Cannot complete login due to invalid user name and password error: VMware 5.1 upgrade

Error description: "cannot complete login due to invalid user name and password" usually occurs after upgrade to vCenter 5.1. Login to vCenter and the web client fails.

I was able to fix the issue in my environment by enabling the NetBIOS over TCP/IP settings in the vCenter server. 

Other good practice to follow is to use FQDN for all the hostnames (vCenter/Single Sign-on).

Host Profile Path Selection Policy error in ESXi 5.0

You might have come across the following error while checking for compliance against a host profile in ESXi 5.0 Update 1:-

Specification state absent from host: SATP VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX needs to be set to use Path Selection Policy VMW_PSP_FIXED_AP by default
Host state dosen't match specification: SATP VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX needs to be set to use Path Selection Policy VMW_PSP_FIXED by default

To resolve this issue:-

1. Open Host Profiles page on your vCenter server. (Home -> Under Management click on host profiles)

2. Right click the profile which was giving error and select "Enable/Disable Profile Configuration"

3. In the new window that opens up, expand the storage configuration section and uncheck Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and Native Multi-Pathing (NMP).

4. Hit ok.

After the Host Profile has been modified, attach it to the ESXi 5.0 host again and check for compliance.

Per VMware support, this issue occurs due to a bug in the ESXi 5.0 update 1. This issue has been fixed in ESXi 5.0 update 2 and ESXi 5.1

Part 5: VEEAM Backup and Replication v6 setup and config (Troubleshooting performance issues)

This is part 5 of a 5 series post on VEEAM installation and configuration. In this section I will show how to troubleshoot performance issues with the Virtual VEEAM Backup and Replication server.

Read my other posts on this topic:-
Part 1 (Introduction and Pre-requisites)
Part 2 (VEEAM Installation steps)
Part 3 (VEEAM Configuration)
Part 4 (Creating backup jobs)

 So after I started running the backups via my virtual VEEAM backup server, I noticed terribly poor performance on the backup server. The windows task manager showed 100% CPU utilization. 

But the network was hardly being utilized. 

The Windows resource manager showed moderate to high I/O on the backup drive (which is understandable and acceptable, considering that we were running two backup streams simultaneously).

The vSphere performance graphs also confirmed the stats that the Windows task manager was showing. 

To further explore the issue, I looked at the VEEAM backup job logs. The logs clearly had an entry which said that the primary bottleneck in the whole process was our Proxy server (which in our case is also our VEEAM Backup and Replication server). Read the second last line in the job log screenshot below ("Primary bottleneck: Proxy").

To troubleshoot this issue I looked at the task manager performance window, the VM's performance tab in the vSphere client, and the VEEAM backup job logs. I decided to increase the number of vCPUs on the VM from 2 to 8. 

After increasing the number of cores, I was able to run the job faster and without causing any performance impact on the VEEAM Backup server.

This concludes the 5 series blog on VEEAM Backup and Replication. I hope you enjoyed reading the blog. Please feel free to leave any comments and I will reply to them as soon as I can.

Thank you.

Gurpreet Singh Anand

Part 4: VEEAM Backup and Replication v6 setup and config (Creating backup jobs)

This is part 4 of a 5 series post on VEEAM installation and configuration. In this section, I will show how to create the backup policies.

Read my other posts on this topic:-

Part 1 (Introduction and Pre-requisites)

Part 2 (VEEAM Installation steps)

Part 3 (VEEAM Configuration)
Part 5 (VEEAM Troubleshooting performance issues)

1. On the menu bar click on the Backup icon. In the new window that opens up, enter the name of the backup job and click next.

2. In the next window, click on Add and then select the VMs that you want to backup. You can also exclude certain drive(s) that you do not want to backup.

 3. In the next window, you can specify a particular backup proxy server to use or you can let VEEAM automatically choose any suitable backup proxy server for you.

4. In the next screen, select the VEEAM repository that you want to use to store the backups. Also specify the number of restore points you want to keep on the disk. 

VEEAM will automatically delete any old backup copy after the "14th" copy (as per the screenshot above). But it will make sure that there is always a FULL backup and related incremental backup copies on disk before it deletes any old backup file.

5. Click Advanced.  

Here you can specify if you need synthetic Full Backups (which always run incremental and then in the background a FULL backup is created on the disk). In this case, you would have a FULL Backup file and some incrementals. For e.g. you can specify Saturday to convert your incrementals into a FULL Backup. The backups for the week will run incremental so you can see incremental files in the backup repository. Then on Saturday, a FULL Backup file will be created on the disk where your incremental backups are stored.

