Constructing a backup policy

A few thoughts drawn on my experience when considering and designing a tailored backup policy for your business. Firstly, it is always worth starting with the basics and what is considered industry best practice for backups, that’s the 3-2-1 strategy. The 3-2-1 backup strategy in its simplest form is 3...Read more

VMware VCPP Usage Calculations

Issue: VMware’s Partner Program usage reporting and sizing can be complicated, VMware charge using points for it’s services and usually against the amount of reserved RAM. Resolution: Example 1 This is the example as found in the documentation, this example is from the Program guide: During one 30-day calendar month,...Read more

VMware, find a VM’s MAC address via PowerCli

Issue: You have a few thousand VMs running on vCenter and need a quick way of finding a VMs particular MAC address. Resolution: Open PowerCLi and use Connect-Viserver to connect to the VC you are searching. Then run: Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where-Object {$_.MacAddress -eq “00:50:56:01:07:65”} | Format-List -Property *...Read more

Veeam, Failed Backup Workarounds

Issue: – Connection Reset Error on a backup job Error: ChannelError : Connection Reset Resolution: The below steps are not version specific and have worked since v8-v11. 1. Open regedit on the proxy where the disk was mounted 2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SCSI\ Disk&Ven_VMware&Prod_Virtual_disk\%deviceId%\Device Parameters\ 3. Remove all entries under this section...Read more

Create a vCloud Director OS template

Build VM of OS choice in vCloud Director in it’s own vApp. Logon and customise OS settings (disable firewall, IES, Install vmtools, etc). Download any OS updates and reboot. Place the current password in the VM notes section from within vCenter. Power down the guest OS. Stop vApp Right click...Read more

Recover a failed vSphere ESXi Host

Issue: You have a corrupt esxi host and need to quickly rebuild it. I am assuming that you are taking esxi host backups Resolution: 1. Check the backup exists. (The current backup will be a tgz file.) There will be a NetworkInfo.txt file. This will have basic networking info 2....Read more

Installing Veeam Agent for Linux (agent)

Issue: I’ve got a bare metal server running Linux and want to get a backup of the server. Resolution: NOTE To make UEFI systems with Secure Boot work with the pre-built veeamsnap kernel module, you need to enroll the Veeam public key to the MOK list using the mokutil utility. The key is available...Read more

VMware, vCenter license options

Issue: What features do I need and what license of vCenter will I need? Resolution: vCenter Server Standard vCenter Server Standard is the version containing all available vCenter Server features. vCenter Server Standard first differs from Foundation in it can manage up to two thousand vSphere ESXi hosts compared to only...Read more