ESXi hosts which are booting from SAN or USB flash media do not have a permanent scratch location. Instead a path /tmp/Scratch will be mapped into their RAMdisk. That has a big disadvantage, because after a reboot all logs are lost. Especially for troubleshooting this is a real problem.
Continue reading “Move ESXi scratch location”Exagrid Backup Appliance
Using Exagrid Deduplication Appliances as Veeam Repository
The importance of backup and recovery solutions today is beyond any discussion. Going back 10 years this was a rather neglected topic. But today no-one can afford data loss or services being unavailable. So the importance of backup solutions leveled up with that of production systems. Time windows for RPO and RTO have become smaller and smaller and the effort and cost to achieve that have become higher. If you’re planning a backup strategy, you need to find a good balance between speed, reliability and cost. Low cost NAS boxes are slow and not very reliable. Running an instant recovery from them can turn into a pain. Premium storages are fast and reliable, but also quite expensive. Backup data is in most cases very redundant, which means there’s a high capacity and cost saving potential in deduplication and compression. Continue reading “Exagrid Backup Appliance”
Veeam GFS on ReFS – how to see real storage consumption and your savings
Microsoft’s file system ReFS is around for some time now. Windows 2012 already brought us the initial version almost six years ago. Still we had to wait till Windows Server 2016 appeared to get the real killer feature – at least as far as its usage for Veeam backups is concerned.
Continue reading “Veeam GFS on ReFS – how to see real storage consumption and your savings”New Datacore Witness against Split-Brain scenario
DataCore SANsymphony offers software defined storage with transparent mirror in active/active mode.
Recently released version 10 PSP7 now supports a witness to avoid split-brain scenarios.
The Problem
In cases where both DataCore hosts (DC1, DC2) lose mirror (MIR) paths and LAN-connection, a split brain scenario occurs.
Both hosts remain functional and have a fully intact set of data on their storage. Both hosts can handle I/O from initiators in their (split) region. Both datastores receive writes that cannot be mirrored to the opposite site. Those changes cannot be synced if the mirror comes up again. Continue reading “New Datacore Witness against Split-Brain scenario”