Blogs and Podcasts

Hi all, I wanted to share the new Veeam Ports MCP server with the community. This gives you the ability to interact with the Veeam Ports underlying database to create rich designs using LLM clients that support MCP, like Claude and VS Code.https://github.com/shapedthought/veeam-ports-mcpTo install in Claude:Install Python Install UV Run: claude mcp add veeam-ports -- uvx veeam-ports-mcp Update your Claude desktop configuration file:

 1. What the REST API Is and Why It MattersVeeam Backup and Replication v13 exposes its entire operational surface through a REST API running on port 9419 over HTTPS. This is not the Enterprise Manager REST API. This is the VBR server's own API, available on every VBR installation without Enterprise Manager deployed. The distinction matters because the two APIs have different endpoints, different authentication models, and different capability sets. If you are reading Veeam documentation and see references to the EM REST API, that is a separate thing entirely.The VBR REST API uses OAuth 2.0 bearer token authentication, returns JSON, and conforms to OpenAPI Specification 3.0. The full spec is available as a swagger.json file in the VBR installation directory and through the built-in Swagger UI at https://<vbr-server>:9419/api/swagger/ui/index.html. The current API revision for

Last week I attended RSAC and as stated in a previous post had a great time.However, nothing in life is perfect and I had one conversation that got me worried. The person in question is much more “in the know” than I am when it comes to the IT industry. He claimed that blogging is basically dead now. It has been washed away by a tidal wave of AI generated content and has permanently removed the need for real bloggers. “No one believes that anyone actually writes anything anymore”. Along with that IT communities are under threat, if you don’t need bloggers and content creators then why have these groups of people? The can be easily and cheaply replaced by AI Agents. I wanted to ask everyone here what they thought and if there is anything we can do to save our brands?For my part I have decided to always try and post a video along with any written content that I create. The BVLOG!! If you can pronounce that you should win an award right off the bat!

My belated contribution to World Backup Day."Man kütt ja zu nix" - as they say in the Rhineland ( You Never Get Around To It ). I learned the value of backups very early in my professional life.As a dual-study student during my first practical phase, I accidentally deleted the root directory of a server - specifically, the server that managed access control for all branches in western Germany.Luckily, my colleagues didn't behead their panicked young employee, but remained calm and restored the deleted data from a backup. At that time, it wasn't a Veeam backup; it must have been either a late ADSM version or an early TSM version.In any case, this experience has shaped me ever since: Firstly: It was great to have had such colleagues at that time. And secondly: Always have a backup of your data and systems! Many years later, data backup is my main professional task.Thanks to Veeam, regular system and data ba

IntroIn a previous article I wrote about the type of storage a customer can use and write their backup to.Some days ago, a user in the Veeam Community asked why, according to Veeam's calculator, S3 object storage is no longer more efficient in terms of space (with immutability and GFS) than storage using XFS/ReFS technology.After answering, I decided to explore the topic further by putting myself in the shoes of a customer who has to make a choice in terms of the costs associated with the space used. That's why I want to tell you what happened with a customer.When I start a new backup infrastructure project, there always comes a time when I have to decide what type of storage repository to use. When I submit a plan to the customer, I often hear them say: Why should I spend more an

How NTP Architecture Impacts MFA in Veeam Software Appliances — And What Happens When Clocks DriftMulti‑Factor Authentication (MFA) in Veeam’s software appliances relies heavily on accurate system time. This is because MFA one‑time passwords (TOTPs) are time‑based. If the appliance clock drifts even slightly, MFA will break — often in confusing ways.In this post, we break down:What NTP is doing inside the Veeam Software Appliance Why MFA fails when clocks drift How time desynchronization can escalate Worst‑case recovery when you’re completely locked outWhat NTP Architecture Is Doing Inside Veeam Software AppliancesVeeam Software Appliances use chrony (the NTP client on Rocky Linux) to synchronize system time with configured NTP servers. This ensures that all time‑dependent security function

Yet another opportunity to highlight the importance of backing up data – whether business or personal – is that the backup system must be an integral part of the IT infrastructure, not just an afterthought.I have written this post in Italian to raise awareness among Italian companies once again.https://blog.luvisi.it/world-backup-day-5d09dc597519 ​@Madi.Cristil ​@safiya 

This article is geared towards the "backup admin" and how no one really wants that job, but someone has to do it. In my current role, in addition to my other responsibilities, I serve as the backup admin in our lab environment. Although it's not as stressful as past backup admin positions, I still need to standardize and have things in order in the event of a restore or server outage.Let’s be honest—nobody gets into backup and recovery because they’re chasing excitement.But somehow, backup environments still manage to create plenty of it:Failed jobs at 2AM Storage filling up unexpectedly Restore requests turning into investigations That one job that’s been “warning” for… way too long That’s not the kind of excitement you want. In Day 2 operations, the goal shifts. You’re no longer just getting backups running—you’re trying to make the entire system predictable, repeatable, and honestly… bo

