The musings of an IT Consultant » VM

The pain of snapshots!

Raj Perumal — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:59:52 +0000

Hi folks! So as you know, one of the coolest features of having a VMware virtualized environment is snapshots. The ability to take a snap of a point in time on the server and then revert to it if need be.

Lots of backup products leverage this capability to provide virtual machine backups. However snapshots as great as they are can be the bane of a network administrators existence too.

You see sometimes snapshots can get corrupted or orphaned from the backup process and they don’t get removed properly. The network administrator doesn’t notice this and then the snapshot ends up running forever and going out of control. This can lead to an outage on the server.

How do we fix this? Constant monitoring! Put into place monitoring and best practices to make sure unused snapshots and orphaned snapshots are cleaned up. This will keep your virtual environment in a healthy state!

-RP

Converting a virtual machine to ESXi Server

Raj Perumal — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:43:33 +0000

Now with ESXi being free, a lot of people find themselves using it. One of the things people want to be doing is converting their existing servers and importing them into their new ESXi server.

Another thing you can do is take any existing virtual machines you might have setup under VMware Workstation and import those in as well. The question I’ve received is how do you do this? When you start up VMware converter there is no option for ESXi.

Well never fear, the answer is quite simple really. Just use the option for ESX. This will allow it to P2V or convert your existing virtual machines from VMware Workstation into your ESXi server without any issues.

-RP

VMWare Virtual Machine Backups

Raj Perumal — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:43:31 +0000

I am often asked, what do we do for backups in a virtual environment? One of my favourite methods is to use a product called vRanger Pro from Vizioncore.

Vizioncore makes a great product called vEssentials which consists of vRanger Pro, vReplicator, and vCharter Pro. The Vizioncore offering is a lot cheaper than some of the competitor offerings.

vRanger Pro backs up the entire VM allowing you to restore it if something happens to it. vReplicator replicates the entire VM to another site for a great disaster recovery alternative and vCharter Pro provides a great solution for performance monitoring.

You can check out their products here. Despite using these products for virtual machine backups, I would still use a normal backup product to backup the individual data inside the virtual machine so you can do granualar restoration. Virtual machine backups are more for the situation where you lose the entire VM not for when you just need to restore an individual file.

-RP