Using three words. You expected more? > 900 Tweets. 8/19 through 9/3. Big Thanks All! Enjoy the timeline.

Aug 19, 2011

Aug 22, 2011

rbrambley via twitter "@BorgCollective_: @rbrambley YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED" > beam me up #vmworld3word

rolltidega via twitter Viva Las VMworld! #vmworld3word

keithnorbie via twitter I’m gonna WuPaaS #vmworld3word

rodos via twitter #VMworld3word Airport VMworld bound

Aug 23, 2011

Aug 24, 2011

jpsbrain via twitter Suitcase for SWAG #vmworld3word

audiomatron via twitter IT Petting Zoo #vmworld3word

Rimmergram via twitter @Kiwi_Si VMworld is Christmas #vmworld3word

kculw via twitter RT @RickVanover: @JaredBlack @kculw I’ve seen hotter #VMworld3Word <- it’s called yesterday

Aug 25, 2011

Aug 26, 2011

Aug 27, 2011

Aug 28, 2011

Aug 29, 2011

Aug 30, 2011

Aug 31, 2011

Sept 1, 2011

Sept 2, 2011

Sept 3, 2011

Recently a disgruntled vSphere administrator was able to delete 88 of his former employer’s virtual machines (VMs) remotely from a McDonald’s WiFi connection. We all know virtualization makes things a lot easier, and unfortunately, this is a scary example of the dark side of just that. I’ll argue it’s also a wake up call for IT departments to realize how virtualization changes the dynamics of data center security,  risk management, and overall data vulnerability, but I’ll leave that for the experts in those fields. What made me go “hmmmm” was the thought “what if I was on the team that had to investigate and recover from this incident?” I also wondered “What if the attack was less obvious?” What if only slight configuration changes were made to the virtual machines instead of  obvious deletions? For example adding limits and reservations to the vCPU and vRAM of the virtual guests or their resource pools thus making them sluggish, unresponsive, and unable to conduct business as usual.

How Long Would It Take To Troubleshoot And Recover?

Put yourself on the team that suddenly realized 88 VMs were gone! Where would you start? The storage  jumps out at me as a logical place to begin, but after your storage area network  is online, healthy, and normal then what? It’s time to try to crack open the VMware Black Box and scour event logs, alarms, permissions, and actions. Put that aside for a minute and think about how would you start the rebuild process and get the business reconnected!?

I don’t have an easy answer. My goal is asking you to think about this for yourself.

Warning! The Veeam Pitch

Since I work with Veeam products every day I’ll briefly suggest how they could help in this scenario. Decide for yourself what tools are best for your company. I’ll point out that

maintaining physical servers for monitoring and management, or a separate, limited access cluster of VMs would have to have been the implemented design to have helped here.

Veeam Monitor

Since the database is independent of vCenter a duplicate record of all events and actions would kept. Deleted VMs would remain in the GUI as italic, grayed objects, but there associated data would be kept. You can easily see the VMs “last few breaths”.

Veeam Reporter

vCenter permissions reports could be scheduled for delivery to the HR department and reviewed regularly. This betters the chance that the dismissed admin’s credentials would be removed from the virtual environment and not overlooked.

Configuration change reports would show what account was making changes, what properties were changed, and what the old and new values of those changed properties were/are.

Various reports would document the entire virtual infrastructure design and allow a rebuild as quick as possible. Everything from VM IP Addressing to datastore and vSwitch assignment would be easily available.

Veeam Backup and Replication

Instant VM Recovery would allow VMs to run from the backup files. In the time it takes to run the wizard and boot the VM(s) user’s would be reconnected to the guests. Migrations back to production storage could take place immediately or delayed and staggered in tiers as needed. If you have a DR site then failing over to replica VMs would also be an option.

What is this?

Learn to play.

Resistance is futile!

CiL Console after the page break

RSS Feed for all tweets here

This is just a quick note that the previous issue with vSphere customers using NFS storage and CBT has been resolved with a recent patch. More on the previuous problem and the new patch in this KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1031106

The KB was updated 7.26.11

This post explains functionality of Veeam Backup and Replication (BaR) that you are not going to see in the User Guide. I was browsing the Veeam Forums and came across this thread – Backing up Veeam / vCentre Physical Machine which inspired me to write this post. The thread is actually about having an with an issue using with the scheduled backup of a physical vCenter server, which also happens to be running Veeam Backup and Replication, using another product.

I’ll get right to it. You can make a backup copy of physical SQL databases with Veeam BaR. Both vCenter and Veeam BaR have a SQL backend. You can’t schedule this as a job, but there are several scenarios where you could take advantage of a quick and easy, one time, manual backup  – before an upgrade or patch, for example.

Although I work for Veeam, this is not necessarily an intended or fully supported usage of the product. This is an easy alternative for the VMware admin to CYA , however.