31.3 is “Backup Day” Why?Because next day is first of April? 😊 So, tidying up could resolve into unwanted deletion of your data, which could lead into surprise, after you find out that and this is not just as a joke😊It’s nightmare …In nowadays we are trying to keep our platforms, environments most resilient as possible from ransomware attacks.BUTWhat is worse than ransomware attack?Are you really prepared to cover all scenarios?Sometimes it could be even bug of your nightmare in vendors software/firmware, which is not the thing that you never think about.ANDCombination with ransomware attack? Admins have no clue what is correct.What happened?Customer found out that has infected VMs – all Windows and Linux/Unix Systems. Production was stopped. It did not take lon

  As long as backups are running, logs are about as popular as a dashcam: you see them, you know they’re there—and you hope you’ll never really need them. But the moment a job fails, a service stops unexpectedly, or the software “just starts acting weird,” logs become the only reliable witness. They show what happened, when it happened, how other components reacted — and often why something was triggered in the first place. In troubleshooting, a complete and properly retained log history often determines whether you can narrow down an outage or error within minutes— or whether you end up relying on assumptions, screenshots, and “it didn’t feel like it was like this before” statements. That’s why in this article we’ll look at: how to collect Veeam logs correctly (suppo

Recently, ​@Madi.Cristil created a post asking members of the Veeam Community who have been "heroes" in performing their backup duties to share their stories. If you haven't yet seen her post, you can read it below:https://community.veeam.com/discussion-boards-66/backup-heroes-wanted-join-the-world-backup-day-contest-2026-12918?postid=90737#post90737World Backup Day is coming and, like they've done the past few years, Veeam is asking for the Community to share posts about how Veeam Data Platform has been used to meet a need at your organization, or even home!  My story isn't too extravagant, but it did meet a crucial need at my organization.We had an employee get terminated a while back for potentially suspect activity with a vendor. Upon being informed of this activity, senior administrators were tasked to look into any network accounts which could have access to our environment. After meticulously ski

If you want to take your Veeam career to the next level, you can rely on Veeam’s education platform, Veeam University Pro.I’ve just enrolled in the Veeam Recovery Orchestrator Essentials course, and here are my first impressions.  There are three tabs on the left side: the Path tab, where you can navigate through the lessons; the Learners tab, where you can see the members; and the Discuss tab, where you can post questions to be answered by the expert team. This means you’ll be assisted by a real person.The platform is easy to use. You simply click on the desired lesson and watch the video. The videos are high quality, and the trainer speaks very clearly.Sub

  Three management modes at a glance.  Mode Managed In Best Fit Reality Check Standalone Local server Isolated hosts or segments without VBR reachability Easy to forget until restore day VBR-managed VBR console Most internal infrastructure teams Best default when central

Last week I attended my first RSAC in San Francisco. To say it was a great experience would be the understatement of the year.The conference is enormous, and you can tell just by walking around downtown as the streets were filled with people sporting their RSAC badges. I quietly slipped mine off whenever I ventured outside the convention center. Wearing it felt like broadcasting to the city: "I'm from out of town — please rob, scam, or at least aggressively inconvenience me." Better to blend in with the local hipster cyclists. More on that later.AI Everywhere (And I Mean Everywhere)AI dominated the conference floor. Nearly every booth referenced it, the street advertisements were themed around it, and by day two I half-expected to find an AI-powered fixture in the restroom. (In some parts of North America they call it a "restroom" — in Toronto we say "washroom." My theory is that in some locations companies work their employees so hard that the

I recently wrote a blog about VSA HA Clustering, which you can find below (link to my site is below as well).Veeam VSA HA Cluster Setup With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication 13 there is a new feature that you can use to set up two nodes in an HA Cluster configuration for high availability.  I am going to outline the process below and keep in mind that you will need to have a VDP Premium license in order to do this as that is a hard requirement.  Now let’s look at HA Clustering with Veeam VSA.Configuring a Veeam VSA HA ClusterThe HA cluster configuration process involves two major phases: enabling the HA feature on both nodes via the Host Management Console, and then assembling the cluster through the Veeam Backup & Replication Console.

 Microsoft’s position on your Microsoft 365 data has not really changed: they keep the service running, but they do not give you backup in the way most admins mean it.Yes, deleted data may hang around for a while. Exchange has retention behavior. SharePoint and OneDrive have versioning. Teams data can still exist in awkward places even after it disappears from the user view. None of that gives you a real backup timeline, a clean point-in-time restore, or a recovery workflow you would want to bet an outage on.That is the gap Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 fills, and v8 is not just another incremental release. The architecture changed enough that you need to think about deployment differently than you did in v7. Start with the big change: v8 is built around PostgreSQL If you are coming from v7, the first thing to understand is that SQLite is gone from the design that mattered before.

