2 Storage Management Archives

Hot off of the press: A new white paper that discusses backing up virtual machines running on VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) using VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP). These are the main topics that are covered:

VDP Architectural Overview
Virtual SAN Backup using VDP
Factors Affecting Backup Performance

The paper details test scenarios, how backup transport modes affect CPU and memory utilization of the VDP virtual appliance, and how the vSphere hosts management network is impacted when the Network Block Device over Secure Sockets Layer (NBDSSL) transport mode is utilized. The paper concludes with a summary of observations, recommendations when deploying the VDP virtual appliance to a Virtual SAN datastore, and some discussion around transport modes and running concurrent backups. A special thank you goes to Weiguo He for compiling this data and writing this paper!

Click here to view/download VMware Virtual SAN Backup Using VMware vSphere Data Protection

@jhuntervmware

Welcome to the next installment of our vSphere PowerCLI 5.8 walkthrough series of the new cmdlets for vSphere Storage Policy Based Management. So far we have seen:

Introduction to vSphere Storage Policies
Creating vSphere Storage Policies
Associating vSphere Storage Policies

In this article we will take the next step and illustrate how to leverage vSphere Storage Policies to enhance the provisioning of New VMs. We will have a few provisioning examples involving a virtual machine with a single traditional storage array backed datastore, a vsanDatastore, and a multi-vendor mixed datastore environment.

PowerCLI cmdlets referenced in this blog article:

New-VM
Get-SpbmCompatibleStorage
Get-SpbmEntityConfiguration
Set-SpbmEntityConfiguration

Follow these links for more information on creating vSphere Storage Policies for Virtual SAN:

Using the vSphere Web Client
Using PowerCLI