Since the UCS Server platform was introduced in early 2009 it has revolutionized how we do servers and everything that goes on inside servers. We got 10G everything from the server all the way to the core and everything in between. While this has proven to be nothing short of awesome for server admins and CIO's who desire to be on the bleeding edge of the bandwidth spectrum we never really knew how to rate that level of awesome on a measurable scale. Sure the Fabric Interconnects run the NX-OS platform and CLI commands exist to look at stats and counters buried in the bowels of the code but in this day of Sofware Defined Everything (SDE (Patent Pending)) we needed a way to present that information to admins and execs quickly and in a format that can be use to make business decisions regarding capacity planning and performance. Enter UCS Performance Manager, this tool give us visibility into the inter workings of the UCS "secret sauce" that we once just trusted because it "works really well".
Version 1.0 of UCS Performance Manager was released in October 2014 with the updated 1.1 package available as of March 9th 2015. This post will cover high level installation and reporting details of version 1.1 deployed in our lab environment.
Licensing:
UCS PM comes in 2 flavors. The Express package and the Integrated Infrastructure package. Express package is limited to Cisco UCS support only and the Integrated Infrastructure package enables the user to have visibility into compute, network, storage and connected hypervisors.
Installation:
Cisco provides the virtual appliance in the typical OVA format to be installed into the vSphere infrastructure or an ISO format if installing on a Windows machine in a physical or Hyper V environment. Setup was a breeze with only needing to provide a hostname, IP, and license information. Once the VM is deployed and configured, you'll login to the Web GUI, add your UCS Domain, Storage, Hypervisor and VCenter information and off you go. Credit to Jim Casselman for doing the installation and providing feedback.
Overview:
After exploring the UCS Performance Manager for just an hour I quickly realized this product is packed with gobs of useful information, statistics, and reports any administrator would love to have at their disposal. The ability to have a visual representation of what's happening inside the UCS chassis is very useful for troubleshooting, monitoring and capacity planning. Here are some screen shots showing some of the valuable information UCS performance manager can display.
Infrastructure:Bandwidth Usage - At a glance we can see how much bandwidth is being used by the LAN, SAN and Server Chassis
Infrastructure: Dynamic View - The dynamic topology view gives an high level overview of the UCS components and any associated events
Infrastructure: Events - The events view shows all events in the system. Administrators can easily see low to critical faults in a single view.
Infrastructure: vSphere - You can add VCenter server and monitor all virtual machines in your environment. Note, you'll need the Integrated Infrastructure license to add vSphere components
Reports - Cisco UCS Performance Manager comes pre-loaded with plenty of useful canned reports. Date ranges can be defined to give specific data for specific time frames.
Summary:
Cisco seems to have gotten off the ground running with this first generation monitoring console. The information available is useful and well laid out in the GUI. Installation and setup are a breeze and the application does not require a lot of TLC after it's initially setup. This is certainly something all UCS systems should be accompanied with as it provides lots of useful information that was not otherwise available before.
More information can be found on UCS Performance Manager here.
If you manage your data center space, there is always something assuring about picking a product that is going to be around for a long time. Not only will it have a strong support following, but it will also give IT administrators time to focus on strategic data center projects for your organization. Does it also help that it's extremely cost-effective, reliable, and agnostic to any hardware you choose? Veeam Backup & Replication v7 made a big splash in the industry with some enhanced features to both standardized hypervisors VMware & Hyper-V.
Veeam Invented the Easy Button:
Everyone should know this product if you live your life within the management boundries of VMM or vCenter. You will feel like a backup expert in about 8 minutes using the Veeam software...and this is by design. Its meant to look and feel like many of the API calls within vSphere including snapshotting your VM's, VM replication, cloning templates, and mounting NFS shares. This is a list of the major features that over 70,000 customers already were able to enjoy:
Veeam Explorer for Sharepoint
vCloud Director Integration
Self-Service Recovery of VM's and Guest Files
Native Tape Support (don't call my baby ugly)
HP Backup from HP Snapshots (HP StoreVirtual VSA, HP StoreVirtual, and 3PAR) *Enterprise Plus edition
Built-in WAN Acceleration *Enterprise Plus edition
VeeamON 2014: Crazy Idea...Right?
And then came along this idea of a software company with a single purpose that thought it had enough juice in the industry to have their own show in Vegas "VEEAMON 2014." Well, they didn't let anyone down. Close to 2000 people showed up for this event to see what was under the hood for Veeam v8. They threw 2 of the best parties and Ratmir himself wasn't shy of taking some selfies with everyone, so why not?
Honestly though, VEEAMON 2014 didn't dissappoint from a launch feature perspective and from breakout session perspective. 2 things I found disappointing; 1.That EMC storage wasn't part of the next storage platforms for Veeam v8 direct backup from snapshots. They chose to go with NetApp. And while I'm not a fanboy of just EMC products, doesn't it make sense to go witht the 800lb gorilla for market share here? But okay, they did offer DDBoost integration with Data Domain in this version so I give it a A-.
We have been using Veeam v7 with Data Domain as just a backp repository without DDBoost and have seen some tremendous results with Veeam CBT and DD deduplication rates over 99:1 in some cases. So its not suprising that v8 with DDBoost will be an even better solution for many organizations. In our case, many customers fit within the v8 and DD2200 platforms for stable backups and long term retention with these 2 products.
So...I know I'm not the only one in the place wondering when they would drop the bomb on physical server support as the rumor with v8. It came in a different fashion with the announcement of Endpoint protection as the feature. This didn't get me excited at first thought. But as I started thinking about it, wouldn't it make sense to give a free product out to be your Beta-testers for physical server backups? Now I started thinking...which is scary folks!
Veeam v8 Availablilty Suite Features:
There was a great deal of enhancements in this release worthy of a party though. For the sake of boring-ness I am going to touch on the highlights that are practical for the users we deal with on a daily basis:
Replication (Ready-to-Start state) -For the customer looking at DR/BC platforms, the same product that replicates your application consistent backups to a tertiary site, this is the product for you. Why spend money on Site Recovery Manager with VMware when you can directly power on backups as a VM at the secondary site with and RTO/RPO of 15 minutes?
Storage Snapshots for NetApp -For a product that has a great story with snapshots and great footprint in the inudstry with FlexPod this is good-to-have product. But where is the array that has amost 70% of the market? Well, it's coming in the next rev apparently.
Veeam Cloud Connect -Many organizations are looking for a way out of spending captial on DR and sencondary locations for DR. Technologies like Cloud Connect make data replication to the public cloud with End-to-End Encryption a possible solution to recover assets in the public cloud.
DDBoost Support -DDBoost offers a wide range of functionality and reliability for a backup solution. If you are wanting to put applications like Oracle & SQL into the hands of the DBA's and speed up the backup windows, this is a great feature addition.
Veeam Explorer for SQL & Active Directory - These features are really cool. Imagine needing to recover SQL and having a Veeam explorer function to replay the logs for you and restore the VM to that point in time...well it's there! Also, backing up AD just got a whole lot better for your helpdesk tickets. You can now not only restore any object from an OU from a Veeam explorer window, but you can also restore users back to their last password. This saves time for all helpdesk users having to request a restore, then resetting the password, and finally having to set the account to change the password on the next login. I love this. Way to go Veeam!
* Sterling explains how easy it is to recover from an SQL backup now in v8
Endpoint Protection -So here is a crazy thought for those organizations that have a few physicals they just can't do without. Allow Endpoint Protection to backup those physical assets. Yes, the file now becomes a VHD stored on your backup repository...but wouldn't it be easy to convert the VHD file to a .vmdk or .vhdx and mount it if you have a 4 hour RTO? I would think this solution is an okay fix for many applications. I too have seen OEM products during P2V's not like coming up in a virtual atmosphere because of UUID's, but there are ways around that too. You could also perform a file-level restore from the VHD directly if you just put the OS back on the physical server. I just wanted to say this isn't a show stopper for physical backups...you have options people!
The upgrade is a cake-walk from v7 to v8. If you are under a support contract you should make the move ASAP. The process only took about 30 minutes to update Backup & Replication and Veeam One Server. Once you launch the setup you will get a nice splash screen to update or enhance the features you already own, or add features you may have upgraded to for v8. It will perform pre-requisite checks and update missing components automatically. It will also automatically update the schema for the databases.
Overview of v8
As you can probably tell, I am a huge fan of Veeam and more specificaly v8. There are few backup products started and built from the ground up with a purpose. These products usually always paramount their competition in all functionality. In my opinion, the 2 products that are almost bullet-proof for backups is Avamar and Veeam, but for very different reasons. With Veeam , installations and upgrades are extremely easy to perform and the new features are easy to configure. If you want to add keep your backups on prem and going to your Data Domain appliance, you can continue to do so. However, if you want to schedule your replication or backup copy jobs in the cloud, just add the service provider credentials and target and now you have a landing space for those features as well. Restoring key infrastructure features, testing backups for DR, and setting up policies for failover have never been easier.
* add 1 of many cloud providers with the click of a button, name or IP resolution, and your credentials
* how to connect to your HP or NetApp storage array for direct snapshot backups
* create a failover plan from the top ribbon based on backup copy job sets
* Veeam One Monitor upon install immediately starts pulling the results from all environmentals within your hypervisor platform. Many features are similar to an add-on vRealize to your vSphere environment
