Blogs and podcasts

Geoff BurkeVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Understanding Kubernetes Networking can be a challenge. A couple of years ago I was tasked to setup a distributed Minio instance running in containers for use with a Veeam SOBR S3 compatible capacity tier. At first, I thought about doing it on Kubernetes but very quickly realized that I was in over my head. I had no previous experience with Kubernetes and I could not just “wing it”. Among other things the networking piece I found especially hard to understand.In the end I created a Docker Swarm cluster which had a much easier almost “plug and play” overlay network and while that did the trick, I understood that simplicity also meant rigidity.Kubernetes follows the age old *nix (Unix, Linux BSDs and so on) philosophy of creating small separate entities that when brought together can scale into something very complex. Networking is no exception.While a Kubernetes cluster does come with some default networking called kubenet it is very limited and not meant for production environments fro

A Short and Simple Description of Container Network Interface (CNI) in Kubernetes

wolff.mateusVeeam Legend

Today I coming here for a simple post about compression Veeam B&R. So, I take a short VM Linux running an Active Directory for this. Below you can see a full backup with a compression set up as Optional. And now you can see the same full backup with compression option on Extreme. How you can see the duration time was decrease in almost 20 minutes when I compress backup on extreme option. The target of backup on this example is an offsite repository. It has a low bandwidth if we compare with a local one. So, when we are planning our offsite backup policy, the extreme compression can help to get better times on your backup execution window.

Comparative of Compression Backup on v11

Geoff BurkeVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Sometimes you just want to do a quick test which requires S3.You can in seconds flat setup a Minio instance on your laptop for this purpose.Go to Minio’s download page: Run the Powershell command as shown in the instructions: Minio will be downloaded: The instructions on the Minio page say to set a username and password. I did this below but when I brought up Minio it still had the default password. Create a directory where your test buckets will reside: Now run the server: As you can see the root user was still the default minioadmin and password minioadmin but for testing purposes we can leave that, or you can login and make the change. Go to your browser and type your laptop ip address in the url and port 9000 http://your ip:9000 Login and create a bucket by pressing the circled button in the lower right: Bucket created you are ready to go!! Keep in mind this is an http S3 setup. For testing VBR capacity tier offload you would need to use https or use a registry key in Veeam

Quick Minio Setup on Laptop for Testing Veeam and Kasten S3

11 months ago

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Another great little thing is the possibility to display timestamps in job log in VBR console. As you know, logs in console look like this:You see start and end-time. But when happened steps in between? With v11 you can display timestamps too! Just right-click in headline and click Timestamp In my opinion this is very helpful!

[What (else) is new in v11 - IX] Timestamp in Job Log

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Finally v11 is launched, but I will not stop to talk about small features and improvements For today, I found a modern (app) feature. It is about instant virtual disk recovery. Which is not new in v11, but it is new to restore a disk as a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere. A FCD - also called Improved Virtual Disk (IVD) - is a new disk type for modern - containerized - applications. It can be used in kubernetes environments, like VMware Tanzu, to provide persistent storage.More details about FCD you can find here:https://cormachogan.com/2018/11/21/a-primer-on-first-class-disks-improved-virtual-disks/ https://cormachogan.com/2020/01/14/first-class-disks-enhanced-virtual-disks-revisited/Idea for short: manage virtual disk easily even if it is not attached to a VM.With v11, a virtual disk can be instantly recovered as FCD. This also means, you do not have to attach the disk to a VM at restore time - this can be done afterwards! This is not possible when instant-recovery as "normal" VMDK!

[What (else) is new in v11 - VIII] Restore as First Class Disk (FCD)

Eddie KwokExperienced User

NEW Veeam Agent for Mac, included with Veeam Backup & Replication, delivers easy and scalable Mac backup and recovery for even the most demanding organizations.Veeam Backup & Replication introduces another new agent (Veeam Agent for MacOS). I wanted to go through a very quick look at the install of the Agent and what it looks like at the Backup & Replication end. My MacBook Air thought add this to the home Veeam Backup & Replication server v11. Veeam Agent for Mac Overview Veeam Agent for Mac New Features and Enhancements System Requirement Release Notes User Guide To install Veeam Agent for Mac and all the required components Preparing the Agent for MacOSDue to managed by VBR, a NEW Protection Group needs to be created under Physical Infrastructure of Type Computers with pre-installed agents. We need to add to NEW Protection group and get the package files to install locally on our MacBook Air. Give your protection group a name first.You have to choose a local path to

