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INTRODUCTIONInformation, now mostly in the form of digital data, is a critical asset for all companies, from the smallest to the largest.The ISO/IEC 27001 standard reminds us what the requirements and best practices are for best managing the security of this information.The three core principles are:Confidentiality: not everyone can access a particular piece of private information, only people with the right permissions Integrity of information: the data that the organization uses to conduct its business or that it keeps safe for others must be stored reliably, ensuring that it is not deleted or damaged Availability of data: data must be available at all times, so that anyone with authorization can access the information whenever necessary

Since AD Recovery is not a routine operation performed daily, many of us lack experience with it. This is evident in the article below.​​​ Recently, my lab environments have been repeatedly restarting due to a faulty switch. After extensive research to resolve this issue before performing VM recovery, I discovered that the Hyper-V host was experiencing unplanned restarts. This can cause the virtual hard disks connected to a virtual IDE controller to become inconsistent if they are being used by virtual machines.According to Microsoft, when you virtualise your domain controller (DC) on a Hyper-V host server, a crash or power outage on the Hyper-V host can lead to several issues. Th

Data drives organizations. In today’s environment, it’s crucial to safeguard your data’s accessibility, integrity, and resiliency. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service provided by Microsoft. It offers high availability, low latency, and automatic scaling, making it an excellent choice for storing and managing large amounts of data. However, with any database, it’s important to have an effective backup strategy to safeguard against any unforeseen events. In this post, we’ll cover what Cosmos DB does, why it’s important to back it up, and suggest some best practices and guidelines for creating robust backups.There are several reasons that you might need a backup plan for Cosmos DB. In the event of data compromise, corruption, or deletion, a backup provides protection. A backup also provides disaster recovery in the event of a natural disaster or ransomware attack.  In some cases,

In a time of cloud computing tape storage might seem like a Prehistoric Dinosaur. But, for organizations that prioritize data security it’s a critical tool. One of the reasons is its ability to provide the only true airgap for data. With weekly Ransomware attack in news, it really got me thinking that if some of these organization had done a tape backup, they may have been back online much quicker, many of these attacks affect the backup files as well. And with Veeam you can easily backup a copy of your data to tape. There are several reasons why tape is best in class to protect your data let’s review few.1. IsolationAn airgap is a measure where a device or network is physically disconnected from other networks, particularly those connected to the internet. Tape excels at this because it is offline when not in use. Unlike disk that remains connected to the network, tape can physically be moved and stored in a secure,

It was hard to miss the global IT outage on July 19th—it likely affected many of us in some form, whether services were unavailable or you were responsible for getting those systems up and running. In the face of an emergency, we sometimes look for the quickest way to get our systems back up and running, and it can be all too easy to miss some of the options available.With that in mind, I wanted to provide some quick suggestions in addition to a list of recovery options available to Veeam customers.Recovery OptionsBefore I dive into recovery options, I want to provide some high-level advice and takeaways:If a full VM restore is required, Quick Rollback is a feature you should consider. This will leverage Changed Block Tracking, restoring only the required dat

Due to recent events, I thought I would share a blog post I wrote a while back on how to add Veeam Recovery ISO to Window’s Boot Menu. This helped us tremendously during the CS outage to quickly gain access to our DC’s.   Veeam Agent Recovery Media Boot Integration During the last Veeam Vanguard/Veeam 100 summit in Prague, Czech Republic part of the summit was “Fun field facts” where attendees presented various topics they found useful for sharing. I presented on how to integrate Veeam Agent into Windows. This will be a short follow-up post on how to incorporate the Veeam Agent Recovery Media into Windows Boot Manager.I started my presentation in Prague with “When it rains, it pours…” and, after being in IT for many years now, that is what happens. Just like Murphey’s Law; so imagine thi

In the former parts of this series, we have seen the importance of backups is well acknowledged. In the last part was shown that the mere presence of a backup does not guarantee the ability to recover your data - you have to test that the backups are restorable, not corrupted and – for virtual machines – be sure that the backups are bootable.The critical step after you assured all these things lies in testing your recovery abilities under realistic scenarios to ensure they function effectively during actual data recovery situations. This article explores the need of realistic testing scenarios for backups, including the simulation of various failure situations such as hardware failure, ransomware attacks, and the failure of a bigger environment structure – for example an entire data center (DC), to ensure comprehensive recovery strategies.You will see that recovering from a major incident requires more than just backups. You will likely need to provide replacement hard

 It feels like everyone is always trying so hard to be perfect, I’m certainly not! But I’m happy to learn from and share my mistakes. I was messing about recently with Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator and made some changes to my lab, and all was fine when I shut down. A few days later I fired up the lab again, but my Veeam Backup & Replication server wouldn’t start its core “Veeam Backup Service” service. I over-engineered my response expecting it to be something far more complex than it actually was, and here’s my story. Hour 1: The Service Won’t StartI fired up my Veeam Backup & Replication server, ready to write my next blog post, uh-oh, the service won’t start! I jumped into the logs and couldn’t see anything of any note, really!

