Category: Data Center

Veeam BR Extract Utility 1

Reviews / Backup & Replication

First Look at Veeam BR Extractor and All Its Advantages

Introduction To Veeam Backup Extractor Veeam Backup Extractor is a Veeam utility to extract VMs from full backup (VBK) file. Administrators can extract VMs from backup file without installing Veeam Backup & Replication. There is no dependency between the utility and Veeam Backup & Replication, so the utility works as independent utility. Administrators can copy the utility from backup server to another server and run that easily. Note: I didn’t test extract VMs from a backup file which it’s placed on a shared folder. There is two interface for extracting VMs from backup files: The extract utility is located in the installation folder of Veeam Backup & Replication, by default: %PROGRAMFILES%\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup. The folder contains three files for the extract utility: Graphical User Interface GUI is available by run Veeam.Backup.Extractor.exe from this path: %PROGRAMFILES%\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup Extracting VMs is so simple from backup files by using Veeam.Backup.Extractor.exe, just click on browse button (1), select backup file (2), then select VM from the VMs list and then click Extract to extracting virtual machines from the backup file. Command-Line Utility There is two command-line utility for Windows and Linux that administrators be able to extract VMs from backup file by run the commands. There...

Veeam ONE Reporter Collection 3

How To / Server Virtualization

[Veeam ONE]: Veeam ONE Reporter Session Task Failed

Veeam ONE Reporter Collection Job Veeam ONE Reporter collection job is a scheduled job to gathering virtual infrastructure information to providing reports for administrators about virtual infrastructure performance, issues and capacity planning. Sometimes, the job will be failed cause of some issues in the Veeam Reporter service and an error will indicate on Veeam ONE Monitor Client. Administrators should care about the issue because the error means that virtual infrastructure information is out of date and any report is unusable. Troubleshooting Step 1: At first step, checking “Veeam ONE Reporter Server” service is very important. Check the service and if it’s stopped, start the service and if it’s started , restart the service and run “Object Properties Collection Task” from Veeam ONE Reporter portal. Wait to job is completed and if issue not resolve go to the next step. Step 2: If stop/start the service didn’t resolve issue, restarting the server is second solution because of OS issues. Run “Object Properties Collection Task” from Veeam ONE Reporter portal, wait to job is completed and if issue not resolve go to the next step. Step 3: If step 1 and step 2 didn’t help to resolve issue, the monitor user permission...

VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN) 1

Reviews / Server Virtualization

[Review]: VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN)

VMware Virtual SAN or vSAN is a software-defined storage or hyper-converged infrastructure and it’s fully integrated with VMware vSphere. vSAN create a software defined storage area from local storage devices or direct attached devices. vSAN supports vSphere features that the features needs shared storage such as HA and DRS. vSAN is also fully integrated with desktop solutions and any virtual machine will be provisioned and protected on vSAN.

security advisory 4

News / Server Hardware

sfcb-smx: wantCoreDump:sfcb-smx signal:11 exitCode:0 coredump:enabled

What’s the “sfcb-smx” error? This error is related to HPE smx-providers for the Smart Array controller MRA and any HPE ProLiant G8 or G9 server will be affected if VMware ESXi has been deployed on the server by using HPE VMware ESXi 6.5 (Nov2016) ISO image. NOTE: As result of this issue, HPE Insight Management WBEM Providers are restarted by the sfcbd when they fail; therefore, the inventory information will be available. However, when a provider crashes and is re-started, the sfcbd may not resend all the indication subscriptions and the clients listening will not get any indications if the Smart Array hardware has issues. You may also faced with the below lines in vmkernel.log file: sfcb-smx: wantCoreDump:sfcb-smx signal:11 exitCode:0 coredump:enabled sfcb-smx: Dumping cartel 684037 (from world 684042) to file /var/core/sfcb-smx-zdump.000 … sfcb-smx: Userworld(sfcb-smx) coredump complete. What’s Solution? There is just a solution and administrators should upgrade their ESXi hosts by HPE VMware ESXi 6.5 (July 2017) custom ISO image. To fix the impact of not getting indications after a provider crashes, restart the HPE Insight Management WBEM Providers, by performing any of the following procedures: Run the command “/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog restart”. Use the console to restart the management agents. Use vCenter to...

HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool - Main 2

Free Tools / Server Hardware

HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool

What’s HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool? HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool is an online application designed to assist datacenter administrators and designers with qualified options details with reserve compatibility for particular platforms including Rack, Tower, Blade Systems, Synergy, HyperScale and storage devices. Using HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool At the welcome page (Home Page), there are two choices: My Server: Find all compatible components with a server or storage device. My Options: Find all devices that compatible with selected component. My Server This is an option to find compatible components with server and storage devices. The various parts of this page are: Family: Includes most server and storage family such a 3PAR storages and ProLiant servers. Generation: After choosing device family, the generation of the family will show on this table. Server: All generation members will be available on the table and components information will display according to the this selection. Search: This is a search box to finding device faster by entering the device name. After choosing the device, the compatible components information will display. The components includes: Processor Memory Hard Disk Drives Solid State Drives Power Supplies Networking (Compatible Network Interface Cards) Storage Controller Computational and Graphic Accelerators Power Distribution...

Software Bugs 3

Server Virtualization / Server Hardware

ESXi PCI Passthrough – Large VM Memory (MainHeap) BUG!

ESXi PCI Passthrough This is a combination hardware and software feature on hypervisors to allows VMs to use PCI functions directly And we know it as VMDirectPath I/O in vSphere environment. VMDirectPath I/O needs some requirements to work perfectly, please read this KB for more information, as we read it! https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2142307 There is also some limitation when using VMDirectPath I/O and the below features will unavailable: Hot adding and removing of virtual devices Suspend and resume Record and replay Fault tolerance High availability DRS (limited availability. The virtual machine can be part of a cluster, but cannot migrate across hosts) Snapshots I couldn’t find any other limitation specially about memory size, so now why we couldn’t use more than 790 GB to 850 GB of our server memory capacity?! Anyway, let’s review our test scenario! Our Test Scenario We have some Sun X4-8 servers with the below specifications: CPU: 8 x E7-8895 v2 Local Disk: 8 x 600 GB SAS Disk Memory: 48 x 16 GB – Totally 768 GB PCI Devices: 2 x QLogic 2600 16 Gb – 2 Ports (HBA) 2 x Intel 82599EB 10 Gb – 2 Ports (Network) Embedded Devices: 2 x Intel I350 1Gb ESXi 6.x U2 has...

kernel: WARNING: at fs/sysfs/dir.c:536 sysfs_add_one+0xbb/0xe0 – Oracle Enterprise Linux 0

Operating System

kernel: WARNING: at fs/sysfs/dir.c:536 sysfs_add_one+0xbb/0xe0 – Oracle Enterprise Linux

Most of modern servers hardware are using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS and modern OS has dedicated partition to stores boot and EFI values. Some times, the partition gets full or OS generate the below log: kernel: WARNING: at fs/sysfs/dir.c:536 sysfs_add_one+0xbb/0xe0 Kernel includes a CONFIG_EFI_VARS_PSTORE feature, and a feature that dumps kernel message log (= the “dmesg” command output) into UEFI variables for persistent storage if the system is crashing (or even if the system is working normally, depending on the options chosen). The cause of the warning is duplicate dump file in EFI partition and OS is trying to write values on same file. There is a simple solution, remove old dump file! I hope this article help you to find out root cause of the warning and resolve that. Here is the complete log on our virtual machine: kernel: WARNING: at lib/kobject.c:196 kobject_add_internal+0x205/0x260() kernel: Hardware name: VMware7,1 kernel: kobject_add_internal failed for dump-type2-0-0-1493749396-cfc8fc79-be2e-4ddc-97f0-9f98bfe298a0 with -EEXIST, don’t try to register things with the same name in the same directory. kernel: Modules linked in: vmw_vsock_vmci_transport vsock oracleasm autofs4 ipv6 vfat fat uinput vmw_balloon coretemp crc32c_intel ghash_clmulni_intel microcode pcspkr sg ixgbe hwmon dca vmw_vmci i2c_piix4 shpchp ext4 jbd2 mbcache dm_round_robin scsi_dh_emc sd_mod...

Ransomware 0

Backup & Replication / Reviews

Protect Virtual Machine: How to Stay Safe from Ransomware

How can we protect VM against ransomware? This is important question for any infrastructure administrator. Actually, Ransomware is a computer malware, and it will be installed on wide range of devices such as computers, smartphones and wearable devices. It can attack to data and encrypt data then ask user to pay for decrypt data. Users may encounter in a number of ways. The most common method used by attackers to spread software is via e-mail as an attached file. Protecting Virtual Machines Most companies are using VDI solutions to deliver desktop experience to the users and virtual desktops acting same as physical desktop. Even all protection steps are provided for protecting users data such as strong anti-virus, firewall, email malware detection and other ways, attackers will try new way to infect user data and keep data as hostage and ask to pay money. When users data is encrypted by a Ransomware, administrators can help them by restoring their data from a valid backup, so one of solutions to protecting data is taking backup from them. Traditional Backup Administrators can ask users to keep their important data on shared folder or removable devices or sync them with same folders on other computers. But this is...

