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Using Workers in Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV

Veeam workers are the VMs running in the Nutanix cluster used in large environments to speed up the backup and restore processes.

Veeam Backup and Replication manages those VMs. During backup or restore procedures, VMs are powered on to process the data, and when backup or restore is finished, they are powered off.

We can consider workers as temporary proxies, working only during backup or restore procedures.

In this article, we will look at how to add workers to the backup infrastructure and how it works.

A few tips for preparing for the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure exam

In 2022, I had the opportunity to take the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure (NCX-MCI) certification exam, and in this article, I would like to talk a little about the certification and give some tips for preparation.

Notice: This is a translated version of my original post, written in 2022 after I passed this exam. Since then, a few things have changed, but the overall process is still the same.

What’s new at Nutanix University?

As I wrote a few months ago, Nutanix released a new training and certification related to Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) – Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration.

It contains two free online courses:
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration (NC2A-AWS) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the AWS environment;
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure Administration (NC2A-Azure) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the Microsoft Azure environment.

And two exams:
Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration – AWS (NCP-CI-AWS) 6.7;
Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration – Azure (NCP-CI-Azure) 6.7.

Both exams are exiting the beta stage and will be available from April 30.

And the good news! Until April 19, two 100% discounts are available:

NCP-CI-AWS 6.7 exam discount code: NXFRCIAWS67;
NCP-CI-Azure 6.7 exam discount code: NXFRCIAZ67.

To get Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration 6 status, and badge, you don’t need to take both exams, but just one of them. So, schedule an exam today using a discount code and take an exam after April 30.

Quick fix: Nutanix. Restore admin password

It’s not a common situation, but it does happen sometimes, especially in test clusters.

To change the admin password we need to connect to the CVM, for example, using the nutanix user, and reset the password:

$ ncli user reset-password user-name=admin password=MyStrong@Passw0rd
Password of user 'admin' reset successfully
Please login again with new credentials.

The password should be strong and between 8 and 255 characters. It should differ by at least 4 characters from previous password and it should not be from last 5 passwords.

Now you can connect to Prism and use the password you just set.

Quick fix: VMware. Some of the disks of the virtual machine failed to load.

I have faced an issue with one of the VMs running on VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20328353.

Symptoms:

1. VM is running. There are no reports from users;

2. vMotion fails with an error:

The object or item referred to could not be found.

3. After vMotion in hostd.log we can find the following:

Failed to find file size for /vmfs/volumes/.../VM_NAME.nvram: No such file or directory

4. In the vCenter UI under VM a message is displaying:

Some of the disks of the virtual machine VM_NAME failed to load. The information present for them in the virtual machine configuration may be incomple

5. No issues with the storage layer. All VM’s files are located on the datastore;

6. Other VMs on the host and datastore works fine;

7. Recommendations like “Rescan Datastore” don’t work.

Solution.

Before you begin, make sure that you have a backup.

The solution for me was simple, but it required downtime:

Power off the VM;
After that, the VM will be in an inaccessible state;
Remove VM from the vCenter inventory;
Locate VM’s files on the datastore and find vmx file;
Register VM;
Power on the VM.

After that VM should be up and running without issues.

Veeam Backup & Replication Instant Recovery to Nutanix AHV

I have previously written about how to connect VBR to a Nutanix cluster, as well as how to create backup tasks and restore.

In this article, we will talk about a very important VBR functionality – Instant Recovery, support for which was added with the release of Nutanix AOS 6.0 STS and AOS 6.5 LTS.

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b is out

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b is out and contains a lot of bug fixes. One of the fixes I want to mention is a bug in CBT:

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) might not work as expected on a hot extended virtual disk:

In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, to optimize the open and close process of virtual disks during hot extension, the disk remains open during hot extend operations. Due to this change, incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT enabled might be incomplete, because the CBT in-memory bitmap does not resize, and CBT cannot record the changes to the extended disk block. As a result, when you try to restore a VM from an incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT, the VM might fail to start.

As a workaround, there were two options: not to use hot extend and perform disk extend operations when the VM is powered off, or create periodically full backups to reset the CBT.

So, if you’re running ESXi version 8.0 Update 2, you should consider updating to the 8.0 Update 2b as soon as possible.

You can read about other release notes here.

Connecting Ceph clients. File access with CephFS

With this article, I close the series on the basics of Ceph deployment. Previously, we looked at how to deploy Ceph, and how block and object access is provided.

This article will briefly describe the procedure for providing file access in Ceph using CephFS. This topic is very extensive and a lot may be missed, so please refer to the official documentation for more information.

Connecting Ceph clients. Ceph Object Gateway and S3

In addition to block and file data access, Ceph also supports object access via the S3 or Swift protocols.

In this case, we will look at what settings need to be made on the Ceph side to provide clients with the ability to store data using the S3 protocol.

Let me remind you that I previously described the procedure for installing Ceph Reef from scratch in this article. In this case, I use the same platform, as well as a client based on Rocky Linux 9.

Also, I previously wrote about connecting block devices using RBD here.

Considerations about changes in Time Zones in Kazakhstan and how to deal with it in Linux

On the 00:00 1st of March 2024, Kazakhstan changes the clocks to a single time zone UTC +5 for the whole country. It will affect two time zones: Asia/Almaty and Asia/Qostanay, which are in UTC +6 and need to be adjusted.

And the question may arise – what to do?

As this blog is more about Virtualization, one thing to mention: there are not many problems. Most hypervisors work in the UTC +0 time zone, and the time zone should be correct inside the Guest Virtual Machines.

Many people ask: Will the NTP server move my clock back for an hour? The answer is no. NTP servers work in the UTC +0. And on the 1st of March, they won’t move your clock backward.

In this article, we will look briefly at Linux systems and how to change the time.