HomeLab: How to obtain a Veeam Not for Resale (NFR) license for your HomeLab protection

In this opportunity I come to show you how to get free Veeam licenses that you can use to protect your HomeLab or can be used to practice if you are planning to get certified as a Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE). I am currently protecting my virtual environment with these licenses that can be obtained if you meet one of these requirements: Who is eligible? Veeam Certified Engineers (VMCE) VMware: vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs & VCAPs) Microsoft: Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Microsoft Certified Solutions Experts (MCSEs) AWS: AWS Heroes & Certified Professionals Nutanix AHV: ALL Nutanix technical personnel VMware, Microsoft, AWS trainers, bloggers and other certified professionals To request this free license just access the link:...

June 11, 2021 · 2 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

HomeLab: Using vCheck for vSphere Infrastructure Health Accessment

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 check your email....

June 8, 2021 · 14 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

HomeLab: Automated VMware Infrastructure Documentation

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 ....

June 6, 2021 · 5 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

How To Install and Use VMware PowerCLI on ArchLinux

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....

June 5, 2021 · 5 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

vSphere 7 Update 2 NFS Array Snapshots Offload Support

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....

May 30, 2021 · 6 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

Using Flexcache volumes to accelerate Windows shares data access

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....

May 27, 2021 · 6 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE) in ONTAP

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 de-duplication (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....

May 20, 2021 · 6 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

NetApp Volume Encryption Setup with External Key Manager

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....

May 16, 2021 · 5 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

VEEAM Scale-Out Backup Repository with Minio

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!

May 15, 2021 · 1 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

NetApp PowerShell Toolkit – Get Lun Mapping Information

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....

May 15, 2021 · 3 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano