Backup

Amazon Web Services has released yet another service designed to improve the lives of people administering an AWS environment. There is a new backup service, cleverly named, AWS Backup. This new service allows you to create a backup plan for Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic File System (EFS), DynamoDB, Relational Database Services (RDS), and Storage Gateway. Now we can build plans to automatically backup, tier and expire old backups automatically based on our own criteria. ...

A transit VPC is a pretty common networking pattern in an AWS environment. [Transit VPCs](http://Should I use a Transit VPC in AWS?) can limit the number of peering connections required to connect all your VPCs by switching from a mesh topology of peers to a hub and spoke method with transit. While transit VPCs offer some nice features, it also requires a bit more management overhead since you need to manage your own routers. Cisco makes the deployment of transit routers very easy but sometimes you need to make some changes to the routers after they’re deployed like if you need to resize them. Also, sometimes bad things happen and those routers can be destroyed by accident. This post shows how you can resize your Cisco CSRs and/or restore an old configuration from snapshot. ...

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about PHD Virtual after seeing them at VMworld and the Chicago VMUG Conference and thought that I’d try them out. I was quite pleased with their product and recommend that you check them out if you’re looking for virtual backup solutions. I know that the big player in the market seems to be Veeam so if you’d like a comparison of features, check out this information from ITComparison.com to get a non-biased opinion. ...

If you need to backup some of your virtual machines, maybe it’s time to consider VMware Data Recovery 2.0. This VMware appliance provides an easy way to backup some virtual machines for free, but if you’re looking for a large scale backup solution it might be necessary to use more traditional backup solutions from Symantec or Veeam. To get started, download the VMware Data Recovery iso from vmware.com. The iso includes a plugin for vCenter as well as an OVF for deploying the appliance. Once you’ve deployed the OVF template and installed the vCenter plugin, you can open the vDR from the solutions and applications section of the vCenter console. ...