Customers that use HPE 3PAR StoreServs with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 and VMware ESXi 5.5 U2 or later, might notice one or more of the following symptoms:
hosts lose connectivity to a VMFS5 datastore hosts disconnect from the vCenter VMs hang during I/O operations you see the messages like these in the vobd.log or vCenter Events tab Lost access to volume due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and the outcome will be reported shortly
Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07. The copy sessions failed with this error:
|Critical| From: BMA@<hostname> "" Time: <Date><Time> |90:6111| Error retrieving encryption key. The customer uses tape encryption. The destination for the backups is a HPE StoreOnce, and a post-backup copy creates a copy of the data on tape. Backup to disk was running fine, but the copy to tape failed immediately.
The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) was developed in 1998 as an open standard protocol. VRRP is the result of an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and it’s described in RFC 5798 (VRRPv3). VRRP was designed as an open standard protocol, but it uses some patents from Cisco. Its function is comparable to Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), or to the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP). VRRP solves a very specific problem at the network edge: It offers highly available virtual router interfaces, or in simple words: A highly available default gateway.
HPE StoreVirtual is a scale-out storage platform, that is designed to meet the needs of virtualized environments. It’s based on LeftHand OS and because the magic is a piece of software, HPE StoreVirtual is available as HPE ProLiant/ BladeSystem-based hardware, or as Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. It comes with an all-inclusive enterprise feature set. This feature set provides
Storage clustering Network RAID Thin Provisioning (with support for space reclamation) Snapshots Asynchronous and synchronous replication across multiple sites Automated software upgrades and self-healing storage Adaptive Optimization (Tiering) The license is alway all-inclusive.
Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are all the rage. REST was defined by Roy Thomas Fielding in his PhD dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures". The architectural style of REST describes six constraints:
Uniform interface Stateless Cacheable Client - Server communication Layered system Code on demand RESTful APIs typically use HTTP and HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) to send data to, or retrieve data from remote systems.
In March 2016, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a ProLiant-based HCI solution, that should be easier to use and cheaper than Nutanix.
This isn’t HPEs first dance on this floor. In August 2015, HP launched the Hyper Converged 250 System (HC250), which is based on the Apollo server platform. The HW design of the HC250 comes close to a Nutanix Block, because the Apollo platform supports up to four nodes in 2U.
Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x. As of June 30, 2016, HPE will offer no new updates or patches for Data Protector 7.0x and 8.0x. This means that
Telephone and email support new security updates, and new product updates will be phased out. The self-help support will be continued until June 30, 2018. Self-help includes access to the knowledge base, current patches and access to known problems.
Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05. Immediately after the first tests I noticed, that backups were made using the NBDSSL transport. I expected that the SAN transport would be used, because the prerequisites were met and it has worked until the update. I opened a case at the HPE support und I was advised to install the hotfix QCIM2A65619. With this hotfix, several files were replaced:
The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.
What is possible? I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.
Feature VE Integration Online backup ✓ Crash-consistent backup ✓ Application-consistent backup ✓ Granularity vmdk, vmx Full/ Incremental/ Differential ✓/ ✓/ ✓ Support for changed block tracking (CBT) ✓ Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?
Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:
[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server" Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27 [170:313] One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session. Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.