I’ll start with a brief introduction on how the SQL U-AIR wizard is supposed to work, and then I will explain how you can use an admin switch to make a backup copy of SQL database whether on a VM or a physical server. VMware vCenter and Veeam BaR/Monitor/Reporter all have SQL back ends. 

The U-AIR Up There

To do this you can use the SQL U-AIR wizard. U-AIR stands for Universal Application Item Recovery, and there are 4 stand alone .exes for the various U-AIR wizards of Veeam BaR – AD, Exchange, SQL, and Universal. All of these wizards can be installed on the Veeam BaR server or on any Windows system that can communicate with Veeam. They could be installed on an admins desktop or the SQL, Exchange, or Domain Controller servers too.

Normally, the purpose of the U-AIR wizard is to request and kick off a workflow for a Veeam vPower Virtual Lab. Once the request is approved and managed by the VMware/Veeam administrator and the “Lab Manager–like” virtual lab is ready with the fenced off, running backup copy of the VM(s), the U-AIR wizards allow for the restore from the backup copy VM to the original production VM. For SQL VMs in particular, the restore options are shown in the following screen shot:

Watch this 4 minute video to see the normal SQL restore functionality of the wizard. This video skips the workflow request, skips the wait for approval and virtual lab start up, and just shows what is possible from a backup copy of a SQL VM. I also want to mention that this is an agentless solution. You do not need to install and manage agents anywhere with Veeam BaR.

Trick The System for Physical SQL backups

You can skip the workflow process of starting and using the vPower Virtual Lab if you use an undocumented (as far as I know) Admin Switch for the U-AIR wizards. I’ll focus on the SQL U-AIR wizard for the rest of this post, but it is the same for the Exchange and AD wizards as well.

To use the U-AIR Admin Switch do the following:

1. Download and Install the SQL U-AIR wizard on the Veeam BaR server, a SQL server, or your desktop.
2. Browse to the install folder – standard location is “C:\Program Files\Veeam\Application Restore\SQL Restore”
3. Create a shortcut – right click Veeam.AIR.SQLrestore.exe and choose “Create Shortcut”
4. Right click the new shortcut and choose Properties
5. Modify the “Target” field by adding “/admin” (see the screen shot to the right. click for a larger image)
6. Save the shortcut.
7. Move the modified shortcut to where ever you want (the desktop)

Now, when you run the wizard from the shortcut you go right to the restore options.

Making A Backup of a physical VMware vCenter SQL

Here’s where it gets interesting! Because the wizard prompts you for the SQL Server\Instance to connect to, you can choose any SQL instance that is configured for remote connections. Yes, SQL Express works too!

In my lab environment, vCenter is not included in a Veeam Backup job. It is a “virtual physical server”. I call it “virtual physical” because I use a VMware Workstation lab (3 VMs = 2 vSphere 4 ESXi + 1 vCenter). The Veeam BaR server is a nested VM along with the 5 other VMs in the environment which it backs up. So vCenter is the equivalent to a physical server in a real datacenter. Clear as mud?

To back up my vCenter database I can do the following:

• start the SQL U-AIR wizard from the shortcut with the /admin switch
• On the SQL Servers screen click the Browse button
• From the Choose SQL Server pop up window pick the vCenter instance (screen shot below. click for larger view. Note the Veeam BaR and Veeam One instances available too)

• For performing just a backup, copy the newly populated contents of the Backup server name field to the Production server name field (screen shot below, click for larger view)

• For the Restore Task pick “Restore Database Tables” (see screen shot at the beginning of this post)
• For the Restore Target pick “Bulk Copy Program (BCP)”

• From the Database screen pick the vCenter database.

• From the Objects to Restore screen leave all selected

• Pick an Output folder. (I created a Restore folder on the Desktop)
• Finish the wizard and export the database tables to the selected folder.

Now you have a CYA, backup copy of the vCenter database. In case you didn’t notice this was done while vCenter was running.

If you need help with the Microsoft SQL Bulk Import and Export process, check out the MSDN pages on the subject.

The Tip Of The U-AIR Backup / Restore Iceberg

Hopefully you can now see the potential of the Veeam BaR U-AIR wizards with the /admin switch? Imagine what else you can do by placing different SQL instances on your network in the Production and Backup server fields of the wizard. Once again, this functionality goes beyond the intent of the product, but the flexibility of it’s use is endless in the hands of the right admins!

I’ve had the luxury of staying away from the math of the new vSphere 5 licensing. Honestly, I haven’t read the new guide, and I’ve only skimmed through posts that explore the pros and cons of different upgrade costs and future growth impact scenarios from virtualization admins, consultants, and architects of  various size VMware virtual infrastructures. My opinion to date – VMware’s goal is to be a total Cloud solution, and this change in licensing reflects and fosters that plan. If you are able to correctly size you infrastructure, or if you can oversubscribe it so that you can offset the costs, then the hypervisor with the most features, the best performance, and the best partner ecosystem (in terms of available third party products leveraging vSphere APIs) is still a no-brainer. That would be vSphere 5.

