Blogs and Podcasts

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.    

 Veeam Community Hub | World Backup Day 2026 Contest Entry | Working in the managed services space teaches you pretty quickly that good architecture isn't about optimizing IOPS or storage densities. It's about keeping a business alive when things go wrong. That mindset proved its worth late last year during one of the most stressful weekends my team has ever worked.Our NOC woke me up at 3 AM on a Saturday. Medium-sized regional manufacturing client, three facilities running around the clock, roughly 200 VMs, about 80TB of production data. The client's IT Director was already on the bridge call. A ransomware strain had bypassed their endpoint protection and moved laterally. By the time the anomalies were flagged, the payload had encrypted their core ERP system, SQL databases, and primary file servers. All three production lines were stopped.The threat actors left a ransom note demanding Bitcoin. They al

 Every backup admin eventually gets the same question: how do you know the backup will really work when you need it?A successful backup job only tells you the data made it to the repository. It does not prove the VM will boot, the services will start, or the application will behave the way it should. That is the gap SureBackup is meant to close.SureBackup boots VMs directly from backup files inside an isolated virtual lab, runs health checks and application tests, and gives you a result that means something. Instead of assuming a restore point is good because the job was green, you can verify that the workload actually comes up and responds. What SureBackup is really doing Under the hood, SureBackup uses the vPower NFS service to present the backup files to an

So, I have recently deployed Veeam in my lab.My Jobs are configured. Backups are running. Everything looks… green.Cool.Now comes the part most people skip—and regret later.Because here’s the reality:Day 1 is the best time to break your backup environment on purpose.If something’s going to fail, you want it to fail now—not during an outage when everyone’s watching.Let’s walk through what you should actually test immediately after setup so you know your backups work when it matters. 1. Test a Full VM Restore (Don’t Skip This)What most people do:Assume backups = recoverable.What you should do:Actually restore a VM.Test:Perform a full VM restore to a test location Power it on Verify OS boots and services startWhat you’re validating:Back

A lot of service providers running Cloud Connect either never deployed it, stood it up once and barely touched it again, or still treat it like an optional extra. That is a mistake. Once you understand what it actually handles, it stops looking optional and starts looking like the management layer you should have put in place earlier.VSPC sits above Veeam Backup & Replication and gives you one place to manage tenant onboarding, license distribution, usage reporting, billing data, and day-to-day monitoring across the customer environments you support. Without it, you end up doing too much by hand and logging into too many individual systems just to answer routine operational questions.This article walks through a production VSPC deployment: how to think about the architecture, how to onboard tenants in the right order, how the Pulse integration changes lic

Today my fourth book announcement went live for the Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication series.  You can pre-order now.  Note the publishing date says May 11th but that will be moved up to April as that is what we are shooting for.Announcement - Amazon.com: Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication: Architect and deploy a resilient Veeam 13 backup platform with proven best practices: 9781806388899: Chris Childerhose, Rick Vanover: BooksGetting excited now. 

The Skill Your Team Is Probably MissingHere's something worth sitting with: most IT teams are great at backup. They know retention policies, job scheduling, repository sizing, all of it. But recovery orchestration is a different skill set, and it's one that's genuinely underrepresented on most teams.The VRO Essentials course is designed to change that. It covers application grouping and dependencies — a topic that sounds straightforward until you're dealing with a three-tier application where App, Web, and DB servers need to come back online in the right sequence, with the right network configuration, pointed at the right infrastructure. Get that wrong during a real incident and your "successful" recovery is actually still broken. The course also covers monitoring, testing strategy, and a tips-and-tricks

I recently went through the Veeam Recovery Orchestrator Essentials course in Veeam University Pro and I will post some of my impressions on the course and about why recovery orchestration is essential to any data resilience plan.When I was growing up, my dad used to take me to see the symphony and I always thought the conductor had the easiest job in the whole symphony. He just waved his baton during the whole concert! But then I realized that it only looks easy because of all the preparation done before the concert. All the hours, days, weeks of preparation and practice made the performance look easy.It’s exactly the same way with recovery orchestration. As my friend Scott says in his post about Disaster Recovery at 4AM, no one wants to be doing the planning and thinking at the time of DR. If things can be planned and tested beforehand, at the time of DR, you look as calm as the conductor of a symphony.Today I’m going to post an overview of the course. In other

In this article, I will talk about Recovering Fast after a Ransomware attack using Veeam. I have tested this in my lab and educated my customers on every demo on the importance of having this all-in place. You would be amazed at the responses I get and how unimportant backups seem to everyone until they're neededRansomware doesn’t give you time to think.One minute everything’s running fine. The next, files are encrypted, systems are offline, and someone is asking how long recovery will take.That’s the moment where your backup strategy stops being theory—and becomes reality.If you want to recover fast, you need more than backups. You need a recovery plan that actually works under pressure.Let’s walk through what that looks like using Veeam. Step 1: Contain the Damage (Immediately)Before you recover anything, stop the spread.What to do:Isolate infected systems from the network Disable

