Blogs and Podcasts

📢Join this webinar on July 18th for an exciting discussion featuring our CTO, @dannyallan , Opti9's own Sagi Brody, who is also one of our Veeam 100 members, and cybersecurity expert Guy Mizrahi, CEO of CyPROS. They'll be discussing how to tackle ransomware risks, why backup infrastructure is a top target for attackers, and how our Veeam+Observr solution sets us apart from other backup vendors in the battle against ransomware, revolutionizing your protection strategy. Don't miss out!Register in here: https://opti9tech.com/events/webinar-anatomy-of-ransomware-attack-preventing-attacks-on-your-backup-infrastructure/ Best, Madi

Do you actively use Veeam Replication?If so, how long has it been since you’ve implemented it? For me, I don’t currently use it, but am in the process of getting it going again after about an 8yr hiatus. Not too much has changed since then, but there has been some enhancements you might not’ve known about, or some behavior you either didn’t know about or forgot. Below, I will be sharing some tidbits & behaviors I feel you should be aware of when making design decisions when implementing Veeam Replication.Before getting into the “Don’t Know/Forgot” items, let me briefly review how Replication works from a high-level. First, they are a job-driven task. You’ll need to set up a job and configure various settings. Next, depending on the source data you’re wanting to replicate, you can either replicate data directly from your production environment, or from other locations. I’ll touch more on this later. Lastly, the first run of Replication creates a fully functional VM on the target, an

Hi Everyone,I went quiet for a few days which had some people wondering whether I had fallen into one of my Burke “everything is depressing moods” that come gleefully with middle age, but in fact I was feverishly torturing myself with learning monitoring. Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool and can be leveraged in my many circumstances, including of course Kubernetes. I knew this certification was going to be a challenge as monitoring loves precision whereas I am by nature more of an “on the spot, off campus” type of personality thriving when it comes to figuring out fixes or trying to think out of the box which I think in my cases according to my early grade school teachers, there was never any box present in the first place.Forcing yourself to study things that are not necessarily in your natural skillset is always very useful as it stretches your mind which can only make you stronger in the end. Like brushing your teeth with the wrong hand. Yes at first it will be messy and unp

Hi Everyone, The Linux Foundation is having a fast sale 40% until July 12. The LF certifications are some of the best in the business and some of the toughest so if you want to test your knowledge now is the time to get them. I don’t really recommend their training though, I personally did not find it very helpful towards the CKA exam. Remember these are not just Kubernetes exams but Linux and other systems as well. Take a look at the catalog.Speaking of which I have to renew my CKA so I took advantage of this deal myself!! https://training.linuxfoundation.org/july-prime-day-2023-promo/?creative=665260864709&keyword=linux%20foundation%20training&matchtype=p&network=g&device=c&pi_ad_id=665260864709&utm_term=linux%20foundation%20training&utm_campaign=EMEA:+Search:+June+21+-+Sitewide+Discount&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=8666746580&hsa_cam=13435710405&hsa_grp=149869974173&hsa_ad=665260864709&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-147

One of the products I spend a lot of time working with is Veeam ONE. If you are unfamiliar, Veeam ONE provides data protection monitoring for all Veeam operations. After implementing Veeam ONE, customers gain real-time monitoring, issue resolution and reporting capabilities that help with analysis and decision making. As companies drive innovation, they are transforming their data center, not only running applications traditionally, but also utilizing the cloud to take advantage of the many benefits it has to offer. I have been working more and more in the public cloud, whether it be utilizing object storage to store my backup data or getting more familiar with running workloads and resources there. Veeam ONE is essential for any installation because you gain visibility into your backups, the infrastructure and how machines are running. Veeam ONE was built for Veeam Backup & Replication, so as businesses are moving workloads to the cloud, or storing data in object storage, ONE is g

Hi! I wrote a post describing the main stages of a ransomware attack, from exploiting a user's endpoint (client-side attack) to the three possible extortion demands: ransom for decryption keys, ransom for recovering exfiltrated data, and ransom to avoid DDoS attacks. I also present a complete list of countermeasures based on the NIST Ransomware Framework Profile, derived from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. I hope this can be helpful!https://cloudnroll.com/2023/07/10/client-side-ransomware-attacks-and-a-defensive-framework-for-your-organization/

