1st Annual Veeam Community Hackathon
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I see one more change in VBR V11 Beta - the handling of exported backups and of backups with no associated backup job. Exported Backups:Up to V10 exported (disk) backups were put in the section “Disk (imported)”In V11 the exported backups are put in another section - “Disk (VeeamZIP)”. Up to V10 I have seen this section when creating a VeeamZip archive intentionally only. Backups from deleted backup jobs:Backups which were created from deleted backup jobs were put in the section “Disk (Imported)”, too. In V11 there is a new section: “Disk (Orphaned)” I think this describes the status of these backups much better than before.
IntroductionV12 is launching (register here) on Valentine's day and one of the most anticipated feature is the ability to backup directly to object. As my Valentine's gift to you, I wanted to highlight what's required to get your first V12 backup Direct to AWS S3 going. What do we need?An S3 bucket, an IAM user with the proper policy and a VPC for the helper appliance. A quick note about the V12 direct to object "helper" applianceIn the context of direct backups to AWS S3, the helper Appliance is a temporary EC2 instance that Veeam leverages to perform backup file health-checks.The benefit is to avoid having to "pull-down" any of the backup data on-premises to perform that maintenance operation. You configure the helper appliance settings at the Mount Server step of declaring your Object Repository.Giving the proper permissions in your policy, Veeam gives you the option to auto-create the required VPC, Subnet, Security Group and Route table.I personally would rather set all of this up-
Yesterday I saw the error a second time, so I thought it would be helpful to others to share.Error happens when VBR tries to read vSphere information for the VM to back up. Error says "Error in the application" like you see in the screenshot.After some troubleshooting we found the reason for this. It was because TCP-port 902 was not allowed (in all firewalls) from the Veeam proxy server to the ESXi host that was hosting the VM to back up. After the port was enabled in the firewall(s), backup ran without further issues. Notes:Used ports for VBR see here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/used_ports.html?ver=110 Vanguard @Cragdoo also shared this error some time ago. In his case the error was caused by a name-resolution problem on a new Linux Veeam proxy server.I hope this post safe others some time when this error appears.
I had the discussion two times last week, so I think it is worth sharing here.You may have noticed, VMware deprecated image level backup of its vCenter Appliance (VCSA) with vSphere 7. What does this mean? Basically, it is still supported to do image level backup and restore with VCSA 7.0. But it will not be supported in future releases. Notice that U1 and U2 are still 7.0 versions. With 7.n, with n>0, VMware will not support image restore of VCSA any more. From my perspective, this step was taken because problems arise when restoring this Linux appliance. I have seen many appliances requiring a filesystem check after restore or crash. When you are lucky, everything works fine afterwards. If not, you have to file a support ticket.To avoid this, VMware offers a new way for VCSA backup. Since 6.5 it is possible to run file-based backups and restore of VCSA. Since 6.7 this can be scheduled. With this, new protocols are supported as well: FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, NFS, or SMB. Pleas
Block Sizes As can be seen from the field, optimal value for the stripe size is often between 128 KB and 256 KB. However, it is highly recommended to test this prior to deployment whenever possible.During the backup process data blocks are processed in chunks and stored inside backup files in the backup repository. You can customize the block size during the Job Configuration using the Storage Optimization setting of the backup job.By default Veeam’s block size is set to Local Target, which is 1 MB before compression. Since compression ratio is very often around 2x, with this block size Veeam will write around 512 KB or less to the repository per Veeam block.This value can be used to better configure storage arrays; especially low-end storage systems can greatly benefit from an optimized stripe size.There are three layers where the block size can be configured: Veeam block size for the backup files, the filesystem, and the storage volumes.Let’s use a quick example: The Veeam block size
It’s time to build the hype and readiness for V12! And as I announced on the special episode #100 of the Veeam Community Recap, I’m going to make a news hub here where everything you need for V12 can be viewed in one place leading up to the launch. Upon GA; I’ll also put a link to the V12 Upgrade Center (like I did for V11). I will target updating this weekly, and if you have a blog/external resource about V12 - be sure to put it in the comments below. Last updated: 30-January 2023 IMPORTANT: V12 Release UpdateThe RTM release of V12 has been made available to partners on 30-January. RTM is the release for partners or for customers needing/seeking early availability of the product. If you use a Veeam Cloud Service Provider or VCSP (such as those here: http://vee.am/splookup ) for Veeam-Powered Services; you will need to ensure that the VCSP has upgraded first. End users using VCSPs should not upgrade ahead of the service provider. Check with your service provider if you are using on
