Blogs and Podcasts

AWS CLI ProfilesIn my previous articles I used the AWS CLI to interact with the object storage platforms for demonstration purposes.  This article will focus on a very powerful feature of the AWS CLI, the usage of profiles.If you find yourself often interacting with several object storage platforms and/or use multiple object storage accounts, then using profiles for the AWS CLI will simplify your efforts.  It has for me. Creating the first profileFor an example, let’s say you need to access three object storage platforms regularly.  For the remainder of this article, the storage platforms will be:platform1 platform2 platform3You could use the “aws configure" command to reset your environment to use the credentials and region every time you switch to another object storage target.My first step is to see what AWS cli profiles I have configured and set:Let’s see what profiles are configured:aws configure list-profilesThere are no existing profiles, so let’s create one up for object storag

Hey Veeam community. I am starting my New Year’s resolution early and posting my first video on YouTube. It’s a walkthrough of Veeam Backup for Salesforce. I’m planning to post more videos as I find it helps deepen my understanding of various Veeam solutions. I hope to document some parts of Veeam products that I found challenging or hard to implement. I welcome all comments as I know there are a bunch of people here with much more experience at this than I have. Have a great rest of 2022! Cheers! 

One of my roles at Veeam is to work with our Technology Alliance Partners, resellers, and customers assisting them with their object storage related questions.  Quite often I need to be able to analyze the S3 API requests that Veeam’s software sends to the object storage repository.  One of my favorite tools that I use for this analysis is S3 bucket access logging.By enabling this feature on a bucket, you will be able to capture information on all requests made to that bucket.  Requests like PUT, GET, and DELETE are all gathered and stored in a log that you specify when you enable the logging. Please Note: Not all object storage solutions support the S3 bucket access logging, so make sure that you check their documentation and/or support to verify that they support it.You can either use the interface provided by your object storage solution or you can use the AWS CLI.  In this article I will use the AWS CLI.The first step is we need a dedicated bucket to store our S3 logs in.  It is a

It shouldn’t be news to you that Veeam B&R had 2 critical vulnerabilities (CVSS 9.8/8.8) in March 2022. Patches were released for v10a and v11a at that time.Here’s the corresponding KB article and a post from @Iams3le:Veeam KB4288If you haven’t updated yet, then here’s another good reason.Last week the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added both vulnerabilites to their known exploit catalog. This means that attackes are now actively exploiting the vulnerabilities and targeting environments which use Veeam B&R.CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilites Catalog I hope you don’t need more reasons to keep your Veeam installation up-to-date? Please also keep in mind that any other Veeam build below v10 is also affected. But as those are already End of Fix/Support, they didn’t receive any patches.

For my first Veeam Community post, I thought I would share with you all something I’ve been doing for over a decade - an exam prep Study Guide; this one being for VMware VCP-DCV 2021. For those who haven’t followed me over the years, I started creating these “outlines”, i.e. Study Guides, for my own benefit to help me with tech cert exam prep. I then thought others in the community may benefit using them, so I decided to share them online. I generally post them on Twitter, so if you’d like to follow me, you can do so from here.When reviewing the VMware ‘Blueprint’ for the DCV 2021 exam as compared to the 2020 exam, I was initially overwhelmed by the additional content for 2021. As I dove deeper into the 2021 exam Objectives, it turns out a lot of them were similar to what was asked to know for the 2020 exam, so it wasn’t too bad to review. As with most of my Guides, I enjoyed learning about the new tech VMware implemented with vSphere 7 - e.g. Identity Federation & Lifecycle Manage

When it comes to sizing a new Backup environment or just new repository server, one metric that is always asked is the daily change rate. You can also see in the most popular - unofficial - Veeam sizer:https://rps.dewin.me/ https://rps.dewin.me/rpc/      Even with VeeamONE it was not simple to get this information easily for VMs and physical machines. This gap was closed with the version v11a of Veeam ONE. The previous report named VM Change Rate History was replaced by the new Data Change Rate History. Fortunately not just the name changed, it also gets some new features!What's new in report configurationIncludes Agent backups. Now these job-types are supported: VM Backup Replication Agent Backup   You can select the base of change rate calculation: Data transferred or read.   What's new in the report itselfIncludes a nice graph for change rate history - for VM and agent data. Includes daily change rate. In Summary In detail - per machine   This is a great help for siz