More and more customers are aware of the fact that backups are more and more important than before 😍.The number of impacts by ransomware and hacking makes customers more and more aware of the fact that backups are often their last resort.They understand that they need an airgapped or immutable backup copy.In every conversation with a customer about backups, I talk about the necessity of implementing the 3-2-1-1-0 rule.If you want to know more about that : 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource HubIn that context the customers ask me what are the possible options to have a secondary airgapped or immutable backup.They also ask what are the pro’s and con’s of those solutions.As everyone knows, there is no fits-all-solution.

Hola,Tras haber realizado un par de entradas, quiero continuar compartiendo con vosotros la configuración final de OOTBI, creación del Repo en nuestro VBR, y una tarea de prueba inmutable.Os dejo aquí las entradas anteriores: Ahora, vamos con el contenido: Ya hemos visto tanto el «unboxing» y también los pasos iniciales para

A greeting to allI have deployed a POC of OLVM 4 host Hypervisor version 4.5.4-1.0.31.el8, to replace Vmware infrastructure.I am successfully testing the Veeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat Virtualization 4.1. I enclose a fairly comprehensive guide with the ste by steps of configurationWith ISO version 12.1.2.172 the Ovirt KVM plug-in is already installed.for those who do not have latest version of VBR installed download and install the pluginDownload plug inhttps://www.veeam.com/it/products/downloads.html?ad=top-sub-menu

 Veeam User RolesVeeam Backup & Replication uses a role-based authorization system to manage user access and authorizations. Each role contains a set of permissions that define specific actions that users can perform in the Veeam Backup & Replication console. This gives you more control over your data backup and recovery and prevents unauthorized access.  User Roles in Veeam:Veeam Restore Operator: This role allows users to recover data from backups. Users can browse backups, select recovery points, and restore files or objects to their original location or an alternative location. However, they do not have the author

Veeam ONE helps organizations meet the challenges that come with digital transformation, navigating hypervisors, and meeting the data protection requirements of today’s businesses. It provides insights into backup status, resource usage, SLA Compliance, threat mitigation and observability. By leveraging Veeam ONE’s monitoring and analytics organizations gain complete visibility into their virtual and backup environment.The Veeam Data Platform continues to develop support for a variety of workload types, providing an easy way to protect data whether it resides in virtual, physical or cloud deployments, including enterprise applications and SaaS offerings. However, backup is only one factor when it comes to protecting an organization’s data. Organizations need also to consider how they can leverage security features, orchestrated recovery, and advanced monitoring to stay resilient and protected in today’s digital landscape. As workloads continue to move across platforms, it’s i

IntroductionAs security operations centers (SOC) manage a daily flood of alerts and logs, the ability to effectively analyze and interpret this log data becomes an essential part of the cybersecurity workflow. Processing and investigating security incidents are the be-all and end-all of any SOC analyst. Before starting an investigation, we must have a common terminology to define attacks and security-related activities and a search that leads us to those activities.In my previous blog post, I demonstrated how log data from VBR can be sent to Elastic via Syslog for evaluation and visualization. Let us take a step back and start with the basics.The Basics

ICYMI, the Story:On the 20th June, one of the two national datacenters in use by the Indonesian government was attacked, and ransomware deployed.Normally that is a headline in itself, but the story gets worse when you dive into it. This datacenter, housing more than 200 government agencies, had very little in the way of backups. According to an official from Indonesia’s cyber security agency, approximately 98% of the government data stored in the datacenter had not been backed up. (Source: TomsHardware). The government regardless took the stance that they would not pay for the decryption key and would instead manually proceed to working on decrypting & recovering the data, which I don’t doubt would be c

Hola! Hace un tiempo recibí mi OOTBI para comenzar a jugar con el,aquí tienes el enlace a mi post inicial:Os dejo aquí la entrada, que me parece mejor tener toda la info a la mano. Object First – OOTBI – Primer arranque y configuración.Tal y como vimos en la entrada anteriorAbrimos la caja y vimos nuestra unidad OOTBI.Ahora, es tiempo de encenderla, conectarnos por remoto a su consola, y realizar la configuración inicial del sistema, acceder a su GUI, y crear nuestro primer Bucket.Vamos…Nos conectamos a la IP

Hello Community! SynopsisI couldn’t wait to get this out to you all. If you’ve been following along my Veeam Malware Detection journey, specifically with Inline Entropy scans, you know I’ve shared it has some shortcomings; although, it’s still a great tool to implement in your environment in my opinion.The post today coincides with my most recent Malware Forensics post on how to work through events you may receive from Veeam. Click below to read it if you like:Since my Forensics post a few weeks ago, Veeam has provided a few updates to its Malware Detection engine. UpdatesThe first update came with the latest Veeam Backup release, v12.1.2. Much of the Malware updates in this release came mostly from Community feedback on the

In this article, we will learn how to Migrate Veeam Configuration Database to PostgreSQL Server. I am sure you already know what PostgreSQL is. So let me not bore you with this information as some of our peers have already discussed this topic.   By default, PostgreSQL is used with all new installs of Veeam Backup & Replication 12. Existing Veeam Backup & Replication deployments that were upgraded from 11a or older will continue to use Microsoft SQL Server until they are manually migrated to PostgreSQL Why switch to PostgreSQL?Migrating Veeam Backup and Replication from Microso

Hello Community! I am in the middle of modifying my Backup/DR environment →  adding infrastructure, upgrading VBR servers, etc, etc...basically a refresh cycle as it were. One of my VBR Servers is used for DR purposes using Veeam Replication. I created a new server for it on the newest server OS (2022) and did a Configuration Backup migration. This was the first time I performed a DB migration and was pleasantly surprised by the ease of this task. Well done Veeam! As for my other VBR server, I’m not wanting to do a DB migration. I’m going to recreate most everything from scratch for various reasons. But, out of just under 30 jobs I have on this server, I do want to retain 7 of them. Sadly, as some of you know based off a Hub post from a yr or so ago by @shawnl :..exporting Jobs isn’t really possible. I really woul

This blog intend to assist SAs/SEs whose customers wants SAP integration(with Oracle databases) in OS platform like Windows, AIX etc. Q1. Customer’s SAP Environment is running on AIX or Windows with Oracle database as backend. Which solution should be proposed?A1. As there is no SAP on Oracle Plug-in for windows or AIX, we must utilize the Oracle RMAN Plug-in such cases.Ask the customer if he wants to utilize the advanced features of RMAN and can work independently without Brtools integration.If there are strict integration needed with Brtools, refer the Q&A in the following sections. Q2.Customer need strict integration with Brtools in such environments. How can this be integrated?A2. Brtools can be integrated with Oracle RMAN in the following waya. Ask the SAP Admin for th

In my interactions with numerous customers through my role, a recurring concern is their reluctance to grant open sudo access. However, many are more receptive to the idea of allowing limited sudo commands specifically needed by the application.Today, let's explore the sudo commands required by Veeam Backup & Replication v12 for the Veeam Agent for Linux. Bear in mind that this list is subject to modification based on community feedback. I encourage you to participate in this collaborative effort – feel free to suggest additions or removals to this list, which I've compiled based on my preliminary research.The necessary sudo commands for the veeamserviceraccount are as follows: veeamserveraccount ALL=/usr/bin/[ -d /tmp/ ],/usr/bin/id,/usr/bin/whoami,/usr/bin/mkdir,/usr/bin/rmdir,/usr/bin/arch,/usr/bin/uname,/opt/veeam/veeaminstaller,/usr/bin/rm,/usr/bin/cp,/usr/bin/chown,/usr/bin/veeamconfig,/usr/bin/chmod,/usr/bin/mv,/usr

With the release of 12.1.2 on Tuesday May 21st and after completing several upgrades I decided to do a blog post on the update and upgrade process.You can find my blog here - https://just-virtualization.tech/2024/05/22/veeam-12-1-2-release-upgrade/ Veeam 12.1.2 Release – Upgrade On May 21, 2024, Veeam Software released an update to the Veeam Backup & Replication products in the form of version 12.1.2.172. This update addresses some critical security vulnerabilities as well as has new enhancements plus a ton more fixes to address other bugs and issues.You can find out more about the release from the following KB page – 

Hi everyone,Veeam Community Hackathon banner for 2024. Alfred is sitting in the middle at a desk. He is about to press a run button with his paw. Binary code and a slider is shown on the left of Alfred. In the middle the word Hackathon is shown with arrowed lines pointing to icons and text describing several aspects of the Hackathon: Development, Brainstorm, Time, Presenting, Goal, Teamwork, Community. The 2nd Annual Veeam Community Hackathon is back, and it's bigger and better than ever! Sep 26 9 AM EST/15:00 CEST to Sep 29 9 AM EST/15:00 CEST We, @JonahMay and I (@mkevenaar) are back with a new round for the Veeam Community Hackathon. This year we are joined by @j

Veeam's Malware Detection feature released with v12.1 was certainly a much-anticipated and welcomed feature by many, me included. And, if you didn't read it, I even wrote about my initial experiences with it:But since enabling Inline Entropy Scan in my environment, I've really had to micro-manage it with regards to Malware events of potential malicious activity Veeam "finds". Veeam is certainly aware of the short-comings of the Inline Scan engine and I know they are hard at work preparing an update for release which I'm confident will make it better. See this Forums post for further details.