The virtual machines I use for the deployment are generated from a Template (Golden Image) through a configuration file unattend.xml Answer files (unattend.xml)https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/update-windows-settings-and-scripts-create-your-own-answer-file-sxs What is Windows System Image Manager?https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-vista/cc766347(v=ws.10) Useful links for sizingVeeam Architects Site https://www.veeambp.com/ Veeam Size Estimation Tool (VSE)https://vse.veeambp.com/#/ The Restore Point Simulatorhttp://rps.dewin.me/ Veeam Ports Calculatorhttps://www.veeambp.com/ports/ REFS Calculatorhttp://dewin.me/calculator/ Bandwidth Calculatorhttp://rps.dewin.me/bandwidth/ Pricing calculator for small businesshttps://www.veeam.com/pricing-calculator NAS Calculatorhttps://cloudoasis.com.au/nas-calculator/ Veeam Clikable Demoshttps://veeamclick.be/ Prerequisite: System Requirements - Veeam Backup Guide for vSphere
Hi everyone,Have you ever wanted a chance to get Microsoft Certified? Now’s your chance!If you haven’t seen the Cloud Skills Challenge before, it’s simple. Microsoft provide multiple learning ‘Track’ options, courtesy of their free Microsoft Learn resources. If you complete one or more tracks within their pre-defined challenge window (12th October to 9th November 2022), you’ll earn one free exam voucher, valid for a selected list of exams.Interested? Read on! What are the tracks? These tracks tend to change every Cloud Skills challenge, this time around the tracks are:Microsoft Ignite: Intelligent Cloud Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud App Maker Challenge Microsoft Ignite: AI Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Modern Work Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Field Service Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Protect Everything Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud Developer ChallengeSee below for a breakdown of these tracks, and the exam & certification path they’re aligned to. Microsof
Inspired by @Geoff Burke‘s post about immutability for Kasten with Wasabi, I decided to post the same for Veeam Backup & Replication. If you want to check out Geoff’s post, then follow this link:What/who is Wasabi?Probably Wasabi doesn’t need to be introduced. But if you can only think about the paste you get with Sushi, then you should check out their cloud object storage. Besides AWS and Microsoft, Wasabi is one of the Vendors, who often gets recommended for usage with Veeam Backup. The reason for that is their really competitive pricing, combined with great functionality/quality and low complexity.How to create an immutable bucketAfter registering an account with Wasabi, the creation of an immutable bucket isn’t complicated at all.Just make sure that you select the right region for your location, and also enable bucket versioning and object locking.Afterwards you need to create an access key. For testing purposes you can use the root account key, but for production you should cr
There are new Veeam Sales Professional (VMSP) and Veeam Technical Sales Professional (VMTSP) 2023 accreditations available in ProPartner Portal.This year the two accreditations do not consist of one single learning path, but on a base “Sales Foundation” part and five different learning streams. With the completion of the base module and one learning stream you will get a badge to show off…The learning streams for the VMSP and VMTSP are:✅ Public Cloud✅ Ransomware & DR✅ Microsoft 365✅ Container Protection✅ Cloud Service ProviderSource: Veeam ProPartner Portal - Veeam IQSo Veeam ProPartners, go and get them 😊
Did you know that there is a very useful Veeam tool to validate the integrity of your backups? In some cases, a backup can get corrupted due to accidental changes in the backup file data. For example, the file can be damaged after transfer over the network or from hardware failures on the backup storage side. With Veeam Backup Validator, you can quickly verify the integrity of any backup file, without extracting the VM data from the archive.Veeam Backup Validator is a command-prompt CRC check utility that tests a backup at the file level. For integrity validation, Veeam Backup Validator uses the checksum algorithm. When Veeam Backup & Replication creates a backup of a VM, it calculates a checksum for every data block in the backup file and attaches these checksums to the data blocks. Veeam Backup Validator re-calculates checksums for data blocks and compares them against the initial checksum values. If the results match, the backup file is viable. This works similarly to the backu