There has been a significant focus on how to make Veeam Backup resilient to ransomware.  More specifically - how to have Veeam backups available for recovery in case of an incident.In the past few months, I have had discussions with customers who have successfully recovered their production data after a ransomware attack. The common theme among these successful recoveries has been the availability of a secondary off-site copy of their backups to recover from, as their primary backup repository was compromised and destroyed outside of the Veeam software.Veeam ransomware protection should be the customers’ focus, and it is always a priority goal in my architecture designs. Secure by design is also a core design principle of the Veeam Architecture team.Off-site backup copies can provide an additional layer of data security:They are usually behind a VPN with a robust firewall deployment They are typically kept on a different network segment They often use an additional authentication metho

Hola!Esta entrada no es nada “tech”, es de comunidad y de ayudar a los demás!En esta ocasión, ayudar a otra comunidad creo que es el mejor regalo que podemos hacer, ya que el enfoque de todo esto es colaborar y ayudar!Por suerte y desgracia, yo pertenezco a estas dos asociaciones, hacen una gran labor, y gracias a su trabajo y cariño, muchas familias pueden atender a sus hijos, y aliviar un poco su carga!Si quieres colaborar, o no sabes cómo ayudar, sigue los enlaces y colabora, puedes hacer un donativo, o comprar un regalo para alguien en su tienda solidaria.Asociación NUPAAsociación MENUDOS CORAZONES Regala pensando en los demás!Luis.Hi!This entry isn't “tech at all, its about community and helping others!In this post, I believe that helping other community is the best gift we can offer, our focus as a community is always that, sharing and helping others!fortunately and unfortunately, I do belong to this two communities, associations, they do a great job, and thanks to that, and also

Os dejo el webinar que hicimos junto con Wasabi sobre Protección moderna de datos con almacenamiento S3 Object Storage, de la mano de la Comunidad de usuarios de Veeam, Victor Perez de Mingo y Wasabi. 

Hi all In this post I want to describe my personal experience in preparing and taking the VMCE exam.I know that there are some other topics written about the VMCE exam, like a good post of our top legend @MicoolPaul 😉, but I also want to share my personal experience.It’s very hot these days because some of our legends have recently received a free VMCE course of VEEAM. How cool is that from Veeam 😊.So especially for these co-legends (and in the meantime I luckily have met them in person at the Veeam 100 Summit event 😊) and hopefully other people wanting to take the course and exam. Requirement : Yes, indeed taking an official 3-day VMCE course is a requirement before taking the VMCE exam.For me it’s almost 5 years ago that I took the VMCE course – version 9.5 at that time. Because I work for a certified Veeam reseller and service provider, one of the requirements is that we have to have at least 1 VMCE in the company if we want to keep a Gold Partnership with Veeam.Because I’m the o

Veeam has just released a warning about a potential data loss issue for the Cloud products (AWS, Azure, GCP).IssueAccording to the article, data loss can occur in the background during the movement of backup objects.Affected versionsThe following versions are affected:Veeam Backup for AWS 5.0.0.452 Veeam Backup for AWS 5.1.0.39 Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure 4.0.0.679 Veeam Backup for Google Cloud 3.0.0.859SolutionHotfixes have been released for the 3 products and it’s advised to install the update immediately.Veeam Backup for AWS 5.1.1.8 Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure 4.0.0.705 Veeam Backup for Google Cloud 3.0.0.868Besides that, Health Check should be enabled for all policies in order to notice any backup chain problems.For more information visit KB4383

Hola!Para todos aquellos que hablais Español - Castellano,recordaros que vamos a celebrar un webinar el 13/12/2022 a las 09:00am. CEST“Protección moderna de datos” Animaros a participar en invitar a todos los “colegas” que queráis y creáis que les interese! Saludos.