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

Hi allFinally previous week I took the time to perform the new VMCA 2022 exam, this to extend my Veeam Architect certificate (VMCA-1) to an up-to-date status. This just before the summer holidays 😎.Previously (7 months ago) I wrote another post regarding my personal experience for the VMCE 2021 exam (VMCE exam personal experience | Veeam Community Resource Hub).I know that @Michael Melter already wrote a great post about his VMCA 2022 exam review, but next to that nice post, I want to add my own personal experience and recommendations 😉. I will use the same content as I used before in my VMCE post 🤗. Requirement : Taking an official 2-days VMCA course is a requirement before taking the VMCA exam.Before (in Version 1 of VMCA) you had to be VMCE-certified before you could take the exam of VMCA.That requirement is no longer valid.BUT, I strongly recommend being VMCE of the same version first before taking the VMCA exam.In my opinion, the requirement of being a VMCE should still exist.I

In this article I will explain how to configure the AWS SSM on EC2 Instances to Veeam Backup for AWS be able to create VSS Snapshots for those instances.Veeam Backup for AWS depends on AWS SSM to create the VSS Snapshots, so before enable the Application-Aware option in the policy we need to configure the instances correctly with all the necessary components. Let’s start creating a IAM policy with all permissiona that we need: { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "VisualEditor0", "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ec2:DescribeInstances", "ec2:CreateTags", "ec2:CreateSnapshot", "ec2messages:AcknowledgeMessage", "ec2messages:DeleteMessage", "ec2messages:FailMessage", "ec2messages:GetEndpoint", "ec2messages:GetMessages", "ec2messages:SendReply", "ssm:DescribeAssociation",

Hi all, I’ve been using an app called “ripgrep” for a while now and wanted to share it with the community. https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep“ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern.”ripgrep is written in Rust which is “blazingly fast” for this type of operation. I found this article very interesting on the subject of benchmarking https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/Finding the specific file or files where something occurred can be tricky, but ripgrep makes it easy with a simple regex pattern.rg "^.*?\b13.02.2023\b.*?\bError\b.*?$"It provides each instance that matches the expression under the file's name. It also allows you to use flags to alter the output; the most useful I’ve found are the -A, -B and -C flags. -A Provides a number of lines before the match-B Provides a number of lines after the match-C Provide a number of lines before and after the matchMany other flags can be used, including a flag that recursive

For those of you who don’t spend much time or have much experience with SQL Server, Brent Ozar is a well-known and respected Microsoft SQL consultant. In addition to consultancy and training services, Brent Ozar offers tools such as the First Responder Kit, and a SQL Server monitoring service called SQL ConstantCare.SQL ConstantCare is a paid for monitoring service, designed to provide a daily report of what’s going on within your SQL Server platform, collecting data and notifying you if it sees genuine room for improvement, when things are good, it stays quiet.It’s the content of these alerts that I want to discuss today. Brent Ozar did a blog post recently discussing the alerts that most people muted, and I found it really interesting to see the elements of data protection in there. So, let’s take a look: SQL ConstantCare – Sample Size and Quality of Samples Some background information on this data set that Brent Ozar has worked with firstly to provide context. At the time of writing

Storpool Storage logoAt the beginning of 2023, I was selected to be part of the Tech Field Day Delegate list, which was an honour. You can find my profile here – https://techfieldday.com/people/chris-childerhose/.After this, I signed up for my first field day, which was Storage Field Day 25 #SFD25. More information can be found here – https://techfieldday.com/event/sfd25/It was a different experience being part of such a great event by @GestaltIT and @TechFieldDay, along with Steven Foskett. After the event, attendees are contacted regarding writing a blog spot for the GestaltIT website from the event you attended.I decided to write a blog about Storpool Storage, and the blog can be found here –https://gestaltit.com/sponsored/storpool/chris-childerhose/storpool-storage-delivery-with-commodity-hardware-the-right-way/I hope you enjoy reading it!

