I experienced this issue the past week. Veeam threw an error during a backup about it not being able to delete a snapshot. Come to find out, there was a slew of snapshots just sitting there even though the snapshot manager thought there were no snapshots.

Symptoms: You have a VM with a snapshot that says Consolidate Helper- 0

After about 2 weeks of frustration and testing I finally figured out why 2 of my VMs were not being backed up and hopefully this helps someone else out.

We run our Veeam server as a VM and use the Virtual Appliance mode to backup all of our VMs. At first, all I did was add my vCenter server into the list of servers. I set up a few jobs and I would have 2 VMs continuously fail, the vCenter and vCenter Database VMs. To alleviate this issue, these 2 VMs cannot be backed up through vCenter, but instead you have to add the ESX(i) server to the list of servers and then add the VM to the backup job through the particular host.

Veeam has recently announced a new technology called SureBackup that will change the way backups are done "forever". Forever is a strong word, but it holds true in this statement. This new technology will allow you to actually verify and test your backups with a few clicks of the button. The great thing, is that you don't have to restore to a particular VM, or even worry about space constraints. The verification process allows you to run a VM or a coupled group of VMs (vApp) all within the compressed images without inflation.

On Wednesday March 31st, 2010, I will be giving a presentation at my Alma Mater, the University of Kentucky. I will be giving a presentation to a class of students in my former Decision Science and Information Systems major. This scope of this presentation is to give students an introduction to virtualization and cloud computing. It's not overly technical, but should give an understanding of how virtualization works, the benefits of virtualization, why companies are embracing virtualization, and why virtualization is the platform that enables cloud computing.

Abstract:

Guest Speaker
For DIS 390 and All Interested Parties
An Introduction to Cloud Computing
Mar 31, Wednesday 4:30PM-5:30PM, Gatton B&E 205 
by
Kendrick Coleman
(A former Gatton College DSIS graduate)

Welcome to KendrickColeman.com! Over the past 7 years, this blog has been dedicated to IT infrastructure, namely virtualization and the evolution of the cloud with VMware. The
only real constant is change, so has my focus. I'm very fortunate that I have a storied past with VMware technologies, but it has led me to learning about the other side of IT, development. I've learned frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js + Express.js + MongoDB, all my projects fit into Docker containers, and GitHub is my friend. I try to bring all of these worlds together in a way to share my experiences. I use this blog for publishing solutions to uncommon problems I find in my day to day duties. If I happen to resolve a problem that google can't find, you can expect me to write a blog post about it.

About Me: I'm Kenny Coleman (Kendrick is my full name), and live in Louisville, KY. I started my career off as a windows system engineer after graduating from the University of Kentucky, which lead me wanting to get back into networking (I attended Trinity High School in Louisville,KY that had one of the inaugural CCNA courses for high school students) and landed me my first certification, CCNA. As a Cisco and systems engineer, it lead me into my new passion of virtualization. I've been honored by VMware with the vExpert award for my contributions to the VMware community and being a virtualization evangelist. Times change, and so do focuses, so I have been engaged in software development with technologies such as Ruby, Rails, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Redis, Python, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, and much more. I have a broad range of experience with many different technologies. I believe that's what has made me so successful this far into my career. I love diving into new technologies, trying to be a bourbon connoisseur, cheering on #BBN, hanging out with my beautiful wife and daughter, and being around friends.

Bio: Kendrick Coleman is a reformed sysadmin/virtualization ninja/cloud junkie turned coder and awaits for an idea to spawn to tackle it with Ruby or Javascript. In his daily role a developer advocate for EMC Code, he works with a team to focus and publish all things open source.

If you have any questions or would like to get in contact with me, feel free to email me at kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [d0t] com

Disclaimer: I am an employee of EMC and the views expressed here are entirely of my own thoughts and not that of my employer.

This past week I noticed an update to NetApp ONTAP. We were running version 7.3.1.1 and I wanted to upgrade to 7.3.2. I heard from so many people, "Don't worry Kenny, it's so easy to do an upgrade." Come to find out, it's actually EXTREMELY EASY. The bad part is, there is a 200 page upgrade guide that makes everything more challenging than it really needs to be. Chris Kranz (@ckranz) over at wafl.co.uk has a good guide for ONTAP Upgrades. I wanted to spoon feed his tutorial a bit more for anyone else wanting to do their first NetApp ONTAP upgrade. This will be done the n00b fashion way with Windows :)

So here we go from the beginning:

The ONTAP upgrade is done to ensure that the NetApp SAN has the most recent release of software. This is also a non-disruptive upgrade because in this case we have 2 controllers (or nodes).

To acquire the ONTAP release, login to the NOW site which is located at http://now.netapp.com
Once logged in, navigate to Download Software and find the drop down for ONTAP. Locate your SAN type and click go. Download the .exe file for the version to upgrade. We will be using windows and CIFS to perform the upgrade.
At this time, we downloaded the release called 732_setup_e.exe for the 7.3.2 release for our FAS2020a. Save it to your desktop until we are ready to transfer.

this is just a fun blog post. Eric Gray over at vCritical came out with a new article about Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM. It just reminded me of a Xzibit Yo Dawg joke so i made one up.

Last week, Train Signal released a new DVD series for VMware administrators called VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Vol. 1

There are three parts to this series and I'll hit each one in detail:

• VMware View4 w/ ThinApp
• Cisco Nexus 1000v
• PowerCLI