Posted on opensource

Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana – Part XXII (Monitoring Cloudflare, include beautiful Maps)

Greetings friends, since 2016 I have been showing you how to get the Perfect Dashboard using Grafana, InfluxDB, and Telegraf, we have come a long way together, and we have seen how to monitor a myriad of critical components, such as SSL, web page responses, VMware vSphere, Veeam, and much, much more.Today we return to the basics, exploring some of the more visually appealing plugins, and giving it a more personal touch, how it is to analyze Cloudflare's statistics where we have our blog, personal website, e-commerce, etc. cached.Note: There are some limitations with the Cloudflare RESTful API:
  • It doesn't always give us the answer with the date we indicate
  • From May it will be legacy, but for now, it serves us
  • With the Free version, we can only consult in ranges of Last 24 hours, Last Week, and Last Month
Once you have finished this tutorial, you will have something similar to this, it is better to give it several days or weeks to see the full potential:
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Posted on veeam

Nutanix: Deploy, install and configure Veeam Availability for Nutanix v2.0, the indispensable backup for Acropolis environments

Greetings friends, today I bring you a very interesting post, it's about everything you need to know about Veeam Availability for Nutanix v2.0, from its deployment to its installation and configuration.Veeam Availability for Nutanix v2.0 was released just a few days ago, and that's why we're going to see the whole process.It includes video and theory, let's go! As this post is a bit long, I leave you the menu in HTML as usual:

Veeam Availability for Nutanix - What is it and why do we need it in Acropolis environments?

Many years ago, back in 2015, I told you that Nutanix was launching its own Hypervisor, distancing itself from VMware or Hyper-V and including its own hypervisor to have better control of the hardware that Nutanix provides.It is true that Nutanix allows replication of VMs between different clusters, and of course, the Acropolis itself and the Nutanix topology offers high availability for all VMs.
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Posted on nutanix

Nutanix: Deploy Single-Node Nutanix Community Edition 5.11.1.2 over VMware vSphere 6.7 in Nested Mode – OVF Format

Greetings friends, I have told you on numerous occasions how to deploy Nutanix Community Edition on different platforms such as VMware Fusion, using ISO, using PowerShell to create a cluster of three nodes, and so on.Today I bring you something much simpler, it only takes 5 minutes to have a Single-Cluster using a simple OVF image  I've created ready for you to try Community Edition today.

System requirements to deploy Nutanix Community Edition 5.11.1.2 in OVF format

I want to emphasize that this image is based on the latest version of Nutanix Community Edition 5.11.1.2, which was announced a few months ago, and that this OVF is intended only to be deployed nested on vSphere or ESXi, we go with the requirements, the image is consuming the following, but you can edit CPU and RAM:
  • Intel CPU, 4 cores minimum, with VT-x support enabled. The image has 8 Cores, 2 processors of 4.
  • Memory 16GB minimum. I will recommend something in the order of 24 or 32GB.
  • Hot Tier (SSD) One SSD for each minimum Server to install Hypervisor Acropolis, ≥ 16GB
  • Hot Tier (SSD) One SSD for each minimum Server, ≥ 200GB per server. We'd better deploy it over SSD.
  • Cold Tier (HDD) One SSD for each server minimum, ≥ 500GB per server.
If we meet the requirements, for example in my case I have a SSD of 1TB and launched there all the OVF with their disks and everything.
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: What’s New in Veeam Backup & Replication v10 – XFS (Reflink) and Fast Clone Repositories in Veeam

Greetings friends, a few years ago I told you all the advantages of using Microsoft's ReFS file system to accompany it to our Veeam as a Backup Repository where the synthetic full is generated every week.Veeam has been recommending for a long time to use this technology to make the disk operations that are made when a synthetic is generated really fast, so fast that Veeam marks it in its GUI as [fast clone].So far, everything is wonderful, and I'm sure you are already using it in your Datacenter, but one of the new features that Veeam Backup & Replication includes in v10, is the possibility of using Linux-based repositories formatted in XFS with the Reflink flag, which is basically the same as ReFS.

Officially supported in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, experimental in the rest of the distributions.