Storm Clouds

I’ve also read the virtualization pundits’ predictions year after year. They usually go something like “this year is the year of VDI”, “sixty something percent of all servers can still be virtualized”, and “VMware’s market share will shrink to the advances of Microsoft and Citrix”. Is the record skipping? (does anyone know what a skipping record is anymore?). Personally, I’ve always felt a balanced market of hypervisor vendors would be the most likely prophecy for the datacenter, but VMware has always managed to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Feature-wise, they continue to do so. But, the recent announcement of licensing changes may have changed things.

Whether right, wrong, misunderstood, reluctant to change, or just emotional, many VMware shops initially viewed the new licensing announcement like dark, thunder clouds approaching. Some reactions were as hot as a flash of lightning. Virtual warning sirens sounded across the community, but after a few days and some damage control from VMware, eventually calmer heads prevailed. But, like in the aftermath of any large storm, people began to build for the future. More so than ever before, public discussion of future plans seem to include a new possibility of alternative vendor virtual datacenters.

An Opening In The Clouds

My hunch is that current VMware shops will 

not jump on the newest version like in the past. They will wait to decide, and while they wait they will explore the alternatives.

Many will decide to stick with VMware. I’m guessing those with environments already right-sized would be least likely to actually switch, for example. I’m sure there will be plenty of others with costs that are favorable to stay where they are, but I am already hearing many proclaim they have decided, been ordered, or are now motivated to actually explore other virtualization solutions.

I do actually believe that many will now move away from VMware, however. I’m not proclaiming any solution is better or my favorite, but instead I am pointing out the market conditions are right for the advance of VMware’s competition. Some may be in the form of wholesale migration, but I also feel a lot will be in the form of maintaining the existing vSphere while expanding future VMs on Hyper-V or XenServer. I’m just being a realist. Features may lead the hypervisor market today, but if history has taught us anything, the total business benefits of any offering has incredible influence on the decision makers who write the checks. As much as the engineer in me hates to admit it, most shops can more than get by with a standard set of virtualization features that exist in all the hypervisor options available today.

Tipping Point

So, are we actually at the start of a significant change in the virtualization market? Time will tell. My point is that recent conditions seem to indicate to me that the time is right, more so than ever before.

David Davis recently posted the video of the Ask The Experts Session from the Carolina Summit 2011 VMUG. In this session, I was fortunate enough to repeat my role (from the 2010 Summit) as session moderator, but the stars of the session were  the experts from the panel consisting of Scott Lowe, Jason Nash, Mike Laverick and Mike DiPetrillo. These guys definitely drove an incredible and informative discussion about Cloud Computing, but more importantly, the information was focused on Cloud adoption concepts, concerns, and options from the perspective of the IT department.

Watch the video below. It’s just shy of 45 minutes in length.

VIDEO: Ask the Expert with Scott Lowe, Rich Brambley, Jason Nash, Mike Laverick and Mike DiPetrillo.

Last week I was in New York, NY for the vPower Tour as a guest speaker. My Northeast teeamates (we spell it that way at Veeam) asked me to present as a blogger, so I put together “Seeding The Cloud. The Conversation.” The actual presentation is embedded later in this post, but I wanted to provide a few notes about some of the slides first.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Special Thanks to Yung Chou for not only helping me understand the Cloud Conversation better with his 5-3-2 Cloud Principle, but for also letting me use 3 of his slides. I also want to thank Mark Minasi for his recent speech at the Techstravaganza Event in Atlanta and his great article “Avoid Being Plowed By The Cloud”. Mark’s economist views of the Cloud were very inspirational and informative to me and for my presentation. I love his “numerological proctology” expression!

I used the Cloud

I used Google Docs to build the preso, and I streamed it live from the Cloud when I delivered it. I guess I owe thanks to Sprint for 3G being up that day too! Thanks to VMware and Intel for the YouTube video. That still cracks me up every time I watch it.

Did You Know

Real Cloud Seeding examples slides:

1. Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics – before both opening and closing ceremonies
2. Woodstock 1969 – several reports from witnesses
3. Project Stormfury – 1960s experiment to seed hurricanes in the Atlantic
4. Chernobyl – Russian pilots seeded radioactive clouds before they reached Moscow

The Points

• You (and your company) are already using the Cloud.
• Define YOUR Cloud Conversation.
• Understand your IT Department’s value and services before you try to determine if The Cloud is a good alternative.
• Be a Numerological Proctologist yourself!
• Consider DR as a “low hanging fruit” reason to use The Cloud.

The rest should be self explanatory.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll get to deliver it again sometime!