Blogs and Podcasts

I wanted to share a couple Veeam errors I experienced on my Replication (DR-side) server after I replaced server hardware. Not sure if anyone has experienced either of these errors, but they were quite frustrating to work through. Let me know if you had a similar experience/occurrence and what you did to resolve it. Maybe what I share here will help someone.As I was replacing hardware in my DR side vSphere Clusters, on my VBR server, I would perform a vCenter rescan to make sure VBR would see the new Hosts and my Replication jobs would run successfully. Because all the tasks involved with replacing h/w is time-consuming, I was only doing 3-4 Hosts a day (took 3 days for 10 Hosts), so I had to do this rescan several times. I think I only verified 1 or 2 jobs out of around 12 I have, but they run good. On the 2nd day, I noticed 1 of my jobs failed. The error shown was below:

A new feature in vSphere 7 is the ability to configure a VMkernel port used for backups in NBD (Network Block Device) respectively Network mode. This can be used to isolate backup traffic from other traffic types. Up to this release, there was no direct option to select VMkernel port for backup. In this post I  show how to isolate NBD backup traffic in vSphere.ConfigurationIt is quite simple to configure backup traffic isolation. With vSphere 7 there is a new service tag for Backup: vSphere Backup NFC. NFC stands for Network File Copy. By selecting this, vSphere will return the IP address of this port when the backup software asks for ESXi hosts address.So all you need to do is to add a new VMkernel port, enable Backup service and set IP and VLAN ID. Host does not need to be rebooted. Now NBD backup traffic wi

I was installing the VBR Console on my PC, and when connecting to the backup server, there was a version mismatch that the Veeam User Guide (HelpCenter) spelt out correctly. Here is the guide on how to “Install Veeam Backup Console on a Jump Server for Secure Access”, discussing all the prerequisites, installation steps, limitations and workaround.I searched through the community but could not find any post discussing the upgrade process for the latest version of VBR. Therefore, I will be discussing these steps below.Two months ago, December 3, 2024 to be precise. Veeam launched Veeam Data Platform v12.3, introducing powerful enhancements that significantly strengthen data resilience.  This release introduces 

 Extracted from the original blog at wcithipster.com on Nov 25 Written By Zane AllynAs a Veeam Vanguard and a longtime backup enthusiast with more than six years of experience working at Veeam. Today, I’m beyond excited to share an early look at Veeam Backup & Replication v13. This release introduces two major enhancements: a fully Linux-based backup server and an HTTPS-based web console. These updates are not just features; they’re milestones that reflect years of community feedback.This sneak peek is based on alpha code, so things may change before the final release. That said

When auditors come knocking—or worse, when bad actors strike—not having accurate and complete event logs can make all the difference in how your organization survives the encounter.However, users are often understandably more focused on day-to-day operations and only think to look for this information once it’s needed (and when time is of the essence).The good news is that all the information you need—including where to find changes in Veeam server user access permissions, failed login attempts, and failed RDP connections—is available in several different locations, including:Windows Event Viewer Veeam Backup and Replication Audit logs for performed restores Veeam One Audit log The individual application log(s) Windows Event ViewerMany Veeam activities (success, warning, and failures) get logged to the Windows Event viewer by default. To see these events from within the V

If the backup jobs fail and show an error message is “Unable to allocate processing resources. Error: Unable to find Hyper-V hosts where VM 'xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx' is registered: Failed to connect to Hyper-V Integration Service on host, port 6163”. I tried to review the settings, and all of them look fine, but the backup jobs failed always. I have run into these issues sometimes, it’s easy to solve, you just need to reboot the Veeam management server or restart the Veeam services of the Veeam management server.

Fellow Veeam Legend ​@MarkBoothman shared an interesting post on the VUG UK Community page and I thought it highly relevant to also be shared with the main Community as a whole as well.Today Anton Gostev, Chief Product Officer at Veeam, created a couple posts on the Veeam Forums I think those anxious for the release of Veam Backup & Replication v13 should be aware of. Starting in v13, Veeam is beginning to deprecate some features, as well as streamline system requirements to make their product better, more secure, and performant. The posts can be viewed at the links below:VBR v13 Deprecated Features

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:

The email notifications are not working after upgrading from v11 to v12 (v12.1), including sending the test email.There are warnings on the backup jobs: " Sending e-mail report Details: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure. "   Every time you send an email report, Veeam Backup and Replication v12.1 validates the certificate received from your email server during email report configuration, indicating that the certificate has likely been modified. It's easy to fix this issue, you need to open the global email notification settings and save the configuration again, accept the verify certificate prompted and save the settings.

