vSphere Data Protection-Part 4: Configure a Backup Verification job

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, we had a look on how to take backup and restore of VM’s using VDP and how to clone/edit existing backup jobs.

In this post we will discuss about how to configure a backup verification job to ensure integrity of backups taken by VDP. 

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

3: Backup And Restore VM’s using VDP

Automatic Backup Verification (ABV)
Automatic Backup Verification (ABV) is a scheduled or on-demand mechanism for verification of backups that ensures the integrity of restore points. ABV has the following characteristics:

  • Backups are restored to a temporary virtual machine with the following naming convention: VDP_VERIFICATION_<vm-name> -<unique number>
  • Backups are restored with no network conflicts, because the NIC is always disabled during the ABV operation.
… Read the rest

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

Configuring vCD 9.0 To Send Metric Data to Cassandra DB

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, we learnt how to install and configure Cassandra DB for collecting metrics data from vCD. We also discussed that kairosdb is no longer needed to be installed alongwith cassandra for this purpose.

In this post we will learn how to configure vCD 9.0 to send metrics data to Cassandra DB.

This configuration is done by using cell management tool utility which is located in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin directory. 

Run cell-management-tool cassandra –help command to see all available options which you need to specify to configure vCD correctly so that it start sending all metrics data to cassandra.

vcd-cass.PNG

Typically this is the command to do so:

[root@vcd90 ~]# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cassandra –configure –create-schema –cluster-nodes 192.168.109.53 –username cassandra –password cassandra –port 9042 –ttl 15

… Read the rest

Installing Cassandra DB for collecting vCD 9.0 Metrics Data

Manish Jha

Cassandra DB is needed for capturing and storing vCloud Director metrics data so that it can be displayed in portal to end users so that users are aware of VM resource utilization etc.

Prior to vCD v9.0, we needed kairosdb + cassandra together for capturing and storing the metrics data, but things have changed now. VMware has removed the requirement of kairosdb and now metrics data can be sent straight to cassandra database.  This metric data in turn can be viewed in tenant UI.

As per vCD 9.0 documentation 

Cassandra is an open source database that you can use to provide the backing store for a scalable, high-performance solution for collecting time series data like virtual machine metrics. If you want vCloud Director to support retrieval of historic metrics from virtual machines, you must install and configure a Cassandra cluster and use the cell-management-tool to connect the cluster to vCloud Director.

… Read the rest

Find vCloud Director Orphaned VM’s

Manish Jha

We all are familiar with concept of orphaned VM’s in vSphere. However orphaned VM’s in vCloud Director have slightly different meaning. 

From vCD perspective, virtual machines that are referenced in the vCenter database but not in the vCloud Director database are considered orphan VMs because vCD cannot access them even though they may be consuming compute and storage resources. This kind of reference mismatch can arise for a number of reasons, including high-volume workloads, database errors, and administrative actions.

Starting with vCD 8.2, VMware added one more option to cell management utility to locate such orphaned VM’s so that they can be removed or re-imported into vCloud Director. This utility is not available with any vCD version prior to 8.20.

The command to find orphaned VM’s is find-orphan-vms command which is used in conjunction with cell-management-tool and enables an administrator to list these VMs .

To list the options available with this command, run command: 

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool find-orphan-vms –help

vcd-orphaned-vms.PNG

If you are using self-signed certificates in vCD, then you have to specify truststore file and truststore password along with supplying vcd username/password and vcenter credentials etc.… Read the rest