Blogs and Podcasts

Something New!I am creating a new series of blog posts with the goal of highlighting a feature or capability that one of our object storage partners has which can benefit the Veeam community.  I will continue to publish new blogs as part of my ongoing Veeam Amazing Object Storage Tips & Techniques, which will focus on non-vendor specific topics. Optimizing OSNEXUS QuantaStor for use with Veeam Storage Class Auto-Tiering Rule:When Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) v9.5.4 added the S3 compatible object storage backed Capacity Tier to its Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) back in January of 2019, it was the start of my object storage journey within Veeam.  During this 5 ½ year journey I have had the opportunity to work with many of our object storage partners and I have witnessed the work they have done to enable their object storage to work more efficiently with VBR and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 (VB365).One of those object storage partners, OSNEXUS, recently released version

Hi all,In this blog series, I’m going to talk about plenty of things around the sizing and architecting for using Object Storage with Veeam Backup & Replication. Each part of this blog series covers different topics and things.The first part of Sizing and Architecting for Object Storage with Veeam covers the following topics:Calculating your real block size on disk, which helps you with sizing object storage for Capacity or Performance Tier in Veeam General Best Practices when using Veeam & Object StorageFeel free to check out the blog post here, as I don’t copy and paste the content here :) https://www.virtualhome.blog/2024/08/21/sizing-and-architecting-for-object-storage-with-veeam-part-1/ Would love any feedback, comments, and thoughts on this :=)

We all learnt about the recent update to Veeam Backup and Replication 12.2. A lot of Legends have written excellent pieces and I will kindly let you take a look at one of the articles yourself.    Also, @Chris.Childerhose recently also performed an upgrade to the latest version. Kindly take a look at his article as well. Because this topic has been dealt with already, I will proceed with the upgrade steps just to add more colours to Chris’ images :-)  Note: Before proceeding with these steps, I recommend taking a look at the upgrade checklist to ensure an error-free upgrade. kindly keep in mind that a reboot is also required for the upgrade To download the Veeam Backup & Replication 12.2 ISO image, kindly navigate to the following URL Upon clicking on Download, you will be redirected to enter your login credentials. Upon download, navigate to the download folder and mount the image.Upon mounting the image, double click on the setup as shown below.On the upgrade screen, click on upg

As you may have seen VB365 v8 was released today. This is a very impactful release for me and my company so I took the time to document some first thoughts today. Please check this out on my blog https://www.koolaid.info/veeam-backup-for-microsoft365-v8-release-thoughts/ where I talk about things such as proxy pools, architecture, permissions and object storage!

Although the post is very small, the news in it is big 😃With v12 you can start a Active Full backup of a single VM processed by a job. Just open the progress dialog of the job and right-click the VM you want to backup. As you can see, this can also be used to run a Retry just for selected machines. Important: this will just work when you use the also new feature in v12: True per-machine backup files 

This is going to be huge change. VeeamON never disappoints! 

I created a second blog for the OOTBI series and you can view it on my blog site or below.https://just-virtualization.tech/2024/08/19/object-first-ootbi-web-ui-users-buckets-more/ Object First (OOTBI) – Web UI, Users, Buckets & More In my first blog post I took you through the journey of OOTBI to my datacenter and then through the Cluster Configuration and setup. You can see that blog post here – Object First (OOTBI) – Installation & ConfigurationI am now going to go through some of the Web UI features, including first launch, and show how you configure things such as –Users Buckets Access Keys Email Alerts Software UpdatesWhen you first go to the Web UI URL for your OOTBI box, you need to log in using the “objectfirst” user and password you set during the initial setup phase, which you can see in my first blog post in the link above. After you log in for the first time, OOTBI prompts you through the main setup wizard, starting with creating S3 Keys for your user account.  Afte

Way back in December (really, it was only 4 weeks ago ?!?), I posted on my personal blog about the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and how they were ending all of the current perpetual licensing and moving everything to subscription licensing. However, there were many, many questions, and FUD about the changes and what this would mean for licensing VMware products going forward. After many conversations with VMware, reviews of presentations VMware provided to partners and distributors and reading of FAQ's, I finally have an understanding of just what direction exactly VMware is going with their licensing and how it applies to the end user clients. Please note that this is more oriented towards the newly announced vSphere Foundation subscription and it's smaller siblings, vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials Plus Kit subscriptions which are more oriented to the SMB space. And to be up-front, I'm not really going to talk about vSphere Foundation as that's really the replacement to Ent

With the release of Veeam Data Platform 12.2 on 9/28/24. The new Veeam Backup for Nutanix version 6 was released. It adds some highly requested features that our customers have been asking for. Please see the screenshots below. I also added additional links at the bottom of the page for more details. Please continue to share your valuable feedback for future improvements😀. New virtualization option menu Updated Nutanix AHV logo added Nutanix Prism Central supportVeeam Backup for Nutanix AHV Proxy v6Nutanix Prism Central Categories support (AKA Tags in VMware)Use snapshots from Replica siteCustomizable compressions and block size settingsMulti-Network supportVeeam Backup for Nutanix Appliance Dashboard Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV Release Noteshttps://helpcenter.veeam.com/rn/veeam_backup_nutanix_ahv_6_release_notes.htmlVeeam Backup for Nutanix AHV v6 User Guidehttps://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbahv/userguide/overview.html?ver=6Build Numbers and Versions of Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV

What my surprise this week, I found a relic, a working Veeam Version 7 Server ! Yes I know in term of cybersecurity risks we are right in the middle of it ! I let you imagine the infrastructure version. Remember the console and her colour ?In v7 Surebackup and Tape was already present ! So many evolution from here to now. We are not getting any younger

Happy Thursday Community! Thought I'd share another Linux process today – how to resize a Linux volume used as a Veeam Repository in Linux OS, specifically increasing its size. This also is in reference to using an array as your Volume-backed storage. Logical Volume Manager (LVM) processes won't be discussed. Additionally, though there is a process to decrease Volume sizes as well, I also won't be discussing that process either. When wanting to decrease Volume size, I highly recommend creating a new Volume of the desired size, then copy your data to it to prevent potential data corruption.As most of you probably know, increasing Volume sizes within Windows is pretty straight forward → increase LUN storage on your array, then rescan your disks in Windows Disk Manager, then Extend the Volume. It takes a minimal amount of time to perform. Within Linux, there are a few more tasks needing to be performed than in Windows to get your Volume size increased. I'll share exactly what those steps

Dear community, I just managed to finish a new blog post regarding the Entra ID Backup beta version. Currently I have many customers looking forward to the feature release and I prepared an overview on my blog: 15 – Veeam Entra ID Backup Beta – Backup and Restore – Disaster and Recovery (disaster-und-recovery.de) Trying not to loose myself in a deep dive I tried to address the integration into the well-known VBR GUI and the basic functionality and different job types. Looking forward to licensing - hopefully we stay below the prices of CommVault. :-) Best regards from Germany and thank you for feedback!Lukas

What is Health Check?A health check is a planned process within a backup or backup copy job that helps ensure the data integrity of the backup chain. When Veeam Backup & Replication initiates a health check, it performs a CRC check for metadata and a hash check on VM data blocks.CRC Check stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check. It is an error detection algorithm used to check whether data is corrupted during transmission or storage. This algorithm calculates a CRC value from the sent data and adds this value to the end of the data. The receiving party calculates the same CRC value from the data it receives and compares it with the sent CRC value. If the two values ​​match, it means the data is transferred or stored intact.  Why Are Health Checks Important?Health checks are important to ensure data consistency in the event of a disaster. Computers can make mistakes. The more systems interact with each other, the greater the chance of errors occurring. When performing a backup, Veeam com

I remember the days of using VMware and Veeam watching the VMworld videos, all those cool cats on stage working in Tech Marketing roles (remember Clint and Luca back in the day?) rocking the stages, dishing out deep dives and updates, and company credit cards flying all over the place. So cool, right?Well, I eventually made it to Tech Marketing and decided to jot down my thoughts here.I know a lot of people also want career advice and thinking about what next in tech, so maybe this helps.

