Things have finally calmed down for me since returning from VMware Partner Exchange so I wanted to mention something that I found quite interesting. Whilst I was at the Veeam/HP Tweetup on the Monday evening I had a long chat with a good friend and Veeam employee Rick Vanover. He was telling me about the big news that Veeam had announced which was around providing Backup and Recovery for VMware vCloud.

I'm not a big Cloud guy, for those of you who read my blog or follow me on twitter, you'll know I am predominantly EUC focused within VMware and I generally just let the Cloud float by. But in past discussions with my colleagues that work closely with our vCloud Suite, I know that Backup/Recovery of vCloud servers can be a pain-point for them. So personally I think this is a good move for Veeam and will be well received by many Private and Public Cloud providers.

This functionality won't be available until v7 of Veeam Backup and Recovery which is due to be released in Q3 of 2013. However, by putting their development money where their mouth is, Veeam certainly believe that VMware's vCloud Director is going to be a big player in the future of Cloud solutions. 

Just lately I've been doing a lot of work in a Lab environment. Some of the work I'm doing is quite important to me so I decided to workout a way I can backup my VM's onto a backup device. To my surprise this was pretty simple to do.

Here is how I decided the script should function:

1. Send myself an email telling me that the backup process has started
2. Import the name of the VM to be backed up and the destination datastore from a CSV file
3. Create a Snapshot of the VM I want to backup
4. Create a Clone'd VM from the Snapshot
   • Place the backup onto my Backup Datastore
   • Name the backup <master VM name>-<date stamp>
   • Thin provision the backup
5. Remove the Snapshot from the master VM
6. Send myself an email telling me that the backup process has completed

So that's what I wanted to do, this is what I ended up with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Working in IT you’d think that i would practice what i preach?

“Make sure you back EVERYTHING up!”

Well i do now! Whilst on a trip to a beautiful beach my camera decided to tell me that i had a “Memory Card Error” and i was unable to take anymore photos.

Once we had returned home i put the SD card into the reader and received the message we all dread.

Read the rest of this entry »