Protecting DB2 servers with Veeam Backup and Replication is pretty straightforward. The IBM DB2 can be protected with the following Veeam jobs:Classic VM backup jobs Veeam  Agent for Linux (VAL) jobs Enhanced NAS backup jobsTo ensure that the DB2 DBs are in a consistent state, IBM DB2 commands will need to be called to either create a native DB2 database backup or to put database(s) in a quiesced state so that a clean application backup of the database can be made. DB2 has several ways to perform backups from the CLI that make backups of the database reasonably simple.Native flat file backup can be performed against an offline or online DB. The options include using full, incremental, and differential backups A simple pause and resume of the DB2 writer that can be used to store (and VMware) snapshots that Veeam Backup and Replication can leverage. The ability to leverage storage array snapshots as restore points through a component called IBM DB2 ACS. I will not discuss this process as

Looking to build your own chatbot but don’t want to break the bank on hardware and keen on some privacy ? I’ve created 2 blogposts on how you can create your own AI LLM powered chatbot.The first post is live and tells you how to get to your source data. I gave it a little twist and used the transcripts of several YouTube instructional videos to train the model.Interested, remarks, comments ?Read it all here: https://integriservices.blogspot.com/2023/06/create-your-own-private-offline-ai-q.html My second post will become available later this week. Then I’ll take you on the tour how to deploy your own private chatbot and train it with the data we’ve collected before. 100% private free and local AI LLM powered Q&A chatbot at your disposal. 

DemoLet's rip the band-aid off, as I know most of you really just want to see it right?!  My ObjectivesBuild a Chatbot interface, nothing new here, but it's a hot topic right now Use the Veeam KB data as the primary data source,(the clean data didn't exist, but i built my own API for it as well as the scraping engine... you can use it too) Learn about embeddings, using the OpenAI models because they're super easy (and certainly at the time) to interact with Learn about Vector databases, I used Pinecone but there are like 20 more since Feb... lots of funding for startups in this space already Learn, have fun along the way, share the knowledgeI really just wanted to share the project with y’all, the techy-details about the various bits are over on my blog if you were interested!Let me know what you think, good idea? would you use it? How would you improve it?

Hello guys 😄Hope everyone are well ! In my side I'm in vacation 🤙. I wanted to share with you some tests done with the beta of Veeam v12 (build 12.0.0.817) and the incredible new feature backup directly to Object Storage.Object StorageFor my test I used Wasabi as cloud object storage. You can find really great posts about Wasabi:Wasabi is now available in the list of providers when you want to add an object storage repositoryWe have less information to enter, it's appreciable You will find your repository with Wasabi Cloud Storage Type. Backup JobThe advantages of this kind of backup are multiple:Financial: you can use on-prem object storage, object storage can be cheaper than SAN Built-in durability & reliability Reduce hardware to manageLet's take a look at the setup, because there are technical side effects.As usual you select your repository, the GFS part still available and you could configure a backup copy job if necessaryIn the advanced options, it’s simplified ! Bye backu

Hi everyone,some days ago I posted about TailscaleBetter than Just VPN for the Home LabNow, I will show a couple cases Im using it for:RDP to my lab Now, from my laptop and anywhere with internet access, I can connect to my “JumpStation” to get into my HomeLab, exactly! and it has a great feature called “Magic DNS” that it does call the remote machine from the Tailscale name, so no IP address needed. Remote access to my Lab Network Yes, you read it right it has a feature that enables the bypass / routing of the networks you have in the Tailscale host, so you can access that network from the remote connected device, in case you need to access a device that has not capability to install Tailscale in it, I use it to access my router, my center and my storage appliance. Proxy form outside routing my internet traffic. Exactly, now I can activate the “Exit node” feature that allows me to route all the client traffic to the “Tailscale” selected host to get to the internet, very useful when we

 Hello, Veeam Community!For the most experienced users of Veeam products this post won’t be a big news, but this will surely be a big help for those taking their first steps with Veeam.Often times we are asked “where do I start with my new Veeam product?” or “does Veeam offer free certification?”, and our answer is go “back to Veeam University!”Veeam University is a FREE online training portal for all users of Veeam products and it offers a wide range of on-demand educational resources. No matter how well you know Veeam products, you will find something for yourself:Guided product onboarding pathways from A to Z for your first-time deployment  for Veeam Data Platform (all editions) for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 These FREE online onboarding pathways were compiled together based on customer feedback and coupled with best practices from Veeam Technical Onboarding Managers and Solutions Architects.They feature everything you need to know from day one of using the product, all in bite

