would be a perfect fit for Cohesity. What we presented was the following:

  1. Start with a  a 2U Cohesity block that consists of 4 Nodes with 96TB of disk capacity. Once they run out of capacity they simply add more nodes 1 by 1. There is no requirement to add 4 nodes at a time. The platform scales infinite.
  2. Once configured and installed register the vCenter server to the Cohesity platform.
  3. Create a policy that defines how long to save the data on the platform
  4. Run a 1-time projection job of the servers that need to go to the graveyard.

The great thing about this is that this is a platform without complexity. Storage and Backup software is all built into the box. The customer only needs to supply the platform with IP addresses and connect it to their 10Gb network infrastructure.

They could at the other end of the spectrum choose to use tape or just some JBOD disks. But a key requirement is the ability to easily access data. And this is where the magic happens.

Cohesity will help the customer achieve the following:

  1. All data backed up is fully indexed. Google-like search capabilities to find whatever they need
  2. File level restore available
  3. Full VM instant restore available
  4. Use the built in Test / Dev use case to pick as many VMs as they need to instantly spin up a clone of the machines that have been backed up as part of a graveyard project. The customer will be able to spin up an environment of 10 or more virtual machines in as little as 10 seconds! This will provide the customer with the ability to run a complex system at any time they want. They can also use this feature to verify that the systems they have put in the graveyard works as they want.

With these capabilities the customer saw that they were actually getting more than they asked for and the loved it. No longer was it project graveyard – now it was project walking dead

the-walking-dead-zombies

#VMworld Day 1 General Session

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Pat Gelsinger CEO went on stage to discuss the challenges of IT and looking ahead in the crystal ball. The big theme of this years show is: be_TOMORROW

A lot of talk about public cloud and private cloud. This is a growing market but it will take many years for the public cloud to take over most of the workloads.

This lead into the first big annoncement of the week: “VMware Cloud Foundation” It is a cross cloud architecture that will bring all of the goodness of the private data center to the cloud. VMware will be able to deliever Freedom and Control while using the cloud and not sacrisifing one of them.

Pat also let us know that VSAN now got more than 5000 customers! I am sure at next years VMworld this number will be even more impressive.

VMware showed a tech-preview demo of the VMware Cloud Services and it showed how it could handle any cloud including Amazon. It was suprising how much Amazon was mentioned, VMware now understands that Amazon is here and the best thing to do is built a system that will provide VMware customers with freedom and control in a multi-cloud world.