[Blog Post] Step by step of Veeam Agent for Mac 1.0 @ Part 1 (Installing)

Geoff BurkeVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Hi Folks,I have written up some quick instructions on setting up Minikube a single node Kubernetes cluster on your laptop. If I have missed something or if anything is unclear please reach out to me. The great thing about Kubernetes is that you can take it anywhere. If just want to familiarize yourself with Kubernetes and do some testing, then Minikube is an easy to install nonproduction single node Kubernetes cluster that you can install on your laptop. I am using my windows 10 Lenovo Thinkpad. First, we need to enable the Hyper-V role (or install Oracle VirtualBox if your laptop OS will not run Hyper-V) on your laptop. Mac users can use brew https://gist.github.com/kevin-smets/b91a34cea662d0c523968472a81788f7 To enable the Hyper-V role, follow these instructions:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/quick-start/enable-hyper-v INSTALL MINIKUBEMinikube is a single node Kubernetes cluster which allows you test Kubernetes.There are two ways to install Minik

Kubernetes on your Laptop

MicoolPaulVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Veeam launched the veeamazing new v11 last week and with it, some amazing new features. In this blog post I’ll be highlighting the licensing requirements for these new features and a few other pre-requisites to use them. Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP)Veeam CDP enables organisations to achieve aggressively low RPO whilst still retaining the flexibility required by organisations for their retention needs. To utilise Veeam CDP your environment needs to be:VMware Environment using vSphere 6.5 or newer. Veeam needs to have either a Veeam Universal License or Enterprise Plus when using a socket-based license. Replication target can’t be a Veeam Cloud Connect Replica. Veeam Hardened RepositoryThe Veeam hardened repository is designed to help keep backups safe and data integrity assured. It’s great to see this feature requires no specific licensing from Veeam, however there are some pre-requisites to be considered:Only Linux repositories currently provide immutability Only certain task

New Veeam Backup & Replication v11 Features: License and Deployment FAQs

eprietoVeeam Vanguard

CDP - Retention Policies A retention policy defines for how long Veeam Backup & Replication must store restore points for VM replicas. Veeam Backup & Replication offers two retention policy schemes:Long-term retention Short-term retentionLong-term RetentionVeeam Backup & Replication retains long-term restore points for the number of days specified in CDP policy settings. When the retention period is exceeded, Veeam Backup & Replication transforms the replication chain in the following way. The example shows how long-term retention works for a VM replica with one virtual disk.Veeam Backup & Replication checks whether the replication chain contains outdated long-term restore points. If an outdated restore point exists, Veeam Backup & Replication rebuilds the file that contains data for the base disk (<disk_name>-flat.vmdk) to include data of the file that contains data for the delta disk (<disk_name>-<index>.vmdk). To do that, Veeam Backup &

VBR v11 🔥 How CDP Works with Retention Policies

regnorVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

I was thinking about building a lab at home to play, test and learn certain topics. But as my free time is very limited and I didn't want to ruin our power costs, I came to the idea to run a lab in the cloud.Advantages:low entry costs: you pay what you use/need flexible/scalable: resources are only a few clicks away ability to create different scenarios: offsite, DR, ... new technologies = more knowledgeDisadvantages:long term costs: as long as you're using/reserving resources you need to pay for themBeing a VMware guy I've looked for ways to deploy a vSphere environment or at least an ESXi host, but unfortunately the costs were much to high. Either I would have to go with VMware Cloud or rent a bare-metal machine to install ESXi myself; both are very costly.Hyper-V on the other side is easier to deploy in the cloud, without spending too much; as long as the base system support Nested Virtualization. So I've decided to give it a try and went with Microsoft Azure.Microsoft has published

Run a veeam lab in the cloud

michaelcadeProduct Strategy

Hi Everyone, I wanted to start sharing some of the content and learning paths I have been taking to get a better grasp on Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies. First of all I am going to be putting my learning and findings on this page as I continue to navigate these new technologies. And then I will keep adding if possible to this post with the latest blog posts. Part 1 - Choosing your platform Part 2 - Setting up your Kubernetes cluster Part 3 - Playing with stateless workloadsPart 4 - Setting up dynamic shared storagePart 5 - Helm & MinIOPart 6 - Context is ImportantPart 7 - Load Balancing your Kubernetes Home Lab with MetalLBPart 8 – Deploying KubeApps the visual marketplace for all your Kubernetes AppsPart 9 – A Mission Critial App - PacmanPart 10 – Backups in a Kubernetes worldI would love to get your feedback useful links to add or things we should share with the community.

