Veeam Backup Best Practice

If you are going to run a physical to virtual conversion, make sure you run a defrag before the conversion: the reason being is when the VM is backed up via CBT it will produce large incremental .VBR files if there is file fragmentation. This works on a 1MB block size, so a single 1k change would mean a 1MB increment, thus if there is a linear structure to file patterns this will help reducing the size of the VBR file.

Pages Files on Windows VM’s are backed up as default via a full Veeam backup, as this data contained in the page file is inconsistent this will in turn produce large incremental VBR files. This is especially an issue with something like Exchange that uses database caching. To solve this create a separate VMDK and place the Windows page file on this disk and when the back job is created exclude this disk.

Make sure you follow this KB article when creating data stores for virtual machines that will be backed up via Veeam or you may have problems when the snapshot is created.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012384

Snapshot Script for Vsphere using yULM

I have found this really cool script for presenting a graphical view of a snapshot chain within Vsphere via PowerCLI http://www.lucd.info/2010/03/31/uml-diagram-your-vm-vdisks-and-snapshots/

I have amended the Script to include the functionality to work in a corporate environment behind a proxy server, you simply need to change the following two lines to reflect your target server name and proxy address.

$vmName = "Servername"

$diagram = Get-UMLDiagram $vmName Get-yUMLDiagram $diagram "C:\test\yULM.jpg" -show -proxy "10.*.*.*:8080"
Snapshot

The Changing face of VDI

I have spoke about this before, but I think there will be a huge amount of traction in the VDI space of the next 18 months, the main drivers as below

1. Windows 7 adoption - a catalyst for change and a great product, it makes sense to at the very least evaluate VDI when deploying.
2. Xendesktop 4/Vmware View - Both these products are now on release 4 are much more mature.
3. VECD - This has now been scrapped by Microsoft for customers running Software Assurance.
4. Unidesk - A product that ticks all the boxes when it comes to a fully managed desktop solution to dovetail with VDI, its in Beta at the moment but I am testing as we speak and will come back with a full review.
5. Apple IPAD - I think this will be a usefull in some select business environments combined with a Citrix Client.
6. Citrix Xen- Hyper-V - Upcoming memory over-commit support means more desktop density and thus better TCO.

Let see how things pan out....