Plain Virtualization

VMware today announce the end availability of vSphere Data Protection (VDP) here .  vSphere 6.5 will be the last version of VDP provided. Abit of history, VDP was included since vSphere 5.0 to replace VMware Data Recovery (VDR). For existing VDP deployment, please check the respective version end of general support here .  Customer can continue to use any backup solution that utilize vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection framework (VADP). Since VDP is an OEM from Dell-EMC Avamar, the closest product is Avamar Virtual Edition. Customers are recommended to take advantage of a Dell-EMC special migration offer to transition VDP VM protection to Dell-EMC Avamar Virtual Addition.  Check this with your local Dell-EMC team and read about it here .

With the announcement and also from the datasheet , it seems to be pretty lots of functionalities been added.  However there are some critical ones that are more appealing and wanting to see approvement or resolution to those who are already using since vSphere 4 and prior till today which are not make known to many. Storage There were many discussion over storage UNMAP via thin provisioning and many called it a "myth".  This was also discussed heavily in our Facebook VMUG - ASEAN group.  This was due to many changes since VMFS3 to till VMFS5.  Cody wrote a long history of what are the changes for those who have missed out here . A KB was also release and this create some discussion VMFS3 with different block size would benefit thin provision so to speak before vSphere 5.0 Update 1.  Sadly after which, all UNMAP was not possible via GUI or automatically other than via command line or script. I try to ask internally as well and luckily Cormac with his f...

The start of February also mark the great launch today by VMware.  Another milestone achieve with more to look forward to which will change the way things will run in an infrastructure. Today has been the long awaiting launch of vSphere 6.0 (which many thought was during vSphere 5.5 but finally it made it), there are also some changes to some add-on products changes as well as bundle update. The General Availability (GA) for vSphere will be in Mar 2015.  The training courses are found here . What's New vCloud Suite will be updates with vSphere 6.0 and vCloud Director and vCloud Network & Security will be deprecated as announced last year and no longer seen in this bundle.  This also get updated with the new vRealize Operations (vROps) Suite to 6. vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) will be updated to 6.0 which include vSphere 6.0 and vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0.  Finally those on vSOM 5.5 have been asking for vROps 6.0 has been granted t...

As stated in my previous post ,  there was a bug in the Vmware Data Protection (VDP) which was release with vSphere 5.1 in backing up Windows 2008 R2 OS VM. As of today, a new release of VDP 5.1.10 is been release as stated here .  There are also some added enhancement which you can read about.  You may refer to the release notes here . With this release, the VDR to VDP migration utility is now make available.  I would like to stress this again, the migration only migrate the data and restore points and NO backup jobs are migrated.  Backup jobs need to be recreated in VDP.  There is no migration utility in VDP Advanced.  The correct way is to migrate from VDR to VDP then to VDP Advance.