Happy Friday, dear community!  I hope you all had a great week, and here's a veeamazing selection of reading materials for you! As you are probably aware, over the last three weeks, we have announced the new classes of 2026 for all three community programms at Veeam. This February Vanguard Newsletter reflects the announcement of the new Veeam Vanguard Class, and also features content from our new Vanguard members. 🤓 I am excited to see how many insightful articles reflecting product updates have been shared over the last month, and I am already looking forward to the next one, which will follow soon! We will soon have the updated Veeam100 Directory up and running, where you will be able to view the profiles of all members of each of our community programms, such as the Veeam Vanguards, Legends and VeeaMVPs. ​@AndreTheGiant 

From Install to Orchestration — What You'll Actually LearnOne of the things that makes the VRO Essentials course stand out is how practical it is. This isn't a high-level overview that leaves you with a slide deck and no idea what to do next. By the time you've worked through it, you'll have touched nearly every part of a real VRO deployment.The course walks you through installation, initial configuration, and the dashboard — then gets into the meat of how VRO works: Orchestrator Agents, Recovery Locations (VMware, Storage, and Azure), Virtual Labs, DataLabs, scopes, roles, credentials, YARA rules, and more. Each topic is paired with clickable labs so you can see exactly how things look in the UI and follow along step by step. There's also a genuinely useful module called "Recovery Homework" that challeng

In this article, I will discuss the mistakes being made with backups, which I frequently hear about from my customers.Let’s be honest—most backup environments look perfectly fine… right up until you actually need them.Jobs are green. Reports look clean. Nobody’s complaining.Then something breaks.And suddenly you’re discovering—live—whether your backups are real or just a comforting illusion.Here are the 10 most common backup mistakes I’ve seen (and probably fixed at inconvenient hours), plus how to actually solve them using Veeam. I've tested all of these in my lab environment. 1. Not Testing RestoresThe problem:A successful backup job does NOT mean you can restore.The reality:If you haven’t tested it, it doesn’t exist.The fix:Use Veeam’s SureBackup to automatically verify recoverability. It s

While managing and upgrading Linux agents through Veeam, you may encounter a seemingly misleading error:Host is unreachable. Failed to connect to <hostname>. Details: Cannot find a compatible console test instruction. All known instructions are not available or executed with errors. At first glance, this looks like a network connectivity issue, but in many cases it actually points to a failure during authentication or remote command execution.Problem analysisIn this scenario, the error occurred while attempting to connect to the Linux host server-vm1 for agent installation/upgrade operations.The root cause was traced back to the credentials used by Veeam for remote access (typically via SSH). When the password of the dedicated service account becomes inv

 Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Actually Ready — Or Just Ready on Paper?Let's be honest. Most IT teams have some kind of disaster recovery plan. A document somewhere, a few backup jobs running, maybe a virtual lab that hasn't been tested since it was set up. But when the moment comes — ransomware hits, a site goes down, VMs get corrupted — that's when you find out whether your plan is real or just a formality.That gap between "we have a plan" and "we can actually execute it" is exactly the problem Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (VRO) was built to close. And it's exactly why the VRO Essentials course exists.VRO isn't just another backup tool. It's a platform for building, automating, and testing full disaster recovery workflows — so that when something breaks, your team isn't scrambling through a checklist hoping nothing was missed. Recovery happens in the right order, at the right time, with the right verification baked in.The cours

In this article, I will explain Instant Recovery with Veeam, its functionality, and its significance. I'll run through a quick demo (screenshots) of the Instant Recovery process with VeeamIn today’s always-on digital environment, downtime isn’t just inconvenient—it’s expensive, disruptive, and sometimes catastrophic. Businesses are under constant pressure to ensure systems are available at all times, even in the face of hardware failures, cyberattacks, or human error. That’s where Instant Recovery technology from Veeam becomes a game-changer. What Is Instant Recovery?Instant Recovery is a feature that allows you to restore and run a virtual machine (VM) directly from a backup file, without waiting for full data restoration. Instead of transferring large amounts of data back to production storage—which can take hours—Veeam lets you start the VM immediately from the backup repository.Think of it as running your system “in place” whil

 A lot of small IT teams skip 4-Eyes Authorization because it sounds like something built for bigger shops with a separate security team.That is the wrong way to look at it.If you are the only admin touching Veeam, you probably need it more, not less. The whole point of the feature is to stop one compromised account from doing irreversible damage. If someone gets your Veeam admin credential and 4-Eyes is not enabled, they can try to tear down jobs, remove repositories, delete backup data, and make recovery harder before ransomware ever starts encrypting production. Your backup server becomes part of the attack path instead of the last line of defense.What 4-Eyes changes is simple. A destructive action no longer completes just because one account asked for it. The request gets parked in a pending state and waits for a second account with the right role to approve it. If an attacker only has your primary credential, the

Veeam's Hardened Linux Repository has been the gold standard for immutable backup storage since v11. Veeam v13 ships a pre-hardened alternative: the Veeam Software Appliance (VSA). The question is whether you build your hardened repo manually or take the appliance. The security calculus is not as obvious as it looks.This post breaks down the architectural differences, where the VSA wins, and where DIY is still the right call. The Three-Pillar Security Model Both the VSA and a correctly built DIY hardened repo implement the same core security model: Single-use credentials - the Veeam backup service account is used once, then cannot authenticate again