It was a holiday weekend here in Brazil, Carnival, and I was off when I got the call around noon.A client had been hit by a ransomware attack.The entry point was a phishing email that compromised a workstation. From there, the attacker managed to move laterally, reach Active Directory, and eventually gain access to the entire environment.By the time I was involved, most of the damage was already done.Around 50TB of Windows-based VMs were encrypted. Production was down.The environment did have antivirus in place, but it wasn’t properly configured to stop that kind of behavior. In the end, it wasn’t enough.  At that moment, the biggest challenge wasn’t just restor

In this article, I'll take you through five different restore scenarios I've tested in my lab, and you should do the same.You’ve got green checkmarks.Your jobs are running.Storage looks fine.Everything seems good.But here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve learned the hard way:A successful backup job does not mean a successful recovery.Day 2 operations is where this really hits. This is the phase where you stop asking “Did it back up?” and start asking:“Can I actually get my data back when it matters?”If you’re not actively testing restores, you’re running on assumptions—and assumptions don’t survive outages, corruption, or ransomware.Here are five restore scenarios you should be testing regularly (but most people don’t). 1. Full VM Restore (The “Everything Is Gone” Scenario)This is the big one.The “we lost the entire server” moment.

 V13 upgrades cleanly when the VBR server is already cleaned up first. Most delays come from legacy backup-copy jobs, old agent deployments, nested repositories, removed job settings, or unsupported infrastructure that was still tolerated before the upgrade. Check the starting build first, clear blockers before mounting the ISO, and validate backup plus restore behavior afterward. 1. Supported starting pointDirect to v13.0.1 only from:v12.3.1 build 12.3.1.1139 or later v12.3.2If the server is on an earlier v12.3.x build:patch to v12.3.1 build 1139 firstIf the server is on v12.2.x or older:stage through v12.3.1 first2. Installer blockers to clear before the ISO is mountedThese stop the upgrade:backup metadata not upgraded to v12 format legacy backup-copy jobs

 We recently completed an upgrade of Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC) from version 8.1 to version 9.1 in a large-scale, multi-tenant service provider environment. From an infrastructure standpoint, the upgrade was uneventful in the best possible way. All core services came online cleanly, communication between components remained stable, and backup operations continued without disruption. Pre and post-upgrade validation confirmed that the platform was operating as expected. During routine post-upgrade review, particularly within the Managed Computers section, we observed that a subset of endpoints had management agent upgrades that were not completing successfully. After reviewing task logs across multiple tenants, it became clear that these were not platform-related issues, but conditions specific to individual endpoints that surfaced during the agent upgrade cycle. Given the scale and diversity typical in service

 VBR v13 defaults to PostgreSQL for new installs, so for a lot of environments the question is no longer “Should we care about PostgreSQL?” It is “When do we move, and what do we need to fix after we do?”If you are still running SQL Express, the answer is usually sooner than later. If you are running a licensed SQL Server only because VBR needs it, there is a good chance you are carrying cost and patching overhead you no longer need. And if you already migrated but the console feels slower than it used to, that is usually not because PostgreSQL is a bad fit. It is because the default PostgreSQL settings are conservative and generic, while VBR is not.This is the part people miss. The migration itself is usually the easy piece. The performance conversation starts after the restore, not before it. First question: do you actually need to migrate now? Not every environment needs to sprint in

I want to introduce you to another community project I worked on: The Veeam Data Platform Content Pack for Graylog. Graylog is a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution that enables the efficient collection, search, analysis, and alerting of various types of machine-generated data. More details about their products can be found on the official website.Content Pack DescriptionThe first version of the Content Pack enables the visualization of security-relevant events transmitted by Veeam Backup & Replication via Syslog. In addition to a pre-configured Dashboard, further information is extracted from the Syslog data, which allows the ingested data to be analyzed further. For more details about the Content Pack, see

OverviewIn this post, I’ll walk through a practical, step-by-step job configuration (from the lab) with real-world best practices to help you get it right from Day 1.Configuring backup jobs in Veeam is where your data protection strategy truly comes to life. A properly configured job ensures your data is not just backed up—but recoverable, efficient, and aligned with business requirements. Why Job Configuration MattersIt’s easy to click through a wizard and create a backup job—but misconfigured jobs can lead to: Failed recoveries Poor performance Storage inefficiencies Gaps in protection Key takeaway: A successful job ≠ a recoverable backup. Step 1: Choose the Right Job TypeStart by identifying what you’re protecting: Virtual Machines (VMware / Hyper-V / Scale Computing / HPE VM Essentia

For years, the Veeam Health Check Report has been a trusted resource for assessing configuration drift, security posture, and operational gaps across Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) environments. But as cyber‑resilience expectations evolve, organizations require continuous insight—not periodic manual reports.Note: This is a lab environment and was setup with error for this purpose of this blog.  Why Automate the Health Check?The traditional Health Check tool delivers exceptional detail, but it remains a point‑in‑time assessment. Modern resilience requirements—CPS 234, ASD Essential Eight, ISM, NIST frameworks—expect continuous monitoring, not periodic snapshots.Integrating this logic directly into Veeam ONE Intelligence would:Eliminate manual execution of the standalone Health Check tool Provide continuous diagnostic, configuration, and compliance insights E

Sizing Veeam environments has always been a mix of experience, assumptions, and spreadsheets. But that just changed. With the new Scenario Builder, Veeam takes a big leap forward, making multi-site sizing clearer, smarter, and far more predictable—turning complex design decisions into a structured, repeatable process.