I still remember the days (almost 10 years ago) when SATA drives hit the storage market by a storm and it became a much cheaper replacement to Fiber Channel drives which were the defacto choice for enterprise storage at that time. In short few years, SATA drive has became a very desirable option in enterprise storage when capacity rather than performance is the focus.
I remember having the discussion over the years with many IT Admins about when Tape will be obsolete as result of storage prices going cheaper by day. Larger and larger SATA drives with lower price tags have been hitting the market over the year, which has only spurred more of these discussions. Nonetheless 10 years later Tape Drives are still the main backup medium today at large enterprises.
If you have decided to use StarWind Virtual Tape Library in an environment where you have Symantec Backup Exec and looking to find out how to integrate both products together then you have came to the right place. In fact if you have used or setup Symantec Backup Exec with ADIC Scalar 100 or HP MSL 2024 Tape library previously then you have went through the complete process before.
In this post, I will show you how to integrate your Symantec Backup Exec with StarWind Virtual Tape Library that is emulating HP MSL 2024. This post, assume you have already setup the StarWind Virtual Tape Library & drives. If you have not yet done so, then please start by going through my previous post: StarWind Virtual Tape Library. Now that you have got the StarWind Virtual Tape Library ready, let’s the integration with Symantec Backup Exec begin.
This is a guest post by Gavin CROSS. I would like to start by thanking Gavin for the great contribution.
As we move further into the digital age, the preferred medium for storing data is becoming online services. Rather than a physical hard drive kept in your home or office backing up the hard drives you are using for the actual computers you work on, more and more storage is being done through online backup services. There are those who say the future is in the Cloud, but for now at least, we’re still relying on someone else’s physical hard drives kept offsite. Here are a few of the online backup services available:
1. Google Drive
Backing up your virtual environment does not have to be as challenging as it seems. Actually if you do it right it should be rewarding when compared with physical servers backup. You can restore VM from images backup much easier than you ever did with physical servers. Yes, you were able to restore physical servers from images backup as well but that had never been fun or easy to do. Restoring a physical machine from image backup had always meant fuzzing with drivers issues specially when using different hardware from the source. As virtual machines run independently from the physical hardware, they can be restored from images quickly to any host without caring about the hardware difference. This is alone is a huge advantage.
It seems IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for VMware vStorage API Data Protection or as usually called VADP is having a lot of attraction lately. Though on the other hand, many TSM & vSphere admins are confused about which version of TSM are supporting VADP and which version still force them to use the old VMWare Consolidated backup or VCB. Before I share with you the versions of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager that support VADP and the versions that support VCB and which particular versions of vSphere they work with. There is a huge note that many people mess about IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and that can be a relief for most admins. Keep reading for that surprising piece of info if you are vSphere admin that your TSM admin is opposing to upgrade their Tivoli Storage Manager backup server to allow you to benefit from VADP.
The StarWind iSCSI SAN has always been my lab primary SAN. It has never failed me, & I know of many companies who is quite happy with their StarWind iSCSI SAN and who refuse to move to a hardware box after seeing the benefits & how it fits their need. It has been amazing year this year as StarWind were kind enough to sponsor my blog. Though that is not all for StarWind this year. They have been nominated as finalist in multiple categories in the Storage Award 2012. Below are the categories they were nominated for & if you are a happy customer of their or welling to try their software and see if they deserve a vote, then the categories to vote for them are:
I have been approached by PHD Virtual to try out and review PHD Virtual Monitor. I have decided to take the challenge and discover how it operate. As usual I will start with what I liked about the product then I will describe what I felt missing and that I would love to see being added or fixed in future releases. I believe this help admins figure out if PHD Virtual Monitor is the product they are looking for and will help PHD Virtual to make sure their products cover the needs of more admins. Before I get to evaluating the product, if you are looking for instruction on how to install it or just wondering how I did install it and test it in my lab then please have a look at my other post at: PHD Virtual Monitor for VMware Step by Step Installation & Configuration
While many of you wonder why I am explaining manual Disaster Recovery failback when using VMware Site Recovery Manager where its an automated feature that is included in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. Two main scenarios where this apply, the first one if you still using any vCenter Site Recovery Manager prior to VMware SRM 5. The other one if you need to break the replication then recover back without syncing back the changes that happened at the Disaster Recovery Site. In this scenario you won’t be able to use the automated failback feature of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 as that sync the changes back to production in the process which you might not desire. For both of these scenarios the below steps become handy.
Its that day where you thought finally you got everything working perfectly with your Exchange infrastructure & your manager walk in and say our old storage where your Microsoft Exchange Server is installed is getting out of warranty and the good news we are replacing it with this new shiny storage box which should give us a better performance and durability. I need this done in a week time. Now you start scratching your head on how to move you Microsoft Exchange 2003 Cluster or Microsoft Exchange 2007 SCC(Single Copy Cluster) to the new SAN. While my article here can not do the work for you. It will show you how you can do it with ease, & without doing mailbox movement although that might be another good way to do it if you have extra hardware for it! Below is how to migrate your Microsoft Exchange Cluster to a new SAN. As well you can find my article on migrating SQL at: http://www.tsmguru.com/data-migration/microsoft-sql-cluster-data-migration-to-a-new-san.html
As with every IT environment new elements and upgrades are becoming a daily task rather than being a yearly task few years back. One of the most consuming upgrade task is storage migration. Your boss has just bought this new shiny storage box & he got it installed by the vendor in the datacenter. Now he need you to move all your production workload to it in no time. Well, if you are in a totally virtualized enviornment and has no Microsoft Clusters in place, then this can be easy and dandy with features like VMware Storage VMotion(ah sorry Only VMware offer such a feature at the moment, but that is not our topic for the day. Anyway did you choose the right Virtualization Product? Hope So!). If you still in the physical world then this is much more work even for non clustered machines, but machines with Microsoft Clusters will be the ones to involve the most amount of work. In this Article I will show you how to migrate Microsoft SQL Cluster Data from your old SAN to a new one If MS Exchange is what you are looking for then look at: Migrating Exchange 2007/2003 Cluster to a new SAN. The same steps should work for:
