In this opportunity I come to show you how to download and use the vCheck tool that is used to validate the health status of the VMware vSphere infrastructure. This tool is developed by Alan Renouf as a mechanism to identify possible failures or misconfiguration in the vSphere implementation. To learn more about this tool I will use the vCheck documentation as a reference: This script picks on the key known issues and potential issues scripted as plugins for various technologies written as Powershell scripts and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is checking your email. ...

In this blog I will be talking about how to automate the creation of documentation reports of our virtual infrastructure. There are several commercial solutions to generate this type of report, but I will be talking about As Built Report a free tool that uses powershell as a base to build the reports. The As Built Report tool uses the VMware.PowerCLI modules that we explained previously in our blog. If you want to know more about PowerCLI follow this link here . An important fact about As Built Report is that it is not only used to generate reports on VMware but also supports the following products: ...

In this blog I will be showing you how to install the PowerCLI tool specifically on the ArchLinux operating system. Archlinux is an advanced Linux distribution that is characterized by being simple and lightweight. Additionally, it offers the user full control in managing and modifying everything related to the system. Well, to install and use PowerCLI we have to install Powershell first. PowerShell is a cross-platform automation and configuration tool. PowerShell has a large number of commands oriented to system administration. But at the same time, PowerShell is a full-featured programming language that allows writing functional programs. There are many Powershell-based administration tools from different manufacturers such as: ...

The vSphere 7.0 U2 release provides the ability to use native snapshot when using the NFS protocol as the access mechanism. As described on the VMware blog: NFS Improvements NFS required a clone to be created first for a newly created VM and the subsequent ones could be offloaded to the array. With the release of vSphere 7.0 U2, we have enabled NFS array snapshots of full, non-cloned VMs to not use redo logs but instead use the snapshot technology of the NFS array in order to provide better snapshot performance. The improvement here will remove the requirement/limitation of creating a clone and enables the first snapshot also to be offloaded to the array. ...

Starting In Ontap 9.8 release NetApp decided to add support for the Windows SMB protocol to the FlexCache technology. At last….. In this blog, I will create a source volume as origin and a flexcache volume on a remote cluster. In the lab example I will also validate the benefit offered by the ability to extend a central CIFS share natively. I used the NetApp documentation as a reference to define what a Flexcache volume is and what it is used for. ...

Previously in a post I explained how to set up an encrypted volume using an encryption key manager (KMS) specifically from the company HyTrust . In this specific case each volume is encrypted individually using independent keys. A disadvantage of this method is that it affects the possibility of increasing the efficiency levels of data reduction such as compression, compaction and deduplication (cross-volume-dedupe). To eliminate this disadvantage the NetApp gurus came up with the idea of applying the encryption feature at the aggregate level by allowing volumes residing within the same aggregate to share the encryption key. This technology is known as NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE)`. This allows customers the option to take advantage of storage efficiency technologies in conjunction with the encryption process. ...

Using NetApp documentation as a reference: NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE) is a software-based technology for encrypting data at rest one volume at a time. An encryption key that can only be accessed by the storage system ensures that the data on the volume cannot be read if the underlying device is reused, returned, lost or stolen. NetApp Documentation In this tutorial I explain how easy it is to configure and manage this impressive security feature. ...

I recently posted about a how to install and configure Minio S3 on a Linux server Link Here: Minio in Centos 8 . Well in this video I show you how to configure Minio as a Scale-Out Backup Repository with VEEAM Backup & Replication v11. Really awesome VEEAM feature! Hasta Luego Amigos!

Recently in a post on the NetApp forum a user asked for help to create a function in Powershell using the DataOntap libraries. Here I show you how we use these libraries to join multiple objects with information related to the LUNs assigned in NetApp. A curious fact about this request is that natively Ontap libraries do not allow you to filter the required information and that it can be displayed in a single table. For this we create an object within PowerShell where we can build the format of the information and that this has a more logical sense. ...

The Problem In the last few months I have been studying for the VEEAM VMCE Arquitect certification and one of the requirements is to implement the Scale Out Backup Repository option. A simple way to achieve this is by using the Minio service. About Minio Minio is an open source object storage service compatible with the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. Applications that have been configured to communicate with Amazon S3 can also be configured to communicate with Minio, allowing Minio to be a viable alternative to S3. ...