Hi CommunityToday I’ve spent my time in our lab and I realised I made a mistake by choosing a bucket without immutability in our backup job.So I dedicated some time looking into how I could move backups to another repository in Veeam B&R Console.Before I started, I wondered why I would want to use the 'Move backup' function in a production environment.I said to myself that it might be necessary to do this in such cases as: Wrong configuration in a backup job Backup repository is close to full capacity. I must replace my repository (because out of warranty). Backup job policies are changed (immutable backup request or different policy needed). “Move Backup” operation permit to continue to use the same Job, moving backup files to a new backup location, and keeping job history and backup chain. SCENARIOIn our lab we have this scenario:Veeam B&R v. 12.1.2.172 OLD repo: S3 Bucket without versioning called Pippo02 (yes is Goofy) NEW repo: S3 Bucket with versioning enabled (immutable)

Please note ** This article is an update from an earlier article on the same topic**Security is always extremely important. Encryption should be used whenever possible. When using Veeam plug-in for enterprise database, you should be aware of the options for encryption and settings that can be configured.With the latest update of Veeam, v12.1.2, the following links should help clarify encryption for Veeam Enterprise plugin backup.Network Traffic EncryptionStarting with v12.1.2, by default, network traffic encryption is in place for Veeam plug-in backup. See the following links for detail on utilization for each plug-in. The encryption may be disabled if desired. Specific commands and steps required are illustrated with each plug-in:OracleSAP HANASAP on OracleMicrosoft SQL ServerDB2 Repository EncryptionOracle - Specific encryption conditions are in place. “The Oracle Secure Backup SBT library supports RMAN encrypted backups. Veeam Plug-in does not support directly encrypted backups of O

The one and only!!! https://objectfirst.com/blog/out-of-the-box-interview-with-rick-vanover-part-1/

One of my friends is a senior network engineer. At dinner the other night, we were talking about how our days went. I said I was creating a series of demos for the Veeam YouTube channel about deploying and managing Azure appliances. I told him when I hear the word appliance in an IT context, I picture a network diagram with little stoves and refrigerators in place of servers and clouds. The visual made us laugh and wonder why we use the term “appliance” for both stoves and servers. So I’m focusing this week’s Friday Blog on appliances and how Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure helps you manage them. What are Appliances in the Cloud?In our kitchens, appliances are devices or equipment we use to perform specific tasks. The concept is similar in IT where an appliance is a device that performs a specific function or set of functions. Examples of computing appliances include routers, firewalls, storage appliances, load balancers, virtual machines, media streaming devices, and IoT-enabled devi

“But…are you still master of your domain.” - Jerry Seinfeld This is the introduction to a multi-part series on getting your Veeam servers out of your production (i.e. main user account) Active Directory domain.  Authn. Authentication. Who are you?Authz. Authorization. What can you do?An explanation of ADDS is beyond the scope of this series, but for context…Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) provides a logical and physical structure for authn and authz within your network. Authn flows across a ‘Forest’ whilst domains are used primarily as replication partitions, being sub-units of a forest (namespace ‘trees’ being a way to organize domains). Another reason to use domains is as a logical security boundary for the seemingly all-powerful ‘Domain Admin’ account. Generally, the best practice is that Veeam components, where appropriate, are "off the production domain". There are two primary reasons for this: first, a compromised production domain admin account can not only wreak havoc o

So I had a unique support case recently, a customer using Veeam Agent for Linux with mixed success, they had one particular server that worked fine during implementation and then after a week the backups had started to immediately fail. The server was unable to load the veeamsnap module.Veeam themselves have a great article dealing with this in general and it helps resolve the majority of the cases, link here.One point I believe this article doesn’t properly discuss though is why this can happen, especially when it previously worked properly. To understand this we need to know a bit about how Veeam works with its Linux Agent.To fully understand how the Veeam Agent for Linux works, the first question we need to answer is, what is “veeamsnap”? veeamsnap is a Linux kernel module used by Veeam to create volume snapshots. Due to the huge variety of Linux systems and updates supported by Veeam, there are some pre-requisites that must be met for veeamsnap to function, these are documented her