These days I had to troubleshoot poor VMware vSphere SAN transport mode performance during backup with Veeam. Before SAN mode, NDB transport mode was used. NBD outperformed SAN mode totally!Here are some facts about the environment.EnvironmentVMFS volume are hosted by two HPE 3PAR arrays in a synchronous replication configuration (Remote Copy) with Peer Persistence. ESXi hosts are running on different versions. Backup (here: Veeam Backup and Replication) is installed on a dedicated physical host. This host is connected with 10G LAN and a single FC uplink to one out of two fabrics.Backup performanceThe used backup mode in this environment was NDB transport mode. This was because the physical host wasn’t equipped with a FC HBA. To improve backup performance a HBA was installed. To run direct SAN backup, a few configuration steps are necessary:Add MPIO feature to backup server, Configure MPIO for 3PAR by running: mpclaim -r -I -d "3PARdataVV" FC switch zoning, Exporting all LUNs to backu

After watching last week’s Community Recap, I realized that I missed a great blog posting from @regnor about setting up Wasabi Immutable Storage for VBR.  After reading this information, I realized that I, as a smaller service provider and MSP, require a more complex configuration to host multiple tenants in Wasabi and was inspired to share my configuration for setting up Wasabi when you have multiple tenants under one account that you don’t have to have accessing each others buckets.The magic lies in some S3 IAM policy work in place to prevent buckets from being visible and accessible to the wrong tenants.  When I was setting this up, there wasn’t much information for doing exactly and S3 policies were completely new to me.  Using Wasabi’s and Veeam’s instructions in the links and the end of this post didn’t work for me out of the box, so after asking around in the Veeam Community, R&D Forums and Veeam Subreddit and some experimentation, I was lead to the answers I needed.  I hope

As I posted some time back my third book came out and thank you to all that are buying it.  Packt conducted an Author interview with me regarding the book which was very interesting.  If you want to read the interview you can find it in the link below and if anyone is interested in writing a book or have thoughts on it just reach out.  I am debating a fourth book but might see about a co-author(s) for it this time around, but we will see.Packt Interview - Chris Childerhose - Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication (Third Edition)

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

Greetings, today I wanted to share with you some amazing news. I am talking about an unofficial Veeam icon library for Excalidraw.Excalidraw is a tool that helps you draw technical diagrams with a great hand-made look, made every diagram much more user-friendly, as it really looks like if somebody has drawn it with their own hands.After a few months, and many nights on this, I have finished adding around 60+ Veeam unofficial shapes in total that have been carefully created inspired by the official shapes. Sorry to repeat myself, but again, these shapes are unofficial and not linked in any way to Veeam Software, use them, edit them, change them as you like.How do the Veeam unofficial shapes for Excalidraw look like?These are all the icons I made manually, they are ready to use, and I hope they are enough for your diagrams:How to Import the Veeam unofficial Excalidraw Icon LibraryThe process could not be simpler, open Excalidraw on the browser of your choice, remember that Excalidraw doe

I have been a Veeam Vanguard for six years and Veeam Legend for just over a year and was fortunate enough to have attended the VeeamON 2017 event in New Orleans and VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas, which was fantastic.  Being a Vanguard is a real honour, and many people ask me when they see my Veeam Vanguard jacket or shirt - What is Veeam?  My answer is a typical one - it is backup software for your infrastructure for now and the future, leading to a conversation around technology, backups, and many other things.This year's VeeamON 2023 event was in Miami, which I attended in person, and it was amazing.  Besides the great weather and hotel, there were many sessions, networking, a VeeamON playground with the Veeam Community Booth, Lab Warz, Hands-on-Labs and the legendary swag shop.Fontainebleau Miami Beach - Pool with VeeamON logo  VeeamON 2023 Digital Display in the lobbyAttending VeeamON is one of the best events if you want to learn more about backup and what Veeam is all about. From use

Disaster’s happen and businesses need to be ready for them. If 2020 taught us anything, it might be to expect the unexpected. Sometimes we can’t plan for the unexpected, but when it comes to data and applications businesses depend on, planning for the unknown is critical. Whether it be a natural disaster, a data outage or a ransomware attack, businesses need to remain online, and by creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan now, it can save us later. One technology that is included in this type of plan is failover. Utilizing replica failover can help achieve the best Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) by having a copy of your VM in a ready to start state.  If your new to Veeam, you might be unsure of the different failover capabilities it has to offer. Throughout this post, I will walk through Veeam’s failover capabilities and describe their meanings and benefits of each. Introduction to Failover Failover is a process in which you seamlessly switch operations from the sour