You can also check the roll back option, which is basically keeping the latest backup as FULL instead of incremental. So at any point of time, you would have a latest FULL Backup and past incrementals upto the point of FULL.

Under Advanced settings, you can also specify the deduplication level.

In the notification tab, you can enable email and SNMP settings.

In the vSphere tab, you can set the option for Changed block tracking which will allow for faster restores. 

NOTE: You will see warning messages during your VM backup if the changed block tracking is enabled and the VM has an active snapshot. 

Under the Advanced tab, you can enable settings for Integrity checks, VM retention etc. You can leave these settings  to default.

NOTE: VM retention refers to the retention for any information, logs or any data for a VM that has been deleted and not the actual VM backup files retention.

6. Under Guest Processing, you can enable options for application level snapshots or application quiescence. You can also set option for the guest file system indexing. Both these options are self explanatory in the window so I won't spend much time discuss them here. If you have any questions, then please leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

7. In the next Window, you specify the schedule for the backup policy and the failed job retry settings.

8. Click create. Verify the policy details in the next window and hit finish to complete the backup job creation. You can also enable the backup job to run for the first time from this screen.

This completes the VEEAM Backup job creation steps. In my next blog, I will discuss regarding any performance issue that you may face if you install VEEAM on a virtual machine.

Click here to go to Part 5 (VEEAM Troubleshooting performance issues)

New features in Windows Server 2012

Windows server 2012 has been released to the manufacturing. It will be available for general evaluation and purchase by all customers around the world on September 4 2012.

Here is the information on some of the new features in Windows Server 2012:-

Licensing

The Enterprise Licensing has been eliminated. There are only 4 license types in Windows 2012.  

• Datacenter edition for highly-virtualized private cloud environments.
• Standard edition for non-virtualized or lightly virtualized environments.
• Essentials edition for small businesses with up to 25 users running on servers with up to two processors.
• Foundation edition for small businesses with up to 15 users running on single processor servers.

Here is a comparison of various editions by server role.

Here is a summary of key features:-

Running instances

Running instances can exist either in a physical operating system environment (POSE) or a virtual operating system environment (VOSE).

Powershell

Windows Powershell has over 2300 commandlets as compared to 200 in Windows Server 2008

Task Manager

New Task Manager Window, shows more detailed information about each process/application

File System

New type of file system for File servers is called ReFS (Resilient File System). Max file size of 16 Exabytes and max volume size of 1 yottabytes (hardware restrictions still apply)

CPU and Memory limits

· There is no support for Itanium based processors
· Max logical processors: 640 (It was 256 in Windows Server 2008 R2)
· Max RAM: 4 TB (It was 2 TB in Windows Server 2008 R2)

Some new RDS features

a) Single Sign-On:  In Windows Server 2008 R2, it was possible to configure an RDS deployment so that users will need to enter their credentials only once when connecting to RemoteApps and hosted desktops. However, this configuration was very cumbersome. Windows Server 2012 dramatically simplified this by eliminating the need to use multiple certificates. It is also possible to use locally logged on domain credentials so that users connecting from managed devices can connect seamlessly without any credential prompts.
b) Email and web discovery of Remote Applications and desktops:  Users now can find the correct remote workspace to connect to by just providing their email address. This removes the requirement to remember a long website URL. In addition, Remote Desktop Web Access now supports other browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Changes to vRAM licensing

In its upcoming release of vSphere 5.1, VMware is getting rid of vRAM entitlements, which debuted with vSphere 5 and determine how much memory customers are permitted to allocate to virtual machines on the host, according to sources familiar with VMware's plans.

VMware will return to its previous CPU-based licensing model and will announce the move at VMworld when it unveils vSphere 5.1.

VMware did not respond to a request for comment on its decision to discontinue vRAM.

VMware is ditching vRAM in part to maintain its competitive edge against Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT), which is adding several enterprise-class features in its upcoming release of Hyper-V 3. Microsoft, which has labeled vRAM as a "vTax," has been using the model in a campaign to lure away VMware customers.

Part 3: VEEAM Backup and Replication v6 setup and config (Configuration steps)

This is part 3 of a 5 series post on VEEAM installation and configuration. In this section, I will show the configuration steps for VEEAM Backup and Replication v6.

Read my other posts on this topic:-
Part 1 (Introduction and Pre-requisites)
Part 2 (VEEAM Installation steps)

Part 4 (VEEAM Backup job creation)

Part 5 (VEEAM Troubleshooting performance issues)

We will basically setup the following components:-

• Add a vCenter Server.
• Configure a VEEAM Backup Repository. 
• Add a VEEAM Backup Proxy Server.
• Remove a VEEAM Backup Proxy Server.
• Configure SNMP settings for email notification.

a. Add a vCenter Server

If you do not have a vCenter Server, you can add your hosts individually. Adding a vCenter Server is preferred, because it makes VEEAM Backup and Replication VMotion-aware.

