This article is about upgrading your HPE SimpliVity environment, including all of the components that come with this upgrade: VMware vSphere, firmware and your third-party software.
I will describe the global steps, time estimation, do’s and don’ts and tips from my side as I have a lot of experience performing these kind of upgrades.
The information in this article is based on HPE SimpliVity 4.0.0.
Continue readingA backup is a term that probably found its existence at the same moment computers got around.
The technologies around backups have evolved many times. Features such as deduplication, compression and automated backup verifications are becoming part of the standard feature set in backup software.
One of the latest trends I’ve seen, is using cloud-based storage, which will be my focus in this article.
This article focuses on some free backup solutions for VMware vSphere as VMware’s home-brewed vSphere Data Protection is End-of-Life and will not support any releases after vSphere 6.5.
Last week I got busy with upgrading four VDP appliances for a customer. I’ve come across quite some challenges and issues during this task that I’d like to share these with you in case you are facing the same task.
This session, provided by Doug Hazelman and Anton Gostev is all about the new Veeam Backup & Replication v7, launched not even 2 weeks ago.
Veeam v7 Deep Dive
I have published an article right after the launch about upgrading your existing Veeam installation and the new features I could find in the first few minutes. Check it out in the related articles section at the bottom of this page.
During this session I learned some new things and added some actions to my to-do which I will perform when I get back from VMworld. I will share these items with you, hopefully helping you to improve your environment with Veeam B&R v7 as well.
Yesterday Veeam released Veeam B&R v7, announcing a lot of cool features, including:
Next to the technical improvements there is also a new license edition: Enterprise Plus next to the Standard and Enterprise editions which were already available.
I just downloaded the ISO file from the Veeam website, which is roughly 800 MB.
Using a Windows Server 2012 OS as base, I opened the ISO from within the OS (Still think this is a really cool feature in 2012!)
Choosing upgrade from the setup wizard took about 5 minutes in my lab environment, which is running Veeam B&R 6.5. Didn’t see any errors, warnings or hickups during the upgrade. Flawless!
I had to re-supply the license file and reboot my machine after completing the setup.
Running the Veeam user interface after upgrading shows a new loader but the UI itself is exactly the same as the previous version.
Clicking around does however reveal some improvements:
Features like the Self-Service Portal are unlocked by using the Enterprise Manager.
From what I can see now, you can add users or groups (local/Active Directory) to specific roles and give them permissions to request a restore of VMs or specific guest files.
And, I was very curious about the vSphere Web Client plugin. The installation is very straight forward and requires Enterprise Manager. After installing, you can use the plugin from the home screen of vSphere Web Client and see a summary of your jobs managed by Enterprise Manager. There is however no possibility to start and stop your jobs from the vSphere Web Client or start backups of a single VM (would be cool!).
I’m happy with the new release and will encourage people into upgrading to this new release.
More information can be found on the website of Veeam. To do so, click here.
Thanks for reading!
SnowVM 