Frequently I'm ask in how to monitor backup jobs of Veeam externally Veeam servers.I know that we can do this easy with Veeam One. But here I’m going to show you a solution to monitor backup jobs having only a Veeam Backup Server (without VEM or VONE).So, the application I’m talking about is Checkmk. Checkmk is a monitoring software usually used on NOC (Network Operations Center) environments. However, this is an easy tool to deploy and very light to hav in our backup environment. VersionsCheckmk has a free and commercial version:Checkmk Raw Edition (CRE) – Free and 100% Open Source. It even incorporates Nagios into its core. You can use it to monitor entire environments. Support for this release is available through the Checkmk community forum.Checkmk Enterprise Free Editio

First of all : Wishing you a happy new year with the hope that you will have many blessings in the year to come. 1. ObjectiveThe objective of this deep dive is to detail the steps to follow to activate the Inline Malwares Detection feature.2. Introduction2.1 Description of Inline Malwares DetectionVeeam Backup & Replication 12.1 introduces a new security feature called “Encryption Detection”. It is an online entropy analysis that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to detect previously unencrypted data that becomes encrypted in processed disk images.This allows for the detection of a potential ransomware attack. “Inline Entropy” analyzes

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 Micr

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)”

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

I was recently made aware that Veeam have released the 2021 edition of the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) exam. If you’ve already got a VMCE 2020 certification, or have taken the VMCE 2020 training course within the past year, (or even been lucky enough to already take a seat on the VMCE 2021 training course) you’re eligible to take the exam.To take the exam simply head to the VMCE certification page, sign in with your company email address that was used for either your training course or previous exam and you should see the below.Description: An image showing the VMCE certification page with a button labelled “Manage VMCE 2021 Exam”Simply click on “Manage VMCE 2021 Exam” and you’ll be taken to the PearsonVUE website to organise eit

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 

Veeam released a new Cumulative Patch for Veeam Backup & Replication 11a: 11.0.1.1261 P20211211Includes a lot of new platform support and a few fixes. See detailed release notes:https://www.veeam.com/kb4245

Recently as blogged already, I got a DS923+ Nas and here is one of the guides agreed upon. This short article will discuss how to set up iSCSI Target and Storage LUN on Synology DS923+ for VBR.ISCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface. It revolutionizes storage accessibility by seamlessly transporting SCSI commands over TCP/IP networks, granting unparalleled block-level access to storage devices. This innovative technology bridges the gap between traditional storage systems and modern networking infrastructures, empowering businesses with efficient, scalable, and flexible storage solutions.iSCSI allows you to use a Windows repository with ReFS which leverages FastClone. Do you wish to learn more about why the 

Recently, Lionel Gilles, a French-based Offensive Computer Security researcher based in Paris, France published a PoC tool on NTLM Relay Attack known as PetitPotam that exploits the MS-EFSRPC (Encrypting File Services Remote Protocol). PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect users. Here is an example of such documents: NT LAN Manager: How to prevent NTLM credentials from being sent to remote servers. Below are some related guides: Active Directory Authentication methods:

While backing up Exchange data, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 systematically retrieves the properties associated with every mailbox folder. This encompassing approach includes visible folders and extends to hidden and legacy folders, such as 'TeamsMessagesData.' By diligently requesting and capturing the properties of these folders, Veeam ensures a comprehensive backup solution that accounts for all relevant data within the Exchange environment.Exchange Web Services (EWS) are the legacy APIs used to create clients and services that connect to Exchange to get access to mailbox information. Microsoft will restrict access via EWS to Teams message data starting on January 31, 2023.Following a recent update within Microsoft 365, a notable adjustment has rendered the retrieval of properties associated with the 'TeamsMessagesData' folder unattainable through the current Exchange Web Services (EWS) APIs utilized by Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. This modification in the Micr

This article was birthed by the following article shared in the community which by @Viperian. Kindly take a look at the comment section of this post as they are very informative as well.I see a lot of environments shared online with the .local suffix and this made me create a blog post on how to set up a Domain Controller as Recommended by Microsoft. There are numerous articles on this topic on the blog but I have decided to share the latest that was prompted by the above concern.But then, this is a new Active Directory environment. The issue has not been solved for existing AD environme

When attempting to add a pre-created (provisioned) PC to a domain or reuse an existing computer account, the following error below is encountered.An account with the same name exists in Active Directory. Re-using the account was blocked by the security policy.Microsoft released this update on October 11, 2022, thereby introducing additional protections (hardening) for your environment. This hardening mitigates the following “CVE-2022-38042 (Active Directory Domain Services Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability)”.Legacy behaviourBefore the installation of the October 11, 2022 update, or later cumulative updates, the client computer queries Active Directory for a

The ProblemLast week we were troubleshooting a Veeam Backup & Replication environment, where jobs were slowing down since some time.Looking at the jobs, the backup performance itself was quite good, but the processing of some VMs took longer then expected.The task log of those VMs showed that "Collecting disk files location data" was the cause; for some VMs it lasted 20 minutes, others were waiting for several hours.I first suspected a vCenter problem, as the debug logs showed timeouts and an unsupported API, but after patching and some restarts the problems persisted.The ResolutionDoing some research I’ve stumbled over an R&D forums digest from @Gostev from the year 2018 (Veeam Community Forums digest at that time

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.

ALT TEXT: Banner with blog post title “Veeam & File Shares: Licensing & Feature Comparison” Hi!Today we’re going to talk about file shares and how to protect them. We’ll also look at how Veeam handles the various backup options available within the Veeam Universal License.File shares can take many forms, so we’re going to look at the following:A Physical/Virtual Server A NAS/SAN/Storage Device with File Share capabilities Azure Files Amazon EFS (Elastic File Systems) Physical & Virtual Servers Before Veeam introduced native file-share support for Veeam Backup & Replication, you could still backup physi