Blogs and Podcasts

 Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) can be considered an alternative to VMware vSphere, especially for organizations looking for cost-effectiveness, open-source flexibility, and a solid community-driven ecosystem solution.As interest and adoption of Proxmox VE increased, Veeam began supporting Proxmox within Veeam Backup and Replication, expanding integration options with the market's leading hypervisors.So, let's better understand the architecture, services, and user tools that Proxmox provides.Proxmox VE is based on a Debian Linux server distribution implemented on a specially optimized Linux kernel. It allows you to run virtual machines and containers simultaneously.ArchitectureThe hypervisor layer uses an architecture many may not yet be accustomed to. Proxmox uses QEMU (Quick EMUlator) and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) in a hybrid approach.They are closely related but serve different purposes in the realm of virtualization.KVM is a well-known type 1 hypervisor, technica

​Amazon S3 Storage Lens is a cloud-storage analytics feature that provides organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity. This tool is designed to help users understand their storage patterns, detect outliers, and make informed decisions about their storage management.Veeam Data Platform is using Amazon S3 as a repository in different products, on-prem, Hybrid, Cloud-Native and more.Why Enable AWS S3 Storage LensComprehensive Visibility: S3 Storage Lens delivers a single view of object storage usage and activity across multiple accounts, regions, and buckets. This helps in understanding storage trends and identifying inefficiencies. Actionable Insights: It provides more than 60 metrics (including both free and advanced metrics) that can be visualized in an interactive dashboard. These metrics help in identifying cost-saving opportunities, enhancing data protection, and improving performance. Cost Optimization: By analyzing storage usage and activity patterns, S3 S

Hi Folks, I was posting over the weekend and then started to wander around the hub. I remembered when it first started as well. What a fantastic place this is! For many folks who don’t have their own blog  this is a website where they can post their Data Protection blogs and ask questions. It is very well maintained, at least when there have been bad actors and spammers pop up the Veeam Team’s reaction was very quick to remove them.At the same time there is just enough freedom to allow people to be creative. Human creativity is the generator of progress after all.  Sure we don’t always agree with one another and some times get annoyed with each other, but we are humans and not robots (or AI for that matter) and that comes with the territory. At the end of the day Communities are very hard to build and maintain. I have seen a lot of communities and many that have failed. Folks let’s do a shout out to Madalina, Safiya, Nikola, Mr. Community Rickatron and everyone else who work so hard to

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Veeam Backup & ReplicationSure, most of you are already familiar with this topic, but I wanted to share my latest blog post here as well. I have had some meetings over the last few weeks, and this topic has been raised every time. I decided to summarize what the current capabilities are.I'm getting more and more questions from my customers about alternative Hypervisors. In today's fast-paced IT world, I've seen how businesses are increasingly looking for hybrid solutions that blend the scalability of the cloud with the control and performance of on-premises infrastructure. Through my work, I've found that Azure Stack HCI and Veeam Backup & Replication are two standout technologies that meet these needs, offering powerful solutions for hybrid infrastructures and comprehensive data protection.I want to get into this in a bit more detail and highlight how Azure Stack HCI is supported by Veeam. What is Azure Stack HCI?Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged I

In today's ever changing data management environment, protecting data integrity and security has emerged as the number one priority for businesses of all sizes. Veeam's backup and replication solution offers a range of features to assist organizations in protecting their data. Among these features, immutability stands out as a crucial capability that plays a role in defending data against ransomware attacks, accidental deletions, and other potential threats.Understanding the Concept of ImmutabilityImmutability refers to the capacity to prevent data from being changed, deleted, or altered in any manner for a specific duration. Within the realm of data protection, immutability ensures that backup data remains unaltered and secure, even in the presence of cyber risks or human mistakes. By integrating immutability features, you can establish an additional layer of security to shield your essential data and maintain uninterrupted business operations.Various methods can be employed to enforc

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 VEEAM'S ROLETo protect this data, software solutions like Veeam Backup & Replication are crucial because they help to achieve the three mentioned cardinal principles of information security.Specifically, Veeam allows us to:create backups and repl

