In this third article in the series of backing up the vCloud Suite, we turn our attentions to NSX, VMware’s Network Virtualization product. Before starting, I should point out that NSX has a recommended way of backing up and restoring configuration information via the use of an FTP server, which you need to configure in your infrastructure to hold this exported metadata. However this exercise looks at how you might be able to use VDP to back up and restore an NSX configuration using image level backups. Once again, I wanted to see whether I could restore the NSX environment…
This post is a follow on to a previous post I did on vCops and VDP interop. In this scenario, I am going to try to use vSphere Data Protection (VDP), which is VMware’s Backup/Restore product, to back up and restore a vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v6.0.1. and vCenter Orchestration (VCO) v5.5 deployment. In this particular scenario, there are nine virtual machines making up my vCAC and VCO deployment. VCO has been deployed in a HA configuration, which accounts for two VMs. The others make up the DEM, Manager, Web, vCAC, SSO and various databases for vCloud Automation Center.
I was in a conversation with one of my pals over at Tintri last week (Fintan), and he observed some strange behaviour when provisioning VMs from a catalog in vCloud Director (vCD). When he disabled Fast Provisioning, he expected that provisioning further VMs from the catalog would still be offloaded via the VAAI-NAS plugin. All the ESXi hosts have the VAAI-NAS plugin from Tintri installed. However, it seems that the provisioning/cloning operation was not being offloaded to the array, and the ESXi hosts resources were being used for the operation instead. Deployments of VMs from the catalogs were taking minutes…
I’m a bit late in bringing this to your attention, but there is a potential issue with VASA storage providers disconnecting from vCenter resulting in no VSAN capabilities being visible when you try to create a VM Storage Policy. These storage providers (there is one on each ESXi host participating in the VSAN Cluster) provide out-of-band information about the underlying storage system, in this case VSAN. If there isn’t at least one of these providers on the ESXi hosts communicating to the SMS (Storage Monitoring Service) on vCenter, then vCenter will not be able to display any of the capabilities…
Well, after almost 8 months of work, the VSAN book that I have been working on with Duncan Epping is finally available for general download. This is the first book I’ve written, and I’ll always be grateful for the guidance and mentoring I received from Duncan. I’m also extremely grateful to a number of people at VMware Press (Pearson) for their willingness to sponsor this project. There are also numerous people at VMware that deserve thanks for their input and support, and you’ll find them listed in the acknowledgements section of the book. We’re hopeful that this book will provide…
I am extremely excited about this year’s VMworld. I’m participating is some really great sessions, and the Essential VSAN book which Duncan Epping and I have been working on for the past 7-8 months should be available too.
We’ve seen a spate of incidents recently related to the HP Smart Array Drivers that are shipped as part of ESXi 5.x. Worst case scenario – this is leading to out of memory conditions and a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) on the ESXi host in some cases. The bug is in the hpsa 5.5.0.58-1 driver and all Smart Array controllers that use this driver are exposed to this issue. For details on the symptom, check out VMware KB article 2075978. HP have also released a Customer Advisory c04302261 on the issue. This was a tricky one to deal with, as…