vSphere

vSphere Data Protection-Part 3: Backup And Restore

Manish Jha

In previous post of this series we deployed the VDP appliance and also had a look on some of the basic configuration steps. Now its time to test how VDP works. 

If you accidently landed on this post and have missed earlier post of this series, you can read them from below links:

1: Introduction to vSphere Data Protection

2: Installing & Configuring vSphere Data Protection

Lets jump into lab and see how backup and restore works with VDP.

Before actually starting with creating any new backup/restore job, I want to first emphasize on the backup window configuration.

Backup and Maintenance Window

Bt default VDP starts taking backup of virtual machine at 8 PM and it has a backup window of 12 hours i.e from 08 PM to 08 AM. Modify this backup window as per business hours of your organization. 

When backup windows completes, VDP performs testing the backup to see if the taken backups are a good candidate when it comes to restoring stuffs.… Read the rest

vSphere Data Protection-Part 2: Installation & Configuration

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we discussed about VDP and its capabilities. We also discussed about VDP architecture and different deployment options available. In this post we will learn how to install and configure VDP. Lets get started.

Requirements for installing VDP

Make sure your infrastructure meets following requiremnts met before deploying VDP:

  • A static IP address is required for the VDP appliance and any additional proxy appliances.
  • DNS entries created ahead of time for forward and reverse lookup.
  • Ensure enough capacity is available on the datastore where backups will reside.
  • Editions of vSphere Essentials Plus and above (or vSphere with Operations Management / vCloud Suite) include licensing for vSphere Data Protection.
  • The vCenter Server and attached ESXi hosts must be configured with an NTP server. 
  • vCenter Server 5.5 or higher. If you are using vCenter 5.5 U3 and want to deploy VDP 6.1, 6.1.1, or 6.1.2, then see VMWare KB-2146825
  • Esxi host v5.1 or higher.
… Read the rest

vSphere Data Protection-Part 1: Introduction

Manish Jha

I am now in final legs of my VCAP6-Deploy exam prepration and objective 7.2 revolves all around VDP. Since I have no prior experience with VDP, this is the best time for me to explore this product.

I have broken down this series in various part so that the posts do not get too lengthy and this is the first part where we will be discussing about what VDP is and what it offers when it comes to backing up and recovering vSphere deployments. 

What is vSphere Data Protection (VDP)?

vSphere Data Protection is a backup and recovery solution designed for vSphere environments which is powered by EMC Avamar. It provides agentless, image-level virtual-machine backups to disk. It also provides application-aware protection for business-critical Microsoft applications (such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint) along with WAN-efficient, encrypted backup data replication. 

Capabilities of vSphere Data Protection

The key capabilities of VDP are (not limited to):

  • Agent-less virtual machine backup and restore that reduces complexity and deployment time
  • Integration with EMC Data Domain for additional scale, efficiency, and reliability
  • Flexibility to restore replicated backup data at both the source and target locations
  • Automated backup verification that provides the highest level of confidence in backup data integrity
  • Appliance and backup data protection via a checkpoint-and-rollback mechanism
  • File Level Restore (FLR), which enables granular file and folder restoration without the need for an agent in Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines
  • Significantly reduced backup data disk space requirements using Avamar variable-length deduplication technology
  • VDP make use of vSphere Storage APIs and Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technique to reduce load on the vSphere host infrastructure and minimize backup window requirements
  • Reliable, efficient replication of backup data between vSphere Data Protection appliances for redundancy and offsite data protection

Consult this whitepaper by VMware to know more about these capabilities in greater details and also what other capabilities lies within VDP.… Read the rest

Distributed Switch Port Group Bindings

Manish Jha

In a vSphere environment where vDS is being used for networking connectivity, there are several options available for what should be the type of port binding that is to be used for a portgroup. Have you ever wondered which Port Binding setting is most suitable for the distributed portgroups to get optimal performance? 

In this post we will be talking about some use cases for using different type of port bindings with vDS.

There are 3 types of Port Binding that is available at portgroup level

  1. Static Binding
  2. Dynamic Binding
  3. Ephemeral Binding

pb-1.PNG

We will discuss about these one by one.

Static Binding

When you connect a virtual machine to a port group configured with static binding, a port is immediately assigned and reserved for it, guaranteeing connectivity at all times. The port is disconnected only when the virtual machine is removed from the port group. You can connect a virtual machine to a static-binding port group only through vCenter Server.… Read the rest

Network IO Control in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

In this post we will discuss about what is NIOC and why we need it. We will also configure NIOC in lab. 

What is Network IO Control (NIOC)?