Microsoft has announced, that they are disabling basic auth on October 1st, 2022 for all tenants. It doesn‘t matter if you use it now or not. It gets disabled after October 1st, 2022. From the announcement post:Today, we are announcing that, effective October 1, 2022, we will begin to permanently disable Basic Auth in all tenants, regardless of usage (with the exception of SMTP Auth, which can still be re-enabled after that).Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-and-exchange-online-september-2021-update/ba-p/2772210 How is this relevant to our Veeam Backup Office 365 Installations?Today, Veeam can backup Office 365 data without basic auth (modern Auth Only).But this has some limitations. You can find them in this post:https://www.veeam.com/kb3146As soon basic auth is disabled from Microsoft, vbo servers with organizations and „modern authentification with legacy protocols“ or „basic authentication method“, backup jobs will most likely st
For my first Veeam Community post, I thought I would share with you all something I’ve been doing for over a decade - an exam prep Study Guide; this one being for VMware VCP-DCV 2021. For those who haven’t followed me over the years, I started creating these “outlines”, i.e. Study Guides, for my own benefit to help me with tech cert exam prep. I then thought others in the community may benefit using them, so I decided to share them online. I generally post them on Twitter, so if you’d like to follow me, you can do so from here.When reviewing the VMware ‘Blueprint’ for the DCV 2021 exam as compared to the 2020 exam, I was initially overwhelmed by the additional content for 2021. As I dove deeper into the 2021 exam Objectives, it turns out a lot of them were similar to what was asked to know for the 2020 exam, so it wasn’t too bad to review. As with most of my Guides, I enjoyed learning about the new tech VMware implemented with vSphere 7 - e.g. Identity Federation & Lifecycle Manage
Veeam Backup & Replication is a data protection and disaster recovery solution for virtual, physical, and cloud environments. With Veeam Backup & Replication you can Create crash-consistent and application-consistent backups of virtual and physical machines, quickly restore physical machines, EC2 instances, VMs, VM disks, guest OS files, and application items, perform a backup health check to verify that backups are not corrupted and are ready for restoring, create VM replicas and switch to them in case of a disaster and automate transferring of backups to tapes and other external repositories. Veeam Backup and Replication Configuration Database Settings come with the Veeam.Backup.DBConfig.exe utility that allows you to manage connection settings for Veeam Backup & Replication and/or Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager configuration database. Using this utility, you can:1. Connect to a different Microsoft SQL Server instance. If you specify a database that does not exist yet, i
Requirements and Limitations CDP has a set of requirements and limitations. RequirementsThe following requirements apply to CDP:CDP is included in the Veeam Universal License. When using a legacy socket-based license, the Enterprise Plus edition is required.For supported platforms, see Platform Support. For supported source and target datastores, see Veeam CDP Source and Target. All hosts in a cluster must be of the same major version: 7.x or 6.x (6.5, or 6.7, or a combination of 6.5 and 6.7 is supported). In turn, all clusters managed by the same vCenter Server must also be of the same major version. VMs on the same cluster must be protected with CDP only by one backup server. The machine where the backup server resides must have at least 16 GB RAM. VMs that you plan to protect must not have snapshots at the moment when the CDP policy starts for the first time. Network between infrastructure components required for CDP must be 1 Gbps or faster. For high loaded systems, 10 Gbps and MTU
It is not uncommon to reset root password in VMware VCSA (vCenter Service Appliance). This can be necessary when account is locked or password is expired. Normally, you have to shut it down, enter GRUB and edit start parameter to boot into bash. There you can reset root password. Afterwards you boot VM again. Here is the link to this procedere: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147144With vCenter 6.7 U1 it us much easier! Since then it is possible to use a Single-Sign On (SSO) administrator account (for example: administrator@vsphere.local) to login to Appliance Interface (Port 5480) and shell. And exactly this can be used to reset the root password. In short it goes like this: Take a snapshot/backup of VCSA - it is always a good idea to start with a backup Login as a SSO-administrator using a SSH client or console. Enable and start shell: shell.set --enable true shell Change root password sudo passwd root DoneHere is the link to the more detailed VMware KB-article: https:/