XFS (Reflink) explained in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication

If we want to take a closer look at how XFS works with Reflink enabled. For example, let's think of a case with NTFS, where we have the typical full copy of each week, the incremental ones and the synthetic full backup, this would look like this in NTFS:If we use XFS with Reflink enabled, we can see that the full synthetic copy instead of having to move all the incremental blocks to produce the new synthetic full, what it does is use the Reflink attribute of XFS to use the references to them to get a fast clone, which makes the copy much faster, and takes up less disk space. This way, we can safely say that using XFS repositories with Reflink enabled, will allow us to reduce the size of our synthetic copies, and get them to go faster.
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: How to design and implement a policy-based SLA backup system – Part V – Monitoring the Veeam Backup & Replication environment with Veeam ONE

Greetings friends, we are approaching the last entries of this interesting series on how to protect the VMs using SLA policies, we have seen previously from the beginning of how to raise this protection system and to begin to create them in vSphere, how to create the policies in Veeam Backup & Replication, to assign the vSphere tags to the VMs that we want to protect and a very useful basic report for the administrators of each application.Today we are going to see in detail, how the Backup Infrastructure Administrators don't get their fingers caught in the resources, and how to create reports that help them understand which environment is busiest.

Veeam ONE Heatmap - A quick look at how busy our environment is

One of the best bird's eye views we have is the one called HEATMAP, which can be found in Veeam ONE Reports, in the Dashboards section. With a simple glance we can see that it is in amber or red, besides being able to see it by each component of the Infrastructure:
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: How to Design and Implement a Backup System Based on SLA Policies – Part IV – Quick Overview and Reporting of Backup Policies

Greetings friends, we arrive at the fourth installment of this interesting series that you are enjoying very much. We have already seen in previous posts all that is needed to deploy backups using SLA policies, and it is now time to generate different reports and different views so that the different owners and managers of each application can know if their VMs are protected.

Using the Veeam Enterprise Manager Plugin with VMware vSphere Client (HTML5)

More than a year ago I wrote about how you could install the Veeam Enterprise Manager plugin on our VCSA to display information on the vSphere Web Client, and on the new vSphere Client (HTML5).Starting from the fact that we have already followed these simple steps, or if we were absent-minded, here is a screenshot where it is shown in a quick way:
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: How to Design and Deploy a Backup System Based on SLA Policies – Part III – Assigning vSphere Tags to Application Groups

Greetings friends, we come to the third entry on this interesting topic on how to protect a vSphere environment using Veeam Backup & Replication with SLA policies, we have seen in previous entries, how to design and create SLA policies in vSphere, and how to create the entire Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, today we will see how the owners or managers of each department can assign the policies to their workloads.

Create or Edit Roles in VMware vSphere

The first thing we will have to do is to grant the role of vSphere Tagging to the role that the different users or responsible of the workloads are using, for example, I have a very limited role, that only allows to do some operations in the VMs, and to this role, I have added the following permission:
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: How to Design and Implement a Policy-Based Backup System – Part II – Creating the Policies in Veeam Backup & Replication

Greetings friends, I already told you in the previous post about how to deploy a backup system using SLA policies, and in that first post, the first steps were mentioned, especially creating the SLA architecture and policies in VMware as vSphere Tags.In this second entry, we're going to see how to create the Veeam architecture we mentioned in the first post, something similar to the following:
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Posted on veeam

Veeam: How to Design and Implement a Backup System Based on SLA Policies – Part I – Design, Architecture, and Tagging in vSphere

Greetings friends, for a long time I have found in more and more places the need of IT Departments to offer the backup as a service internally to the rest of the departments.This means that the IT and Backup managers create the entire infrastructure and backup possibilities, and it is the different managers of each application or group of applications who are responsible.

Create an SLA policy plan according to our business

The first thing we will have to do is sit down and create these SLA plans, according to the needs and obligations of our company. For example, let's imagine that we have three different levels of protection for our environment.
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Posted on veeam

Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: Veeam ONE – Part IX – Chargeback to create cost reports of our Infrastructure

Greetings friends, we arrive at the last entry about In Search of the perfect Dashboard using Veeam ONE, we have seen in-depth many features that surely you had overlooked, or even maybe you didn't know if so I feel happy to have written it.Today we are going to see how to use the Chargeback reports in Veeam ONE. When we talk about Chargeback, we are not really talking about charging anyone for resources, but about having a control of how much certain workloads are costing, besides being useful in Service Provider environments, or simply as I say, sending once a month, or every three months, a report of the resources and their cost to the different departments.
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