Today Veeam released Veeam Reporter 4.0. This release is significant for many reasons but one that I’d like to focus on here is the new tracking and auditing capability. We introduced change tracking with Reporter 3.5 but we were missing one critical piece…who made the changes? With Reporter 4.0 we now pull in the vCenter audit logs and correlate every change back to the person (or system) that made the change. Another feature that’s not available from the vSphere client is the ability to not only see the new value, but the previous value as well.
Let’s take a look at an example.
You come into work on Monday morning and you’ve got an inbox full of emails about a particular virtual machine. On Friday everything was working fine but on Monday it won’t respond, even though you can see it’s powered on and you can access the console through the vSphere client.
After a reboot doesn’t fix the issue, you now need to determine what changed. Using the vSphere client, you can see that doug.hazelman changed a custom attribute:
The screenshot above shows that the Custom Attribute “TEEAM_FUNCTION” was changed to PROD for the VM “XPViewTemp”. This is slightly helpful in that you know you have an automated process that reconfigures VM’s based on custom attribute values. Setting “TEEAM_FUNCTION” to PROD kicked off a script that moved it to the production network which is why people who could access it on Friday can’t access it today. The easy fix it to change “TEEAM_FUNCTION” back to the previous value…but what was it? The proper setting determines how this VM works, you need a quick resolution. Veeam Reporter to the rescue! All you need to do is run the infrastructure changes report showing all changes for that VM over the weekend. Clicking the name of the VM in the report, you can easily see that the old value was DEV:
Now all you have to do is change the attribute back to the correct value, let your automated script reconfigure the VM and you’re good to go!
The above example is a bit of a stretch (who automates VM configuration based on attributes?) but was meant to show how quickly and easily it is to get this data from Reporter 4. While the scenario above shows a change made in a relatively short time frame, what if the change had been made 2 months ago? How would use us the vSphere Client (or even PowerShell) to find who changed it as well as what the previous value was? Reporter 4 can give you that audit data for any time frame, you choose a date and Reporter shows you the configuration as it was on that date. If you want to see how an object has changed over a period of time (including WHO changed it), just select a time “window” for your report to get the detail.
There are a lot of powerful, new features in Reporter 4. I did the voice for this quick overview video, check it out and then download Reporter 4 to see what YOU can do with it.
While there’s been a lot of talk this past week on Free ESXi (more on that later) I wanted to take some time and explain the new Veeam Essentials bundle and our reasons behind it. We view our Veeam Essentials bundle as a great entry bundle for the small business just getting into virtualization using VMware vSphere. As you may know, VMware has introduced a very attractively priced vSphere bundle called VMware vSphere Essentials, this gives you vCenter and up to 6 sockets (3 hosts) for just shy of US $1,000. If you think about it, that’s a lot of power for not a lot of clams. Think how many physical servers you can virtualize on 3 ESX(i) hosts…way more than 3. For more information, check out VMware vSphere Pricing.
So, for just shy of 1K you get fully licensed vSphere. This is great but it still leaves you without an efficient backup and recovery tool, single pane of glass monitoring or detailed reporting…enter Veeam Essentials bundle…offering Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter for around US $2,000 (Americas pricing). The Veeam Essentials bundle is fully functional licensed versions of those 3 products for 6 sockets (3 hosts).
Of course Veeam is placing some limits on this bundle…
Must be purchased with VMware vSphere Essentials (or proof of VMware vSphere Essentials must be given)
Each bundle will only support 6 sockets. This means that even if you purchase multiple bundles, each Veeam product will only work on 6 sockets, you’ll need to install other instances with the other license(s) to manage the other VMware vSphere Essentials vCenters.
Each bundle is 6 sockets, no less (sorry folks, you can’t get it cheaper for only 4 sockets)
What does all this mean? For just under US $3,000 (hardware not included) you get 6 sockets of VMware vSphere, 6 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication, 6 sockets of Veeam Monitor and 6 sockets of Veeam Reporter. That’s 3 servers with up to 8 cores (2×4) and 256GB RAM each running VMware ESX(i). Couple that with a free iSCSI solution such as Starwind and now you’re talking 2 TB of shared data for free (hardware and Windows licensing not included).
I did not include Support and Subscription (SnS) above because for VMware vSphere Essentials it’s optional (it’s not optional on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus). Veeam’s Essentials bundle includes 1 year of support and upgrades in the list price.
Now, let’s discuss a few things about the Free Version of ESXi. We’ve gotten a number of questions on this since we released the “news” and the Essentials bundle on the same day. Below is a simple table explaining what is and isn’t supported:
Table of compatibility:
ESX Version
Current Customers As of June 3, 2009
Future Customers
ESX/ESXi 3.x licensed
+
+
ESX/ESXi 4.x licensed
+
+
ESXi 3.5 free
+
-
ESXi 4.0 free
-
-
+ = supported/usable
- = not supported
Now please note that Veeam will not be supporting ESXi Free 4.0 at all. If you’re a current customer using Veeam Backup & Replication for ESXi Free 3.x, please contact your Veeam ProPartner or sales person for vSphere options.
