I have received some truly great news from VMware about ESX 4 Update 1, which I am sure many Veeam Backup and Replication customers will appreciate.
Recently we had to contact VMware Storage Alliance team to share a growing number of complaints from our customers about vStorage API Hot Add processing mode not being available for vSphere license levels lower than Advanced.
Indeed, if you look at the vSphere licensing structure, Hot Add feature which this backup mode relies upon is not available for the lower versions:
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Lately I had to brief a few people on vStorage API, and everyone used to ask me the same question: what is the difference between vStorage API and VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB)? It was really hard to explain until I found this analogy, and despite it is not technically flawless, it really explains the difference very well for non-developer type folks.
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As a person who follows VMware Backup market and evaluates all of its players closely every day, I decided to share my opinion on this VMworld 2009 award for Business Continuity and Data Protection category, where Vizioncore Inc. took the gold award for vRanger Pro 4.0.
Here’s what we know officially:
The gold winner provides a cleaner interface and all-around faster tool, speed being crucial in this category.
Let me review these claims now, one by one.
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As promised in my previous article, today I will provide some recommendation on choosing best host operating system for VMware. I personally consider this to be Linux, however for historical reasons I am stuck with a number of Windows-based hosts in our environment, so it is quite easy for me to compare both.
Our Windows-based hosts mostly use Windows Server 2003 as host operating system, while for Linux hosts I’ve chosen the Debian Linux. Yes, I am sure there are a lot of other great Linux distributives. But I am not looking for hard ways, and back in time I fell in love with Debian because it always “just works” and because updating/patching it is a breeze.
To start off, here is the summary table of most important points for my decision to use Linux over Windows.
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If you want to know how to install and run VMware Player inside of a virtual machine running on VMware ESX host, this post is for you.
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Past year, I’ve been watching threads like this constantly popping up on virtualization forums here and there, with people asking for advices and wondering what is the real difference between VMware ESXi and VMware Server. I used to promise myself to share my own experiences sometimes – and I finally got time to do this.
It is no secret that many virtualization enthusiasts and small companies looking to try out virtualization usually do not have neither budget for paid hypervisor, nor fancy host hardware. So they need free hypervisor which is able to work on hardware they already have.
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[UPDATE 01/05/10] Good news! The patch ESX Patch ESX400-200912401-BG improving the disk read speed issue discussed below is now available from VMware, please refer to VMware support KB article 1016291 for more information and download. My quick testing showed about 2 times improvement.
Last week, Veeam has released version 3.1 of Veeam Backup product with support for VMware vSphere. We were the first to provide support for vSphere in VMware backup product, so together with early vSphere adopters, we got to be the first to see what ESX 4.0 is all about.
As soon as first customers upgraded to vSphere after having Veeam Backup 3.1 installed, we have immediately started receiving first complaints on the network backup performance after upgrading ESX hosts to ESX 4.0. Customers using service console agent backup mode observed 2-3 times backup speed reduction! So I had to get my hands dirty and find out what has changed in ESX 4.0 which resulted such a great performance decrease.
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