ESX Virtualization

4 Virtualization Whitepapers in One Kit

Vladan SEGET — Sat, 26 May 2012 12:00:17 +0000

Get 4 Free whitepapers in one kit

There is free download offer from Tradepub which you might want to check. In fact, when registering for this download, you’ll get 4 Free Whitepapers.

This 4 selection White papers brings some questions and answers about the TOP mistakes when it comst to virtualization, gives some WAN optimization tips, talks about desktop virtualization from any device. And there is also one paper which talk Hyper-V.

In this Single Request Download you’ll get those 4 Whitepapers:

- 14 Common Virtualization Mistakes – And How To Avoid Them
- WAN Optimization Gives Rise to Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure
- Desktop Virtualization: A Cost-Effective First Step For Creating a Virtualized Desktop Experience Anytime, Anywhere, Any Device
- Microsoft Hyper-V Backup and Recovery Best Practices

This is a free offer provided by Tradepub, and which you can also find in my Free Virtualization Content section of my website. When you get there, there is a collapse menu which enables you to choose the sub-section you need. For example you can drill down through Information Technology Section > Servers and server OS > Virtualization… to get to your favorite topic.

You might also be interested in subscribing to our website via RSS or by E-mail. I hope that you enjoy this small selection of resources.

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Newly released VMware vSphere 5 Training - VCP-510. Don't have a lab to prepare for your VCP? Try to learn with those High quality DVD training package. Read my Article on the Release. Prepare to pass your VCP-510 exam with those learning courses done by David Davis and Elias Khnaser.. Check my home lab.

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Principal Keyboard Shortcuts of VMware Workstation 8

Vladan SEGET — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:20:17 +0000

Keyboard Shortcuts VMware Workstation 8

To speed up the daily use of VMware Workstation, it’s good to know some keyboard shortcuts. I wanted to point out some of them that I use the most. Shortcuts that save you some time searching through the icons or menus.

There is much more than listed below but I won’t bother you to list all of them, since the not All are used on daily basis.

So here we go. Here is the first one.

CTRL + Alt – This one is the first shortcut I ever learned on VMware Workstation, a couple of years ago…. This shortcut does free the mouse cursor from the Guest OS when the mouse “get stuck” inside of the VM. Youll need to know this shortcut before you actually install VMware Tools inside of your guest OS. If you don’t know this shortcut, you can’t do much…

CTRL + Enter – Full Screen. You like to use Full screen? Me too. It’s excellent to “mask” your underlying OS and make to think to your friends that you’re running natively whatever operating system on your laptop..

CTRL + Alt + Righ Arrow – This is next necessary shortcut to know if you’re using Full Screen mode, since this shortcut will get you, In full screen mode, to the next powered-on virtual machine.

CTRL + Alt + Left Arrow – Same as previous one, but this time you’ll navigate to the previous powered-on virtual machine.

CTRL + Alt + Ins – If you want to log in, Sends a command to the VM in order to invoke CTRL + ALt + Del, to shut down or, depending on the guest operating system, log out of the guest operating system. This command is received by the virtual machine.

Ctrl+Shift+U – While you’re in unity mode and you need to make appear the start menu on your Guest OS system.

You can change all of those shortcuts if you go to Select Edit > Preferences > Hot Keys. In fact when you click one of the non selected buttons there for example, to use Ctrl+Shift to release control from the current virtual machine, click the Ctrl and Shift buttons. You’ll see that the text under the hot key buttons changes as well and the new value for the hot keys is showing now…..

Enjoy.. -:)

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VMware View 5.1 Performance

Vladan SEGET — Thu, 24 May 2012 08:29:34 +0000

VMware View 5.1 performance improvements.

VMware View 5.1 has been released recently. The 5.1 release brings many improvements and enhancements as I reported in my article Download and test VMware View 5.1 now. I this article I focused on the new features and integrations introduced in this release.

There has been a very good read on VROOM blog from VMware, which shows you the improvements for the end user by using simple example of drawing in in MS Paint. This simple test which can be done by anyone. The test with the two different access protocols. RDP 7 and through View 5.1.

A quick quote:

As a simple visual test of this improvement, the picture below show a user rapidly drawing a spiral in mspaint, when connecting to their remote desktop using both RDP7 and View 5.1. With RDP7, the resulting spiral is obviously formed from rough polygons, whereas, with View 5.1, the spiral is significantly smoother (while this test may seem an overly simple example, it is heavily influenced by the speed and frequency at which the client communicates with the remote desktop and clearly conveys the likely differences in scrolling and dragging performance

Network Improvements – The post outlines also other enhancement, for example to the users connected over Wi-Fi networks by using tablets or laptops, where those enhacements can be benefical for playing videos in the VDI sessions and the improvements in the networking helps to achieve up to 8 times better performance in some cases.