Network I/O Control (NIOC) was first introduced with vSphere 4.1 and it is a vDS feature that allows a vSphere administrator to prioritize different type of network traffic by making use of Resource pools and shares/limits etc. NIOC does the same for network tarffic which SIOC does for storage traffic.

What problem NIOC is solving?

In old days physical servers were equipped with as many as 8 (or more) ethernet cards and administrators (as a best practice) configured vSphere to use dedicated NIC for passing various network traffic like management traffic or vMotion or fault tolerance. Managing these many physical cables were a bit cumbersome.

Modern day servers addressed this issue by introducing servers with support for 10 GBPS/40 GBPS network speed and these servers have only 2 NIC’s and all the traffic is passed via these 2 NIC’s.… Read the rest

vSwitch NIC Teaming and Network Failure Detection Policies

Manish Jha

What is NIC Teaming and why you need it?

Uplinks is what provides connectivity between a vSwitch and a physical  switch. This uplinks passes all the traffic generated by virtual machines or the vmkernel adapters. 

But what happens when that physical network adapter fails, when the cable connecting that uplink to the physical network fails, or the upstream physical switch to which that uplink is connected fails? With a single uplink, network connectivity to the entire vSwitch and all of its ports or port groups is lost. This is where NIC teaming comes in.

NIC teaming means that we are taking multiple physical NICs on a given ESXi host and combining them into a single logical link that provides bandwidth aggregation and redundancy to a vSwitch. NIC teaming can be used to distribute load among the available uplinks of the team.

Below diagram illustrates vSwitch connectivity to physical world using 2 uplinks.… Read the rest

VLAN tagging and PVLAN’s in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

VLAN’s enable a single physical LAN segment to be further isolated so that groups of ports are isolated from one another as if they were on physically different segments. Using VLAN’s, administrator get following advantages:

  • Integrates the host into a pre-existing environment
  • Isolate and secure network traffic
  • Reduce network traffic congestion

In a physical environment, servers are equipped with dedicated physical NIC that are in turn connected to a physical switch. VLANs in physical world are usually controlled by setting the VLAN ID on the physical switch port and then setting the server’s IP address to correspond to that NIC’s VLAN.

In a virtual environment, dedicating a physical NIC (pNIC) to each VM that resides on the host is not possible. In reality, a physical NIC of the Esxi host service many VMs, and these VM’s may need to be connected to different VLANs. So the method of setting a VLAN ID on the physical switch port doesn’t work.… Read the rest

Switch Discovery Protocols

Manish Jha

In physical networking space, switches are connected to one or more adjacent switch forming a web of switches which can talk to each other. This web of switches is referred as “neighbourhood of switching”.

Virtual switches (standard or vDS) are connected to these physical switches via physical uplinks. These uplinks are terminating at a particular port of the physical switch and that port itself have some characteristics like a VLAN ID etc defined there. These characteristic values are not exposed to virtual switches by default.

What I mean by this is by just looking at virtual switch diagram in vSphere client, we can’t tell which uplink of vSwitch is connected to which port of physical switch, or what is the make and model of backend physical switch.  

Switch discovery protocols allow vSphere administrators to determine which physical switch port is connected to a given vSphere standard switch or vSphere distributed switch.… Read the rest

Configuring QoS and Traffic Filtering in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

During my VCAP6-Deploy exam preparation, I found this topic quiet a bit interesting and difficult as well as I have never ever laid my hands on Quality of Service type of thinks in respect of networking. Also my concepts were not very clear on topics like DSCP, QoS, COS etc, so I decided to learn more about these this time and write a blog post on the same.

What is Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic filtering?

In a vSphere distributed switch 5.5 and later, by using the traffic filtering and marking policy, you can protect the virtual network from unwanted traffic and security attacks or apply a QoS tag to a certain type of traffic.

The goal of using QoS for network is to ensure that the most important network traffic gets to where it needs to go while suffering least amount of latency when there is congestion in network.  … Read the rest

Configuring NetFlow in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

NetFlow is a mechanism to analyze network traffic flow and volume to determine where traffic is coming from, where it is going to, and how much traffic is being generated. NetFlow-enabled routers export traffic statistics as NetFlow records which are then collected by a NetFlow collector.

Traffic flows are defined as the combination of source and destination IP addresses, source and destination TCP or UDP ports, IP, and IP Type of Service (ToS). Network devices that support NetFlow, tracks and report information on the traffic flows, and send this information to a NetFlow collector. Using the data collected, network admins gain detailed insight into the types and amount of traffic flows across the network.

Netflow was originally developed by Cisco and has become a de-facto industry standard for analysing network traffic. VMware introduced Netflow for vDS in vSphere v5.

Note: Netflow is only supported with vDS and not standard switches.

There are various versions of NetFlow ranging from from v1 to v10.… Read the rest