I thought I posted the following post already. But it seems I missed to do so. I also saw @PValsecchi posted similar content already But I think I add some other details here, so I hope it is okay to post my stuff too. What is it aboutOne of the new v12 features will be the possibility to move backups between repositories. It’s not just new that this will be an option in the GUI, also fast cloning information will be moved. This means that synthetic fulls will not need more space on target repository than it uses on source! This feature is very useful when it comes to replacing old repository hardware with new one.How to move backup job dataIn beta there are several ways to move backups from one repository to another. One way is to right-click Job Name beneath Disk and select Move backup.The following windows will ask about the destination repository.I could see all repository types of my test environment: ReFS, XFS, object storage and Scale-Out backup repositories. When movement runs
Greetings friends, some time ago I wrote about how to enable these notifications for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, it was a success, and very simple until Microsoft, and Google, disabled the normal SMTP on TLS, so many people ended with these notifications broken due the force of OAuth.Since Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7, you can configure OAuth on the Console, for regular email notifications. But the Audit Email Settings configuration API wasn’t that trivial andeasy to setup, until today. We will go step by step, so you can have those Audit operations working again. Let’s go.Recommended – All Automated!Please come here to find everything automated:https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-podcasts-57/scripts-veeam-backup-for-microsoft-365-audit-email-audit-users-5351You will find there two scripts to make your life easier with this.Audit Diagram in Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365Before we start with the subject, I think a diagram about how all these works can help us better understan
VeeaMover is a cool new feature available in the next Veeam Backup & Replication v12 that allows to move or copy backups to different locations.If you need to change the target repository for a Backup Job containing existing backups, a warning message is displayed and the procedure cannot be finalized until the backups have moved to the new repository.With current versions of Veeam this is a manual, time-consuming operation. Here is where VeeaMover come into play. Use casesCommon VeeaMover use cases are the following:Move backups to different repository Copy backups to different repository Migrate ReFS to XFS for Hardened Repository Migrate NTFS to ReFS Re-balance Scale-Out Repository Scale-Out Repository extent evacuation Move backups to a different locationThe target Repository can be changed also in an existing Backup Job. Move a VM to different Backup Job Copy backups to a different location Migrate backups from NTFS to ReFSAnother cool capability of VeeaMover is the option to
A few days ago @Link State posted how to migrate MS AD-controllers using Veeam Replication. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to get to know the new vSphere Advanced Cross vCenter Server vMotion (XVM).What is Cross vMotion about?First, there is a difference between Cross vCenter Server vMotion (xvMotion) and Advanced xvMotion. xvMotion was already introduced (and supported) for migration of VMs between vCenters within the same Single-SignOn (SSO) Domain in vSphere 6.0. With Advanced xvMotion it is possible to migrate VMs between vCenters in different SSO Domains!Advanced xvMotion is not completely new. Actually it exists for about 5 years as a fling. Now it is introduced in the latest version of vSphere: 7.0 U1c (notice the "c"!) How does it work?For demo I use a vCenter 6.7 U3 as source and a 7.0 U1c vCenter as destination.To start the wizard, right click the resource, you want to move VM(s) to and select Import VMs. Provide data of source vCenter. And press Login. When cre
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.
Hey everyone,Starting the beginning of January 2021 we're going to see Veeam simplify the license offerings available to customers. Historically Veeam have always offered a "per socket" perpetual licensing model, which was great when we were just considering protecting our vSphere & Hyper-V infrastructure, but as Veeam has grown and produced additional feature capabilities such as NAS Backup, Cloud-native Backups for AWS and Azure and Physical server and workstation protection options, this licensing model hasn't suited them all. Then Veeam introduced the Veeam Universal License (VUL) subscription, streamlining the licensing experience for customers by offering a "per workload" backup model, allowing customers to mix and match different products as part of their overall Veeam licensing. This license becomes increasingly appealing as customers wish to test adoption of different clouds, they protect their workloads, regardless of whether they are physical, cloud or virtual. Earlier t
