[Not] Vamoosing VMworld
We were at Storage Field Day 5 (SFD5, see the videos here) last month and had a briefing on Veeam’s upcoming V8 release.
They also told us (news to me) that they are leaving VMworld[I sit corrected, I have been informed after this went to press that Veeam is not leaving VMworld2014, and never said anything about it at the session – My mistake and I take full responsibility, sorry for any confusion] (sigh, now who’s going to have THE after conference, KILLER PARTY at VMworld) and moving to [but they did say they are definitely starting up] their own VeeamON conference at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas on October 6,7 & 8 this year. If their VMworld parties are any indication, the conference in the Cosmo should be a fun and rewarding time for all. Pre-registration is open and they have a call out for papers.
Doug Hazelman (@VMDoug), Rick Vanover (@RickVanover) and Luca Dell’Oca (@dellock6) all presented although Luca’s session was under strict NDA to be revealed later. I think sometime later this summer.
Doug mentioned that after 6 years, Veeam now has over 100,000 customers world wide. One of their more popular, early innovations was the ability to run a VM directly off of a backup and sometime over the past couple of years they have moved from a VMware only backup & replication solution to also supporting Microsoft Hyper-V (more news to me).
V8’s virtues
Veeam V8 will add some interesting capabilities to the Veeam product solutions:
- (VMware only) Built-in backups from storage snapshots – (Enterprise Plus edition only) Backup from VMware snapshots can sometimes impact app performance, especially when it comes time to commit changes. But with V7, Veeam now offers backup utilizing VMware’s Change Block Tracking (CBT)and taking backups from storage snapshots directly for HP 3PAR StoreServ, HP (Lefthand) StoreVirtual/StoreVirtual VSA and in soon to be available V8, NetApp FAS (Data ONTAP 8.1 or above, 7- or cluster-mode, clones too) storage systems. First Veeam does its application level processing (under Windows Server does VSS operations), after that completes tells VMware to take (a VMware) snapshot, when that completes they tell the storage to take a (storage) snapshot, when that completes they release the VMware snapshot. What all this does is allows them to utilize VMware CBT as well as storage snapshots which makes it up to 20 times faster than normal VMware snapshot backups. This way they can backup directly from the storage snapshot using the Veeam proxy. Also because the VMware snapshot is so short lived there is little overhead for committing any changes. Also there is no need to use a proxy ESX server to do this, i.e., promote the VMware snapshot to a LUN, add it to an ESX, resignature, add the VM, and do all the backups, which, of course destroys CBT. This works for FC, iSCSI and NFS data stores. With NetApp storage you can also take the (VSS) application consistent snapshot and copy it to SnapVault.
- Veeam Explorer (recovery) for storage snapshots – (Free backup edition) Recovery from (HP in V7 & NetApp in V8) storage snapshots is yet another feature and provides item (e.g., emails, contacts, email folders for Exchange), granular (VM level or file level) or full (volume) recovery from storage based snapshots, regardless of how those storage snapshots were created.
- Veeam Explorer for SQL Server (V8 only) – (unsure what license is required) Similar to the Explorer for snapshots discussed above, this would allow a Veeam admin to do item level recovery for an SQL database. This also includes recovery from Veeam Backup repositories as well as storage snapshots. But this means that you could restore a ROW of an SQL table, an SQL TABLE as well as a whole SQL database. Now DBAs always had these sorts of abilities which required using Log services. But allowing a Veeam admin to do these sorts of activities seems like putting a gun in the hands of a child (or maybe a bazooka in the hands of an untrained civilian).
- Veeam Explorer for Active Directory (V8 only) – (unsure what license is required) You’ve seen whats’ available above and just consider these same capabilities only applied to active directory. This means you can restore a password hash, user, group or organizational unit (OU). I don’t know about you but this seems more akin to a howitzer in the hands of a civilian.
They showed an example of competitive situation where running V8 (in beta?) with NetApp backups using snapshots versus some unnamed competition. They were able to complete a full backup in 1/4 the time of their competition (2hrs. vs. 8hrs.) and completed incremental backups in 35min. vs. 2hrs. for the competition.
“Thar be dragons there …”
Ok, maybe I am a little more paranoid than the average IT guy/gal. But in my (old world, greybeards) view, SQL databases belong in the realm of DBAs and Active Directory databases belong to domain controller admins. Messing around with production versions of SQL DBs or AD DBs seems hazardous to a data centers health. We’re not just talking files anymore here guys.
In Veeam’s defense, these new Explorer recovery tools are only probably going to be used to do something that needs to be done right away, to get things back operating again, and would not be used unless there’s a real need/emergency to do so. Otherwise let the DBA and security admins do it with their log recovery tools. And another thing, they have had similar capabilities for Exchange emails, folders, contacts, etc. and no ones shot their foot off yet so why the concern.
Nonetheless, I feel strongly that these tools ought to be placed under lock and key and the key put in a safe with the combination under a glass case labeled IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.
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