IT Consultant | Veeam Certified Engineer | Veeam Legend | VMware Certified Professional | VMware vExpert with 26 years of experience in system and network administration writing about backup, virtualisation, VMware, Veeam, and whatever else catches my eye. This blog has a mirror on Medium.
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Easy but good I have been administering vSphere infrastructures for a long time, but most of them were in little/middle companies with standard licenses that did not allow using Distributed Virtual Switches. The default load balancing in vmkernels and Port Group is: Route based on originating virtual port In short terms, every VM is mapped to a physical NIC and moved to another one in case of failures only. It’s simple, does not require configuration on physical switches, and works pretty well… but, easy to understand, the load balancing between NICs is not optimal. When we were working with a lot of NICs, maybe 4 or more, because we had 1 Gbit/s only, it was not such a great problem, for statistical reasons. Now we often have only 2 10Gig NICs (or faster) and that primitive load balancing can cause issues that are easy to solve with the Distributed Virtual Switch features. ...
Enterprise Manager operations Adding the newly deployed VSA 13.1 to the Enterprise Manager was totally straight forward: click Add… and follow the wizard ONE operations adding correctly the two different (windows and vsa) backup server by adding the Enterprise Manager directly to ONE required some trick: first of all click on Data source -> Add server… and select Enterprise Manager in the wizard ...
Broadcom is no longer as friendly as VMware was vSphere (VVF or VCF) licenses are getting more expensive every month, and many companies decided to migrate to another hypervisor: ProxMox, Oracle Virtualization, Nutanix, Microsoft and HPE are only some examples of the market movers. Most, but not all, of them are KVM based. Some good guys developed a “product” that has a lot of nice features to help massive moving of VM to another hypervisor. At the moment only a few of them are supported, mainly ProxMox and HPE. Currently it is in beta and totally not official, not supported. But it looks good 🙂 ...
Freedom from HW vendors The story Veeam has recently acquired Object First but the v13.1 brings another feature that provides us more freedom of choice for the backup storage. It’s possible to (easily) attach LUNs from any block storage device, iSCSI or FCP. I gave it a try using an iSCSI LUN from a virtual Truenas server. I did not use any auth method but mapped the lun to the veeam VSA initiator only (see below how to find it) ...
Another episode in the fight DBAs vs Backup Admins? ☺️ A feature that landed recently, and that I find super useful in enterprise contexts, is granular permissions on backup jobs. Easy example: you give the DBAs the ability to manage the jobs for “their own” servers. This lets you avoid those situations we’ve all seen way too many times, where DB servers end up protected badly, or in some needlessly convoluted way — like having Veeam (or something similar) do only crash-consistent backups and then hoping — fingers crossed — that data consistency is being handled properly over on the DB team’s side. ...
Version 13.1 seems to be shipping so many things that, joking, should have been called 13.5 or even more ☺️ Facts I have found the Observability page in the VSA web interface -> Configuration page (not in the Host Management Control) and activated it https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbr/userguide/configure_node_exporter.html?ver=13 the output is not human readable 😃 but it uses a common format: Prometheus. This gives us a lot of opportunities ...
One of my NUCs failed ☹️ Problem Problem: one of my NUCs (the one running PVE, just updated from 9.2.3 to 9.2.10) crashed during the night. I did not notice it and it was not possible to reset it from the remote. Solution Arduino UNO Q running monitorino, an application developed by me and my mate Claude, in a few minutes to receive an alert from a Uno Q board (independent from my NUCs) when one of the hypervisors is not running fine. ...
Oldies like me were programming with Basic, Fortran…. and are not comfortable with Powershell 😃 Script refactoring with Claude Code Now some of us old guys have recently find out that there is a young, cheap, always available and reliable script kid that helps us in doing things we are not always as familiar as we should. In this video it’s possible to follow the process of testing a script that is aimed to detect if any job ran successfully in the last X hours. I made it interacting with ChatGPT or Copilot, and it was pretty painful. After switching to an Anthropic addicted, I tried to enhance-refactor the script with Claude Code. ...
Spoiler: Business in not always that bad 🙂 As I’ve said many times, Veeam ONE doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Then there’s a section that we geeks tend to happily ignore, because it has the word “Business” in it. It makes us think of sales reps hassling us, so we unconsciously steer clear of it 🙂 Under the “Last Backup Date” branch you’ll find two pre-built lists that are super handy — especially the first one, which lists the VMs that DON’T have a backup! ...
A long time ago, when I was studying Telecommunications engineering In the past… I remember I spent months working to produce an interface for a little simulator in Optics.I absolutely cannot recall what it exactly was… more than 25 years are gone! I asked myself “what if Claude Code existed?” Today I asked Claude to develop a Low Pass filter simulator. Nothing special, simply something I remember what’s for 😃 It developed a “web application” that looks like this ...