Building the Home Lab Kubernetes Playground Blog Series

jdwComes here often

When it comes to protecting your business against Ransomware, there are three critical components of a successful strategy. Any solution that you're going to rely upon must have all three of these attributes: Simple Immutable Fast The combo of Veeam Backup and Replication alongside SafeMode snapshots on Pure Storage FlashArray//C is uniquely capable of delivering on all three of these critical requirements. SimpleWhen it comes to data protection, it's easy to let your guard down. The best solutions are the ones that don't require constant care and feeding. They are simple to set up and simple to maintain. Veeam and Pure have each built a solid reputation on designing products that are intuitive and easy to use. Veeam backups made immutable by FlashArray SafeMode are "set and forget" simple. This simplicity comes in part due to the fact that you don't have to change a thing about your Veeam deployment to enable SafeMode protected backups. SafeMode protects the entire Veeam Backup Re

Veeam Immutable Backups with Pure Storage FlashArray//C SafeMode

MicoolPaulVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Morning all! With under 8 hours to the launch event, make sure to sign up!Join the Live Event for V11 Launch (veeam.com) Here’s the time the launch event kicks off in some time zones: AWST (Australian Western Standard Time): Midnight (25th Feb)EET (Eastern European Time): 6PMEST (Eastern Standard Time): 11AMGMT (Greenwich Mean Time): 4PMPST (Pacific Standard Time): 8AM Time to level up to 11!

Veeam v11 Launch Event

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

Default behavior in VBR (incl. v11!): When a VM gets application-aware backed up, runtime components gets installed at start of job and are removed at the end. With v11 we have the option to install them persistent! This increases security! No Admin-Share and VIX-access is necessary any more. But it is required to deploy the Veeam Installer Service on the VMs you want to use persistent components. This can be done by manual installation, Group policy roll-out, or by adding the VM to managed Servers. When everything works fine, components are installed persistently: If you enable this feature and something does not work (as installer is not deployed, ..), VBR tries to run non-persistent components.

[What (else) is new in v11 - VII] Persistent guest agent

Burak MARANGOZComes here often

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

If you do no know much about Hardened Repository in Veeam VBR v11, read here to learn more about:I was asked, if a hardened repository can be a extent of a Scale Out Repository (SOBR). Good news: yes it can! But you have to take some facts into account.Hardened repositories can be Performance Tiers of SOBR. A SOBR can contain a mix of repositories: ReFS, XFS, Immutable and mutable. Even in mixed SOBR, Performance Placement Policy can be set. That leads to, for example, immutable increments and mutable fulls. When you mix, for example, ReFS with immutable extents, you can use Evacuate backups to free an extent. I would not recommend any points 1 - 3!In my opinion the point 4 is the most important. With evacuating an extent you can easily migrate from ReFS to XFS with immutability.Notice: If you evacuate an immutable repository, Veeam performs a copy, not a move operation! Which makes perfect sense! When backups are evacuated to a hardened repository, files will be immutable as long as

Hardened (Immutable) extent in Scale Out Repository

wolff.mateusVeeam Legend

Hello everyone! So, last week we have our first VUG of the year. It was a such good webinar that the principal subject was around the best features about data protection. If it weren't good enough, we still had the presence of none other than @Rick Vanover and @Kseniya. To start the event Rick and Kseniya talk about our Veeam Community Resource Hub and after this, they introduced how Veeam Legends works and what is the benefits to become a Legend. It was so nice listen them and I felt myself so counfortable with their words. Rick and Kseniya look like Batman and Robin of Veeam because they are very much involved one with other about Veeam Community. Seriously both of you are awesome!! After this amazing introduce we start our event completely in portuguese and @CarlosXGomes talked about backup of Office 365. Continuing with VUG Brazil Marcio Freitas made a perfect presentation about NAS Backup and all possible subjects around of this theme. So, to finish it Leonardo Ferreira talked

Resume of 1st VUG Brazil of 2021

Michael MelterVeeam Legend

While updating our VCSP stack with V11-RTM, I just stumble again onto this small but fine new feature to prioritize your primary backup jobs:More than once I had customers request several jobs to be finished with priority.You could of cause concatenate jobs with the schedule option “After this job:”. But this is not recommended as it does not use the ressources of your backup system accordingly. Valuable proxy/repo slots would linger out-of-work for quite a while.Overlapping jobs would lead to the second job jumping in with the first one still running, so saturating ressources. But this might easily oversteer and thus delay the first job.With the new option this problem can be solved by just the click of a checkbox.Prioritized jobs get a nice little flag in the job list. So how does it work?The Veeam scheduler runs all its tasks according to priorities:800: Restore jobs — restores are obviously the most important jobs 700: Continuous data protection jobs — new CDP ist also considered v

V11 - New feature - Prioritize primary backup job - why and how it works

1 month ago

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

These days I saw a strange error that makes every backup failed. I thought this would be interesting to share. SituationThere were a few jobs running each day. From a point in time all jobs failed. Error that was shown in console was: [Error Unhandled exception was thrown during licensing process] I checked licensing of course. All hosts were licensed using perpetual licensing. No instances were licensed separately.SolutionIt turned out to be no license problem at all. What happened was, password of the user that was used for connecting to VMware vCenter was changed. After updating the new password in Veeam Manage Credentials too, everything works fine again.

[Quicktip] Licensing error during backup

5 months ago

regnorVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

When creating SureBackup jobs there are often VMs which need additional care before their first successful run/test; like tweaking startup times of OS/applications or changing firewall rules. Also if you’re adding custom test scripts & roles then it might require multiple tries before they work like expected.On the other hand there could be a VM where the SureBackup job discovered an existing problem and you need to debug the system to find the root cause.This is where SureBackup troubleshooting mode (KB1216) comes into play. Instead of restarting the whole SureBackup job with all included VMs, you can just select a single VM and start it via right-click.After clicking start the SureBackup job will only run the selected VM and keeps it running regardless of its state (as opposed to the normal mode where an error will stop/abort the job).So with troubleshooting mode you can save some time when configuring or debugging SureBackup because you don’t need to wait for all VMs inside your

SureBackup Troubleshooting mode

vNote42Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

For this post I planed to share some time and bandwidth comparison for backups in my lab. But it is some kind of difficult to get representative data in a fully virtualized demo environment.So I am very happy @Gostev pointed out this topic in his last Words from Gostev (Veeam R&D Forums Digest) from 8.2.2021. If you are not subscribed to this newsletter: do so! https://forums.veeam.com/I want to summarize important facts here:Backup performance per appliance (all-in-one box) doubles in v11. Revise and optimize basics: How are backup files written to disk. Shared memory transport engine, when source- and target-datamover on same box. Implemented full NUMA awareness Enhance the data movers placement logic to ensure they never end up on different CPUs. All this, and I assume much more, leads to an incredible performance. Veeam tested with an HPE Apollo 4510 Gen 10 Server – which is really a perfect backup target – as a all-in-one appliance. Veeam was able to peak at 11.4 GB/s (!) b

[What (else) is new in v11 - VI] Performance

falkobVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard

In this post I’m going to show you how to do SAP DB2 databases backup on Linux with Veeam. I came across a SAP DB2 installation during one of my last projects and wanted to share with you how to backup these databases. Introduction on pre-freeze and post-thaw scriptsSince there is no native integration of SAP DB2 in Veeam, we need to use pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts within the guest processing options.Pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts are being used, when an application does not support VSS for example. The pre-freeze script is used to quiesce the VM file system or the application prior Veeam triggers a VMware snapshot. After the VMware snapshot is created, the post-thaw script triggers and brings the VM and the corresponding application back to the initial state. How do the scripts work ?Pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts are used on backup jobs, replication jobs and VM copy jobs.Furthermore, you need to create the scripts beforehand. When the specific job starts, Veeam uploads the s

SAP DB2 databases backup with Veeam hosted on VMware