VM Backup Best Practices - Strategy 1

Backup & Replication

VM Backup Best Practices

Datacenters are going smaller compare to datacenters in past few years because of virtualization revolution. Organizations are deploying their services on virtual servers instead of physical servers and most companies over the world have large virtual farms. But some traditional challenges are still exists such as backup and disaster recovery. Virtual machine deployment and maintenance is easier than physical servers but administrators have to take backup from machines, files or any important data same as before, nothing changed! Also organizations still needs to recovery site for disaster recovery in other geographical location, all machines should be replicate between the primary and recovery site. Backup solutions are little different in virtual infrastructures with physical infrastructures but backup solution has also backward compatibility in virtualization platforms, means that the backup solutions covers both virtual and physical machines now. The new backup and recovery solutions still needs to storage space for storing backup files, bandwidth for transfer and computing resources for processing backup jobs. Any backup solution has some best practices and administrators should consider the best practices to achieve best results. Know VM backup best practices are important topics for planning and implementing backup solutions. Join me to review some of best practices...

vmware uuid 0

How To / Server Virtualization

Find, Convert And Compare, VMware Virtual Machine And Windows Guest UUID

What’s UUID? Each virtual machine has UUID and it will appear on OS as guest UUID too. A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems, the 16 bytes of this value are separated by spaces. Microsoft uses the term globally unique identifier (GUID), either as a synonym for UUID or to refer to a particular UUID variant.

Architecture 0

Server Virtualization

OpBot – Virtual Assistant For Your Virtual Datacenter – New Release

You may read previous post about OpBot on this blog and if you didn’t check it, here is the previous post: OpBot – Virtual Assistant For Your Virtual Datacenter Now, new version of the virtual assistant is available to download and try it as free software for limited period of time. There is some changes to improve your assistance performance:

IGEL – Universal Desktop Converter 3 (UDC3) 0

Desktop Virtualization

IGEL – Universal Desktop Converter 3 (UDC3)

The Universal Desktop Converter 3 (UDC3) thin client software provides a highly effective alternative to traditional thin client hardware. The software is installed as the operating system on PCs, notebooks and selected thin clients, and turns the hardware into a powerful softwarebased and universally deployable thin client allowing secure access to almost all centralized IT infrastructures. Users have stable and reliable access to cloud computing services, server-based computing (SBC) applications and virtualized desktops (VDI). The local desktop operating systems are unified and standardized, and are centrally managed by IGEL’s user-friendly Universal Management Suite (UMS), the industry’s leading device management platform. The UDC3 software is available at low cost, the UMS is included for free.

0

How To / Operating System

Find HBA Firmware Version in Linux – Easy Way

You need to know, what is version of your HBA firmware to upgrade it or install compatible driver version. There is many ways to find firmware version but I want to share easier way. Just logon to your Linux machine with Sudo user and run the below command: cat /sys/class/fc_host/host*/symbolic_name

Major features comparison chart for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 0

Backup & Replication

New Veeam Agent For Microsoft Windows 2.0 – Beta

Whats up? Veeam Endpoint Backup that renamed to Veeam Agent has been released for Microsoft Windows with some new features. The agent called Veeam Agent For Microsoft Windows and now, beta version is available publicly. Download need to fill the invitation request on this link: https://go.veeam.com/windows-backup The new agent will be published as two new paid edition and free editions is also available yet:  

opbot 001 0

Server Virtualization

OpBot – Virtual Assistant For Your Virtual Datacenter

What’s OpBot? OpBot is a virtual assistant for VMware vSphere from Opvizor. OpBot is a full featured OpBot, that can manage VMware vSphere via natural chat commands from any device and any place. You can also connect OpBot with Opvzor Performance Analyzer, which unleashes amazing new remote troubleshooting and analysis possibilities. OpBot can give you some useful information about your virtual datacenter such as: VM Config: Filter your VMs using wildcards, cluster or ESXi hosts and get information about the virtual and physical hardware configuration. VM Load: Get ESXi and Virtual Machine CPU and Memory Load as well as disk usage information. VM Snapshot: Check instantly for existing Snapshots, creation date and comments. Benefits Using this virtual assistant has many benefits for you: No VPN: There is no need to use VPN for secure access to your virtual datacenter. No RDP Session No Mobile Hotspot Any Device: You can ask OpBot to do some tasks from any deviecs. Any Place: You can do it from any place and any location. async commands Audit log in the chat Avoid annoying bandwidth issues using remote desktops or VMware Web client How does that work? You import a virtual appliance in your environment that...