Thin Clients – There has been also many optimization done for Thin clients running Atom or ARM platforms. The improvements for video playback performance is improved by as much as 3X over previous versions.

PCoIP Efficiency – The improvements in the PCoIP protocol continues. Some refinements to compression protocols and general performance optimization brings more improvements in reductions in CPU consumption. There is an additional 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.

You can buy VMware View 5.1 through this page.

Get the best VMware View Training from TrainSignal.

Excellent ressource whitepaper is this VMware View 5.1 Evaluator’s Guide.

The guide is divided into the following main sections:

1. Key New Features of VMware View 5
2. Description of VMware View Components
3. Setting Up a View Evaluation Environment
4. Evaluation Tasks

Enjoy… -:)

Source: VMware VROOM! Blog

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How-to disable SSL Encryption in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to speed up P2V conversions

Vladan SEGET — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:44:26 +0000

How-to speed up P2V conversion by disabling SSL encryption in VMware vCenter Converter 5 Standalone.

I just found VMware KB article which guides through a possibility to disable SSL encryption in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0, during conversion process. As you might be aware, during the P2V process the copied data are encrypted by VMware vCenter Converter. This might slightly impact the performance.

This is a default setting for the VMware vCenter converter 5 standalone. What must be done is to disable SSL encryption for the converter worker. This can be done by editing the local converter-worker.xml file and restart the windows service called VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker.

Follow those steps:

01. Locate the converter-worker.xml file. By default it is located at:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone on Windows Vista and newer operating systems
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone for older releases

Note: On my laptop running the Windows 7 x64 version, the file was located at this folder:

“C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone”

02. Backup the converter-worker.xml file, just in case…..

03. Open the file in a text editor and locate the tag pair . It is located inside the tag and has a value of true. Change the value to false. Save and close the file.

04. Restart the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Worker service on the machine.

You’re done.

Source: VMware KB Disabling SSL encryption on VMware Converter Standalone 5.0

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vKernel – Quest updates vOps Server Standard to version 5.0

Vladan SEGET — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:48 +0000

The new version of vOps Server Standard 5.0 from vKernel (Quest) has been released

Major update for vKernel introduces new VM tracking feature which follows the changes that has been made to VM(s) in virtual environment. Those problems were unnown to traditional physical only environments, where the CPU, Memory size was fixed due to a physical hardware. And if any changes were made, the server had to be shut down > then upgrade CPU or Memory > and power back on.

Those days are gone. In today’s large virtual environment, the changes to the VMs are operated by many admins which access the VI infrastructure simultaneously.

If you’re working in large admin team where many admins has credentials for an elevated vCenter access, then this tracking feature will be able to identify not only that there has been a change done by particular person of your admin team, but also which changes has been made by that person, in how many VMs, etc…

This very powerful function enables to track the potential changes to your virtual infrastructure, and revert back automatically in case that performance issues occurs.

Even small changes can make significant impact on part of your environment. That’s where this new tracking feature in vOps Standard will come handy. What exactly this feature provides?

What’s new in vOps Server Standard 5.0

- Tracking VMs and virtualized storage
- Possibility to track a difference from “Golden Image”
- Changes organized as a Timeline
- Rollback Changes with Right click or Automated.
- Admin can see who made a change and when
- Performance Changes can be identified quickly and reverted back.

Additional Enhancements:

Auto-Deployment of Reserved VM Slots – If tied to a VM template these reservations allow for VMs to be auto-deployed with the click of a button.

Manual Overrides for Automated Rightsizing – Allocations for VM vCPUs and memory can now be overridden manually for specific VMs, and then implemented with rightsizing automation.

Exclusion of Local Datastores - VM administrators can exclude local datastores when assessing storage capacity so as to only focus on the storage available in the SAN.

Efficiency Trend Reports - 12 new reports showing the trending of system resource efficiency are now available

Chargeback Enhancements – possibility to generate costs only reports for end user customers. Charging per Ghz or per vCPU usage.

The new update of vKernel vOps Server Standard 5.0 with the new functionality - the historical tracking of changes – also applies to vOps Server Enterprise version customers and it’s a free of charge update.

Here is another screenshot from the dashboard of the new update from vKernel. You can click on the image to see larger view.

As you can see, there is also a Risk column, which enables you to filter on changes which are critical. By clicking the header of this column, you’ll see all the critical changes that has been made.

Those critical changes can be modified by the administrator.

There is also a video of What’s new in the vOps Server Standard Video, which has been recorded by Alex Rosenblat.

Source: vKernel

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14 Common Virtualization Mistakes – And How To Avoid Them

Vladan SEGET — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:10:04 +0000

Free paper from Globalknowledge showing the first 14 usual mistakes that happens after P2V.

After you virtualize the whole physical environment in your enterprise, you do the physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions, you think that the job is done? Wrong. There is much more than that.

Learn from this paper, which are the principal mistakes that are made by administrators starting with virtualization. This whitepaper brings on the table some essential questions which might interest you, as a virtualization admin.

The Author - Dheeraj (Raj) Tolani has been working with Global Knowledge as a contract instructor teaching various courses, including authorized VMware training.

He has been in the industry for over 18 years working with various technologies, including Cisco, Banyan Vines, Microsoft, Novell, and VMware.

Dheeraj has worked as a consultant for various medical, financial, legal, government, and publishing companies.

You can Request the download from this link.

Please note that there are quite a few things that they’re asking to fill in the form, before you got the e-mail with the download link, well… -:(

The good news is that those informations are re-used when you come back and want to download another whitepaper. Note that I run a section called on Free Virtualization Content - you’ll find tons of papers from storage, networking, virtualization….

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Top Free Courses from VMware Education

Vladan SEGET — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:12:12 +0000

Free Trainings from VMware Education

VMware Education has a very good choice of learning courses at the Public Source Catalog offerings. There are paid courses, but also free of charge learning courses delivered to your web browser. I’m gonna put some spotlight today on those courses there.

Not all of those training courses are for the latest products, but being so popular in the past, VMware probably keeps them still in place for some time. For example, there are still trainings for VMware Worsktation 7, Fusion 3…. Products that has been updated several months ago.

The best advantage of those free courses done by VMware is that those are free and you don’t have to travel anywhere in order to take those courses. Here is my small selection one of those

My selection of Free VMware Courses by VMware Education:

- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Design [v5.X]
- VMware vCenter Operations Manager Fundamentals [V5.X]
- Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange 2010 with VMware-Customer

Then you can also have a look at the paid offerings, since those courses might be necessary in order to achieve VCP 5, VCAP5-DCA or VCAP5-DCD.

You’ll be able to find all the best sellers courses from VMware Education at the VMware Education Services webpage.

My selection of Top Paid VMware Courses:

- VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0]
- VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.0]
- VMware vSphere: What’s New [V5.0]
- VMware View: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0]
- VMware vSphere: Overview [V5.0]
- VMware vCloud: Architecturing the VMware vCloud

Stay updated:

If you want to subscribe via RSS to receive daily updates which you can read in your RSS Reader, you can do so by clicking on this link. If you don’t know how RSS works or What is RSS, just read my Page where I explain everything.

Few years back even myself I haven’t used RSS and I was an IT professional.. so it’s no shame not knowing. Every one learns something every day… -:)

Enjoy..-:)

Source: VMware Education

…

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Session hijacking (or sidejacking) – Whitepaper by Thawte

Vladan SEGET — Sat, 19 May 2012 09:28:52 +0000

This paper from Thawte discusses some critical points of Sessions Highjacking and how to prevent them.

What is Session Highjacking?

It is simply a way of taking over a web session by stealing the session ID (which is normally stored within a cookie) and masquerading as that user. Of course, once the hacker has managed to gain the victim’s session details he can do anything on that network that the legitimate user is entitled to do.

Which tools hackers uses to steal the sessions credentials?

FaceNiff is an Android application, released in June of last year, which allows hackers to intercept web session profiles over wireless networks and steal user credentials for Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and other social media sites.

You’ll be able to find out more in the whitepaper which can be downloaded from this link. Please note that the Editor asks quite a few details to fill in the form, so it’s up to you, if you have enough passion to fill all that info to get the paper! I warned you…

The good news is that those informations are re-used when you come back and want to download another whitepaper. I run a section called on Free Virtualization Content (see right hand side of my blog – “Featured Sites”) - you’ll find tons of papers from storage, networking, virtualization….

Here is the link.

This paper was sponsored by Thawte.

Enjoy… -:)

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This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET.

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Tintri VMstore 1.4 will bring new scheduled snapshots and VAAI for NFS

Vladan SEGET — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:15:43 +0000

Tintri VMstore 1.4 – new features announced.

I was able to assist to a demo of new version of Tintri VMstore 1.4. If you don’t know Tintri, I would like quickly introduce you to an storage vendor company which creates some really cool and fast entreprise class storage with mixed disk systems (SATA + SSD). Tintri uses Storage Appliance called VMstore.

The VMstore is a storage appliance which uses it’s own file system and presents the available storage to your ESX/ESXi hosts via NFS. The storage network is connected through 10 Gigs network adapters.

I was able to see the new version of VMstore 1.4 which will be available to new and existing customers in June 2012. This update brings some new features with scheduled snapshots and VAAI for NFS. The end of 2012 will also brings replication possibility with another planned update, which will enhance the Tintri’s capabilities even further. Async ~~and synchc~~ replication is planned, which means that VMware SRM, which does host based replication in the version 5, will have another competitor to deal with.

No I’m not a storage guru. I use the storage that I work with with but I’m not a storage expert. I’m interested in the speed I can get out of a storage with low latency and also I like simple storage interfaces. Tintri provides all that in super simplified dashboard and the storage management is super easy. No LUNs to provision… no datastores to create.. -:) In fact, as a consultant, by deploying those devices I would save some time (and money) in order to put this gear into production.

The VM’s System Disks runs from Flash, the Data disks from SATA to keep the costs down. But I simplify here…The speed of the VMs is maximized and also Tintri uses it’s own technique to align the VMs to the Tintri’s Filesystem to achieve the best performance. This is quite unique – the Auto Alignement of VMs, which can recover up to 30 % of lost performance through your VI.

In the demo to which I assisted, I was able to see the difference in cloning without and with VAAI support. The VAAI support makes cloning look like copy-paste of Microsoft Word file in Windows Explorer. It’s so blazing fast that you must really pay attention to see the cloning actually, otherwise the operation is already finished if you don’t look close enough!

The cloning without VAAI, well you know how it works from the speed standpoint by using SAN devices without VAAI. Nothing sexy… -:) Especially for VMs that are 40Gigs and larger. The demo I saw, the clonig operation took 1-2 sec for a VM this size, but I was told that it would be the same for a VM which size is 1Tb. It’s because Tintri has a very efficient use of data and metadata.

VMstore by tintri. Click on the image below to see larger view.

The new Scheduled Snapshot feature – this functionality will be available in few months from now, June 2012. How it works. You do have the possibility to setup scheduled snapshots in order to back up individual VMs. This solutions is per VMDK level snapshots.

The Scheduled Snapshot Feature can actually replace backup software, because even the Individual File Level Restore is possible, because you can Hot-Add and mount the whole data disk and then do copy-paste of your file. Usage of your backup software can be then used to back up the snapshots made by Tintri and sent them to remote location for DR purposes.

Those snapshots can be crash consistent or VM consistent. The latter one quiesces the VM and than the snapshot is taken, which is slower, but guarantee the consistency for restore.

Just to give you an idea on how the clones and snapshots works under Tintri. The snapshots and clones are not the same as the snapshots or clones you do through your hypervisor, through vSphere. Read this:

Tintri snapshots and clones are operations on the VM itself (and just the VM!), and make very efficient use of data and metadata and impose very little, if any, performance overhead. This is achieved by sharing both data and metadata at a fine granularity and by designing the core data paths from the ground up to work efficiently with snapshots and clones. Snapshots and clones can be created instantaneously regardless of the size of the VM, and use no additional space until they are modified.

The result of this is that after I saw the clone of 25 VMs almost instantly, they were consuming almost no space! Just have a look at the screenshot below:

I had a couple of questions about the Maintenance and how it works. But first of all it’s a gear with lot’s of redundancy. So if there is a problem on an individual hardware component, there is usually a second one which has already taken over.

Redundancy is assured by double raid controlers and double 10 Gigs NICs. Tintri also provides hardware service maintenance contracts in order to assure the hardware maintenance. If you need to upload log files, you can do so with a single click. The data’s are sent to Tintri over SSL connection. Then will look up and calls you back to solve the problem.

Here you can see a screenshot from the “hardware” monitoring page.

How is Tintri different from other, classic storage vendors. I think the best is to take a quick quote from the Tintri’s website:

There are no LUNs or volumes, tiers, RAID groups or other traditional storage objects that create complexity in a virtualized environment. Provisioning storage for VMs is simpler and faster. VMware™ administrators will feel right at home: The VM objects in VMstore are the same ones used in VMware vCenter™, and the VMs and vDisks will be familiar to VMware vSphere™ users.