Integrating Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure into Your Backup Environment and Deploying Azure Infrastructure​​​​  The first step is to download the Microsoft Azure Plug-in from my.veeam.com and deploy it to Veeam Backup & Replication.  After the deployment is complete, we need to select Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure on the Managed Servers side of the “Backup Infrastructure” Tab in Veeam B&R. This step asks if there is a Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure server on the Azure side. If there is, continue with the existing appliance, otherwise Deploy a new appliance is required. Azure account must be added in this step. To add our Azure account here, we first set the name that will appear on the Veeam side.  In this step, we specify the region where our Azure account is located.  Since we are doing this for the first time, we continue by saying Create a new account. Since no such integration has been done with our Azure account before, there is nothing registered.  We log in as a

Overview of Veeam ONE Alarms The Veeam Data Platform provides data resiliency through backup and replication, recovery orchestration and monitoring and analytics. Through these different capabilities, Veeam powers data protection for organizations to mitigate threats and orchestrate recovery when disasters occur. Veeam ONE, a part of the Veeam Data Platform Advanced and Premium editions, provides comprehensive monitoring and analytics, providing complete visibility of critical events that are happening in the data center. Through the different alarms that are included within ONE, you can respond and remediate issues in real-time, avoiding downtime and data loss. With over 300 predefined alarms included, it’s important to understand the alarm lifecycle, how you can adjust alarms and their configuration parameters. All the alarms have predefined thresholds based on industry standards and best practices, however they can be adjusted or tailored to fit your business needs. Popular AlarmsWi

Hi folks, I continued my tests on the lab, and did a I wanted to share the results and thoughts with you.After the initial setup, and installing Tailscale on my Veeam V&R Server vm, I also installed on a client machine outside of my network (also internet connection, emulating a remote client).Tailscale has a Magic DNS service that, when the agent is installed, you can call the clients by their DNS names (or names configured at the Web console),So, I though, why don't I deploy a backup agent and connect it through the Tailscale VPN network?instead of opening ports, and mapping IP addresses, I give it a shot,I created a protection group and added the test client in the process, as you can see in the screenshots:the, with the agent deployed, I created a backup job to test it out.Now, let's trigger the backup, the fist one will be a FULL one, so I was anxious and “scared” at the same time:Fire in the hole!Backup has started and seems to be doing fine…and here it comes the magic, perfo

IntroductionIn the first of 4 blog posts of this [Migrate Veeam Infrastructure Off Production Domain series], we described the fundamental security reasons behind moving the Veeam infrastructure components OFF Production domain. In this blog post, we will provide step by step guidance for moving a Veeam Backup and Replication™ (VBR) infrastructure to Child Domain of the Production Domain. Disclaimer: This is not intended to be a complete Security Best practice reference, nor does it address every possible scenario. A Veeam Solutions Architect can be engaged as needed to assist with VBR Security Best Practices, especially with complex deployments.SetupThe scenario is comprised of the following servers:A Production Domain Controller / DNS server A Child Domain Controller server 2 ESX hosts and 1 vCenter Veeam Backup and Replication server (VBR) with local PostgreSQL database Veeam Enterprise Manager server (VBEM) with local PostgreSQL database Veeam Gateway server Veeam Mount server Veea

I often find it helpful to remind my partners about the full range of features Veeam offers, especially when speaking with the sales team. While everyone acknowledges that Veeam excels in backup, its capabilities extend far beyond that. To highlight the depth of Veeam's solution, I’ve put together a concise list that showcases its extensive features. Veeam is built for powering data resilience.Advanced Data Protection: Data Backup Backup and Replication: Provides reliable backup and replication of virtual, physical, and cloud environments, ensuring your data is safeguarded across various platforms. Backup Copy Jobs: Allows you to create additional copies of backups for enhanced data protection and offsite storage, ensuring redundancy in case of data loss. Multi-Platform Support: Provides backup solutions for virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V), physical servers, and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and more), offering a unified approach to data protection. Cloud Integration: Offers