While I don’t endorse or condone any of the following, I thought I would be doing an injustice if I did not include links to the community’s reaction to our announcement regarding dropping ESXi Free support. The list below is just some of the reaction, be sure to read the comments in each as well.
I decided to write this simple example of how to use some basic functions of the Veeam PowerShell Extensions.This is by no means comprehensive, just an idea of some of the things that can be done if you don’t have time to install Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.5 yourself.
The Veeam PS Extensions are very similar to the VMware VI Toolkit, but don’t require the VI Toolkit. With the Veeam PS Extensions you use PowerShell to connect to the Veeam Reporter Enterprise database, not vCenter. This gives the advantage of not putting any stress on vCenter and you also get access to all of the historical data in Veeam Reporter Enterprise.
Once you have everything installed, simply open the Veeam PowerShell Extensions shortcut and connect to the Veeam DB using the _Connect-VIServer command:
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Connect-VIServer
cmdlet _Connect-VIServer at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
SQLInstance: localhost\veeam
SQLDatabase: VeeamReporter
Now that you are connected, you can do some basic commands like _Get-VM
Name
PowerState
Num CPUs
Memory (MB)
—-
———-
——–
———–
WindowsServ01
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM02
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM011
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM03_RUN
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM04_TEST
PoweredOff
1
256
WindowsServ02_STA…
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM03
PoweredOff
1
256
WindowsServ02
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM04
PoweredOff
1
256
Windows Server Ho…
PoweredOff
1
256
DSL Linux
PoweredOff
1
256
To check what data set you’re viewing, you can use the _Get-VRCurrentDate command:
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Get-VRCurrentDate
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:24:15 PM
If you want to connect to a different date, simply use the _Set-VRCurrentDate command and enter a date:
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Set-VRCurrentDate
cmdlet _Set-VRCurrentDate at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
Date: 03.22.2009
To check that you’re connected to the proper date, rung the _Get-VRCurrentDate command again:
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> _Get-VRCurrentDate
Sunday, March 22, 2009 12:00:00 AM
Now, executing the _Get-VM command will show different results, for that particular date:
Name
PowerState
Num CPUs
Memory (MB)
—-
———-
——–
———–
WindowsServ01
PoweredOn
1
256
MSVM02
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM011
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM03_RUN
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM04_TEST
PoweredOff
1
256
WindowsServ02_STA…
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM03
PoweredOff
1
256
WindowsServ02
PoweredOff
1
256
MSVM04
PoweredOff
1
256
Windows Server Ho…
PoweredOff
1
256
DSL Linux
PoweredOn
1
256
Notice that WindowsServ01 and DSL Linux are both listed as PoweredON for this date, they were listed as PoweredOff on the other date.
This is a VERY simplistic example just to show connecting to different dates/times in the database.
Today Veeam released an update to it’s popular Virtual Infrastructure Reporting platform, Veeam Reporter 3.5. In the Enterprise version one of the new features is PowerShell Extensions. As we were preparing the release, I had some discussions with Alan Renouf and Hal Rottenberg about how we implemented it. They immediately raised some concerns regarding our implementation and I’d like to take the time to address those here. We were too close to the release to address this but we will address it in a future hotfix. Please understand I’m not a PowerShell expert, I’d just like to let everyone know about this feature and get suggestions for how to make it better.
The idea behind Veeam’s PowerShell Extensions is to allow people who want to query vCenter using a PS script to query Veeam’s Reporter Enterprise database instead. We wanted to provide an easy way to do this without having to completely re-write pre-existing scripts that have been written for the VI Toolkit. Another advantage is that Reporter Enterprise saves “points-in-time” of your Virtual Infrastructure, so if you want to run a PS script comparing last month to this month, the data is there, it’s just a matter of connecting to it.
In the process, we ended-up messing with the Verb-Noun syntax of PowerShell and we understand (now) that the PowerShell community will not be happy with this. For instance, in the VI Toolkit you have the command “Get-VM”. Rather than change the noun (VM) Veeam decided to change the verb, so with the Veeam PS Extensions the command is “_Get-VM”. Essenitially all the verbs that can be used in the VI Toolkit can be used with the Veeam Extensions just by adding an “_” in front of the verb.
We understand now that this is wrong and we will be working to fix it. One suggestion is to leave the verb alone and change the noun so that we would have “Get-VRVM” where the VR=Veeam Reporter. Another suggestion is to use “Veeam\Get-VM”. Both of these options are valid, what do you think? We’d love to know your feedback!
Hal Rottenberg has invited me to be on his PowerShell podcast on April 30 and I’m looking forward to being there and talking about how we’ve implemented this and getting suggestions for how to improve it.
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