How Tintri Stands-up from the crowd?

By adding more features to the Software Appliance, Tintri is closing the gap between the need of solution for real time monitoring and troubleshooting, since you can very quickly find out where your bottlenecks are.

By adding the scheduled snapshot feature they practically tries to push back the standard backup vendors which provides backup solutions with daily backups with e-mail reports. The scheduled snapshots does have an advantage that the performance of the VM isn’t altered during the time that the snapshot is taken, like we can usually experience during the usual snapshot operation at the host level, taken by the hypervisor and ordered by your backup software.

On the screenshot below you can see the array based snapshot which operates at the VM level and provides the possibility to have a scheduling and retention policy. Again, click on the image to see larger view.

We could spend hours to talk about Tintri and the features that the small 3U box provides. Small in size, but big in features. An entreprise class features… -:)

But, you can also have a look at their website – Tintri.com

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Enjoy..

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This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET.

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Trilead VM Explorer 4 product review

Vladan SEGET — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:50:15 +0000

New version of VM Explorer from Trilead – v. 4.0 which supports VMware vSphere and Hyper-V

Trilead VM Explorer 4 has been released few days ago and I have been asked to do a product review. Since the product has Hyper-V support, I installed Hyper-V host in my lab in order to test the Hyper-V backups.

VM Explorer 4 does provide VMware vSphere and Hyper-V backups from one small msi package weighting 13.5 Mb. With this one tool you can manage your backups, restore operations, replications and also file level restore. If you run production environment with those two hypervisors, you might be interested in this tool since the licensing options are unique. In fact to license VM Explorer, you don’t pay per physical socket, but per installation. It means that with one license you can, in most cases, backup the whole virtual environment.

If you’re running older vSphere Environment, below you can find the versions of ESX/ESXi that are supported to use with VM Explorer 4.0.

Versions support: VMware ESX 3.0.X/3.5/3i, VMware ESX 4.0/vSphere & 4i, VMware ESXi 5.0, VMware vCenter 4 + 5,
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (SP1).

Please note that before you install this product, you must first install .NET 4.0 in your environment

Now Let’s start with the review. As I said in the beginning of my article, for this occasion, I have temporarily transformed one of my ESXi 5 hosts into Hyper-V host. I disconnected the USB stick, where my ESXi 5 is installed, out and installed a copy of Hyper-V on one local SATA hard drive.

I will be running a couple of Hyper-V VMs on another local disk on that host. The VM Explorer 4.0 will be installed on the same physical Hyper-V host and the destination of the backups will by my drobo device which is connected via iSCSI.

The iSCSI network for this test is completely isolated gigabit network going through small gigabit switch. Only one host and the Drobo device are connected through this switch.

Trilead VM Explorer is small in size product and the installation took only few seconds (after the required step of installing .NET 4.0). The default screen provides you with option where you can install the product license, or start with Free version. See the differences in both editions in this page at Trilead’s website. I have requested a trial license through e-mail. This trial expires after 10 days, which might be a bit short for someone, but I’m sure you can ask for another one if you need to test this product further.

On the image below you can see the initial connection to my Hyper-V host and other possibilities. You can click on the image to see larger view.

Once the server type is selected, you have to click on the Test Connection Button, in order for the Add Button to became active. You’re asked about the connection credentials, domain and IP address of your host.

All this takes like 3 seconds. You can’t really make the setup process more easy. I definitely have more work with the screenshots here than you on figuring out how to get started… -:).

Once the Hyper-V server added to the dashboard, it’s possible to create a first backup. I started with a right click on one of my VMs and as you can see, one of the options is for scheduled backup. I took that option.

The next screen let you choose the backup schedule and the location of the backups. You have many options there, but most of the time one daily backup will usually fits your needs. There are also options for weekly or monthly scheduling as well.

For more granularity through the day you can also configure incremental backups with the possibility to backup up to every hour, with retention of up to 50 incremental backups. This is the maximum of incremental backups before one full backup is made.

Please note that when you finish building your backup job, you must click on the button on the right hand side to Enable The Scheduler. Otherwise the backup won’t start. Once the scheduler enabled, the backup job is ready to start at the time that you scheduled.

As I said in the beginning of my article, the target backup directory is my Drobo device which is connected via iSCSI to my physical Hyper-V host.

So in my Server Manager you can see the connection to the remote iSCSI storage as an E: drive which looks like local hard drive, but it’s a remote network storage. You can see the setup of my disks which are present at my Hyper-V host at the screenshot below.

The Trilead software has been installed directly on the Hyper-V host, which is a 2008R2 Standard edition with Sp1.

This lab setup performed remarkably well and with some great speed. Probably due to the setup which was running those VMs from one local SSD drive and because a dedicated gigabit network was used for the destination location.

To give you an idea, I have backed up a Windows 7 client OS. The first backup took only 3 min 25 sec (Note that that the OS is clean, no applications – but the VHD file is is 9.6Gb in size, still). At the destination the VHD file gets an extention DELTA which is a VM Explorer’s file extention for incremental files.

You also have the possibilities to select multiple VMs to be backed up. You can do it when creating new backup task, with right click > choose multiple VM backup.

Restore Possibilities.

Individual File restore – This option enables you to restore file which was located inside of a VM. Inside of the Guest OS.

The easiest way to restore a VM or single file is to go through the Backup Explorer Tab. There you can see which VMs has been backed up and how many restore points or full backups has been made for each job.

When chose the Backup Explorer, you have already access at the bottom to the Next Button. Immediately you can go to the next screen, where you have several radio buttons.

You can choose to:

- Restore Individual Files from different virtual disks (in case that you have more than One).
- Restore Full VM from backup

Quick Tip: Note that you can also use Righ click while you’re in the Backup Explorer window…

I tested both without problem. The first option (single file), brings another window, where you just double-click the volume from which you want to recover the individual file. And with right-click > copy, you have the possibility to paste to the location you want.

After navigating to the folder from which you want to recover your file, you have one right click option – COPY, as you can see on the screenshot below.

Full VM Restore – this option enables you restore the whole VM. If the VM which you want to restore still exists, you must specify different name for the restored VM. Also, there is an option to power On this VM after restore and not connect the virtual network card (vNIC). Those are the default options.

The restore operation runs as smoothly as backup. No issues here and I can say that I was very nicely supprised with the speed of the restore, again. Here you can see the Hyper-V server manager with two restored VMs which has been powered on immediately after restore and automatically started.

Concerning the speed of restore and backup operations, you can see another screenshot below showing the runtime of those operations. If you click to see larger view, you would be able to see, that except the Windows 7 Guest OS full VM restore which took over 3 min, all the other jobs (backups or restore) runs very quickly under a minute.

As said in the beginning of the review, the tool can handle VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V backups and replications. Adding vCenter to the dashboard takes few more minutes. Add vCenter > you’re asked for vCenter credentials > double click each of the ESXi hosts to setup ESXi credentials. You’re done.

Reporting through E-mail - There is a possibility to configure E-mail reporting for each job as well. There isn’t a simple check box, like one would usually look for, but you must right-click in the job window to add another task to the job. And this another task is the e-mail report.

A bit unusual, but in the version 3.5 it’s been already the same way. It might get changed in the future release, since I think that simple check box when configuring backup/replicate job, would be sufficient.

If you go and fill in your e-mail details (SMTP, sender, receiver …) in the File > Settings > E-mail TAB, and validate there, then you have the possibility to get those values populated when adding the E-mail report task to the backup job. There is a button called for that, so you don’t have to fill in those values again and still have the possibility to send the report to another person instead of the default one.

I haven’t been able to cover the replicate feature since in my lab I had only one physical Hyper-V host. The replication feature for Hyper-V works the same manner as backup, where you have the possibility to choose the source host and the destination host for the VM which needs to be replicated. Plus there are other TABs where you can configure the shutdown/replacement of the destination VM on the remote Hyper-V host.

Wrap up.

The product, as in its previous release which I was reviewing (the 3.5 release) stays simple to install, setup and use. The configuration, the look and feel gives great users experience with minimum hassle when setting up. You can be up and running within minutes.

The simple licensing of the product is per installation and not per physical CPU socket (or even per VM pack). This opens another possibility in a niche market where backup tools for virtual infrastructure does cost less than the competition.

The product can’t compete with products providing more features, like AD, SQL or Exchange Server Individual items restore. But not every environment needs that capabilities either. There is definitely place for tools like VM Explorer 4.0, which can cover environments where the individual item restore might be handled by other product or by the application itself.

Trilead grew up with this release bringing support for Hyper-V, which we might see to be more present in testing/production environments.

Note: Please note that this detailed review of VM Explorer was sponsored by Trilead.

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This post was originaly posted at www.vladan.fr by Vladan SEGET.

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