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. The Active Directory database may become corrupted, or the virtual machine may fail to start, resulting in an error message like the one shown below.Troubleshoot via DSRMDSRM (Directory Services Repair Mode or Directory Services Restore Mode in versions prior to Windows Server 2012) is a special boot mode for Wi

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, for instance in the medical and financial industries, compliance or regula

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, location.2. DurabilityModern tape media can reliably store data for u

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 data blocks, meaning a faster recovery time overall. Keep in mind that Veeam Backup & Replication can perform an Instant Recovery to a hypervisor different from the source, particularly to vSphere, Hyper-V, or to Nutanix AHV. This

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 this, you have a physical workload backed up with Veeam (great), and the OS crashes. You need to restore to bare metal as fast as possible. But now you need to create the recovery media first, boot up the

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 hardware or an entire

 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!This was my log, if you don’t load/can’t read images, the final three lines contained the following:[db] Minimal supported database server version is 10.0.1600.22[db] Connecting to SQL Server (CurrentUser=[NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM], ServerInstance=[W

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.The best solution for the customer depends on several factors : The size of the full backups on disk The size of (daily) incrementals on disk The bandwidth of the internet-connection The preference or aversion of a certain solution (cloud vs tape) The

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 tenerlo todo listo.Ahora vamos a lo «divertido», configuración del Bucket S3, configuración y adición en VBR y primeras impresiones, como siempre, a pantallazos!Accedemos a la GUI de nuestro OOTBI desde la IP del cluster creada en pasos anteriores, y ponemos credenciales, usuario objectfirst, contraseña, la que hayas definido en el proceso de instalación.Precioso Dashboard inicial, con información sencilla y crucial.Vamos a Crear nuestra Key S3, para poder luego crear el BucketAquí la tenemos, guarda bien esta información, Key ID y PasswordYa está creada y listada la keyAhora vemos en el menu lateral de navegación que nos hemos ido al menu S3 BucketsCreamos nuestro

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-menuVeeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat VirtualizationPerform the following Operations   Architecture OverviewArchitecture Overview - Veeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat Virtualization • Virtualization managerVirtualization manager is a Linux-based physical or virtual machine that manages oVirt resources such as VMs, hosts, clusters, storage domains and networks. • Backup serverA backu

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 important t

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 BasicsSecurity Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems centralize the collection and analysis of log data across diverse sources, offering features like data aggregation, uniform formatting, pattern detection through correlation, secure log storage, in-depth analysis, and detailed reporting to ensure comprehensive security event manage

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 challenging if at all possible, and the risk to the integrity of the encrypted data is a reality here. In this scenario, the story supposedly has a happy ending, as the ransomware group behind this attack have allegedly apologised and offered a decryption key. Until the Indonesian gov

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 IPMI de OOTBI, para encontrar la IP, yo escanee mi red con Advanced Easy Scanner…El usuario es ADMIN, la contraseña, la que viene escrita en la pestaña del frontal.Pantalla inicial del IPMI, desde aqui, vamos a controlar por remoto y encender nuestro OOTBIBoton rojo PowerPower Ondale!Ahora que está arrancando, nos vamos a la consola remota por HTML5Remote Console, Remote Console, Launch Console.Boom! aquí vemos como bootea nuestro OOTBI Os suena esta ventana? a mi mucho… donde la hab

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 Forums and pertained mostly to the File System Analysis (FSA) engine. I don’t use that engine in my environment, so not sure how well the update has worked with regard to FSA detection, false positives, and exclusions.The 2nd update is specifically for the Inline E

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 Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to PostgreSQL is driven by various reasons. Below are some common reasons to consider such a migrationCost saving: If you prioritize cost savings, choosing PostgreSQL for your database needs is an excellent option. It is an open-source database engine that is completely free to use, even for commercial purposes, under the PostgreSQL license.Mitigate Vendor Lockin: Migrating to Po

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 would like a Backup/Copy Job export function in the Console personally. Anybody else concur this would be a useful feature add?But, I digress. My main purpose here is to provide t

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 the location of init<SID>.sap. From Oracle 12 onwards, it can usually found in /oracle/<SID>/sapprof/ b. Take the backup of the init<SID>.sap file c. Edit the file and configure the following para