1. Open the VEEAM Backup and Replication console and on the home page click Add Servers.

2. On the next Window that opens up, click VMware vSphere.

3. On the next screen, enter the hostname or IP address of the vCenter Server.

4. On the next window, type an account with administrator privileges on the vCenter Server.

5. Review the settings and click Finish on the next screen.

b. Configure a VEEAM Backup Repository

1. Create a folder on the drive where you want to backup your VMs. In this example, I've created VEEAM_BACKUP folder on the V: of the VEEAM server itself.

2. On the VEEAM Backup and Replication Home console, under Backup Infrastructure right click the Backup Repository and click Add Backup Repository.

3. On the next window, type a suitable name for your Backup Repository. This is the name by which your Backup Repository will be recognized by VEEAM.

4. In the next window, choose Microsoft Windows Server as a type of Backup Repository.

5. In the next window, select the drive on which you created the backup folder.

6. Browse to the location of the backup folder on the selected drive (that is the folder that we created in step 1 above). In this window, you can also specify the Load control settings. For eg. if you have SATA drives for your storage, you may want to limit the number of concurrent jobs to 2 or 3 to avoid any I/O bottlenecks. Or if you have just one NIC card on the backup server, you can limit the incoming dataflow.

The options in the Advanced tab are self-explanatory.

7. On the next window, you'll see the settings for vPower NFS. vPower NFS enables running virtual machines directly from the backup files. Its a feature thats highly recommended. 

Specify the folder for the vPower NFS cache. As explained earlier, this cache is used to store all the changes to the VM while it is running from the backup files. So depending upon the changes and number of VMs that you will test for Instant Recovery, you might want to leave atleast 50-60 GB space for this folder.

8. Review the settings in the next window and click next. You can import any existing backups to the VEEAM database if you want to in this window.

9. Wait for the repository to be created and configured. Click Finish when done.

c. Add a VEEAM Backup Proxy Server

1. On the VEEAM Backup and Replication Home console, under Backup Infrastructure right click the Backup Proxy and click Add VMware Backup Proxy.

2. In the next window that opens up, click Add New...

3. Enter the hostname or IP address of the VEEAM Backup Proxy Server.

4. On the next window, type an account with administrator privileges on the Backup Proxy Server.

5. The next window will inform you that the "transport" component would be installed on the Backup Proxy Server. Click Next.

6. The VEEAM Backup Proxy Server components will be pushed and installed onto the Proxy server. Wait for the installation to complete and click next.

7. Click Finish to complete the install.

8. After the installation is done, you can modify the settings for Transport Mode. You can also set the SSL Encryption at this screen. 

You can also set the number of maximum concurrent tasks for the Backup Proxy Server. As a rule of thumb, for every 2 CPU cores, VEEAM adds 1 concurrent task. So, for a quad core system, VEEAM would recommend max 2 consurrent tasks. You can, of course, modify these settings.

9. You can set the way Backup Proxy Server accesses the datastores.

10. In the next window, you can specify the settings for Traffic Throttling.

11. Click Finish to complete the installation.

d. Remove a VEEAM Backup Proxy Server

It might sometimes be necessary to remove a VEEAM Backup Proxy Server. For e.g. you decide to change the Backup Proxy Server to some other host, or you decommission the Backup Proxy Server. Follow the steps below to remove a previously configured Backup Proxy Server from your VEEAM farm.

1. To remove a Backup Proxy Server, you would first have to disable it. 
Select Backup Proxy under Backup Infrastructure. On the right hand side right click the Backup Proxy server and select Disable.

2. Once the Proxy has been disabled, right click the Proxy again, select Remove and click Yes.

3. After you have deleted the Proxy, goto the Servers section, right click the Proxy Server that you wanted to remove and click Remove Server.

4. Click Yes on the next window to confirm the removal.

5. Click OK on the next Window.

e. Configure SNMP settings for email notification

1. On the VEEAM home page, click Tools-> Options.

2. In the window that opens up, check the box for "Enable e-mail notification"

3. Enter the following:-

i. Hostname or IP address of the SMTP server.

ii. Your or generic e-mail address.

iii. Recipients e-mail address (multiple recipients should be separated by semicolon)

This completes the Part 3 of the 5 series post on VEEAM installation and configuration. In the next post, I will show how to create backup policies.

Click here to go to Part 4 (VEEAM Backup job creation)