@storageninja said in What Is an Agentless Backup:

They can take a snapshot and replicate it somewhere else. That isn't really revolutionary in and of itself (EMC had storage arrays that could do this in the 90's). One challenge to this is what are you recovering?

Not revolutionary at all. I think the key there is that agentless backups are not revolutionary. They are a tried and true solution on top of which some vendors like Veeam have added some amazing features. But those features are product features, not intrinsic artefacts of agentless approaches.

Veeam is amazing, in both their agentless and agent-based products. But neither agentless nor agent-based is amazing as a concept.

@brandon220 said in How to take advantage of virtualization. Major products get updated:

I plan on setting this up in the lab soon. dm-cache also sounds interesting. I've never touched software RAID because 95% of my environment has been MS for a long time. Always have gone the hw raid route.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/improving-read-performance-dm-cache

Redhat did some testing with an SSD but it looks ugly. 5 passes and no performance improvement using a SSD. I suspect they are hamstrung by the patent minefield that is ARC (IBM of all people has this patent BTW) and the subsidiary cool optimizations that have been made to it (ARC was intended for CPU cache originally, your storage fun fact of the day!). Also I suspect the IO path on this thing isn't the cleanest. Looks like the Linux kernel file cache is going to be faster which if I"m using that I might as well just give memory to the guest and let it sort it out (especially with the lack of dedupe or single instancing of this cache).

If your looking to speed stuff up I say get "the good stuff".

We got some PMEM DIMMS in the lab, and this stuff is face melting fast. You can "bolt" it on with a DAX file system, but the best way to use it is with applications that have been redesigned to support it. We forked REDIS to support this and got latency 12x better than using local NVMe drives, and 2.8x better tha DAX.
Oracle had 57x better operational latency.
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