Hi everyone,I assume some of you already know about this, but I think is interesting and also a good resource, being in the same path Veeam and VMware.VMware user group has a yearly subscription, for less than 200 dollars a year, you have access to a lot of 1 year licenses for many products, for lab and study proposes.It also offers discounts on official courses, certification exams and so on,so please, if you run a home lab, you want to grow it, and don’t have licenses to do so, check it out! VMUG ADVANTAGE Now includes also ESXi 8 and VCENTER 8!cheers!Luis F.

IntroductionWith backup direct to object being one of the most anticipated features in v12 AND with the ever-increasing number of cyber-threats, it is paramount to secure access to our buckets.In this series of posts, I will explore v12's direct to object capabilities and offer some suggestions to batten down the hatches.Note: For this post, I will use Wasabi and Minio as my Object Stores of choice. While some slight variations are expected, keep in mind that the same concepts should apply to any S3 compatible target. Restrict bucket access with a simple User IAM policyYou can find the Amazon S3 Object Storage Permissions in the User Guide for VMware vSphere and kb3151 highlights the required steps.Let's review what that looks like in Wasabi's console. For this example, I will configure a simple S3 bucket without immutability. Step 1: Create the policy as described in kb3151This policy grants access to the <<orossisecurebucket01>> bucket to the identity it is associated wit

Alt Text: Title “In The Lab With: Windows” Subtitle: “Endpoint Management” Subtitle Two: “Delaying Windows Feature Updates with Group Policy”There was recently a lively discussion on the Veeam R&D forums that inspired me to write this post. The essence of the disagreement on there was about Veeam’s inability to support new Windows Feature Updates sooner. I won’t repeat all of my points on the topic as they’re available for reading freely on the R&D forums already. What I do want to focus on however, is providing support to the thinly-stretched sysadmin who needs to get a grip on the Windows Update Lifecycle, to avoid issues with the Veeam Agent, and other applications that don’t have ‘Day One’ support for a new Operating System (Yes, Feature Updates are considered upgrades).So, what is a feature update? Please the quote below directly from Microsoft’s own documentation.Feature updates: Previously referred to as “upgrades,” feature updates contain not only security and quality r

VMware Tools is a set of services and modules that enable several features in VMware products for better management of guests operating systems and seamless user interactions with them. VMware Tools has the ability to pass messages from the host operating system to the guest operating system. Therefore, VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine guest operating system and improves the management of the virtual machine. Without VMware Tools installed in your guest operating system, guest performance lacks important functionality. Installing VMware Tools improves these issues low video resolution, inadequate color depth, incorrect display of network speed, restricted movement of the mouse, inability to copy and paste and drag and drop files, missing sound, and provides the ability to take quiesced snapshots of the guest OS, and synchronises the time in the guest operating system with the time on the host Impacted ProductVMware Tools for Wind

December Chocolatey Month banner; Alfred, a cat and community mascotte, is wearing a Christmas hat and licking a Chocolate bar with the Chocolatey logo on it. On the background pine trees are draw, a green heart and some festive swirls.As you might have noticed, the Automation Desk is doing a December Chocolatey Month, and December starts tomorrow! There are prizes to win, so make sure you read the rules and you are ready for this! More info: 

Hi Everyone, More and more of us are spending our days wandering around various CLIs. There are times when you need to jump out into a file explorer in the precise location where your pwd command locates you.on windows simply type start .on a Mac doopen .and on Linux (I will demo this since I am in my basement on one of my stashed Linux machines hidden away :) xdg-open .So here I am in my Pictures directory I would like to see the thumbnails quickly so here it goes  and Voila!   If the xdg-open command is too long for you go ahead and create an alias in your .bashrc file  

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 an existing account with the same name. This query occurs during domain join and computer account provisioning. If such an account exists, the client will automatically attempt to reuse it.Note: During this time, the re-use computer account will only fail if the user does not have the appropriate permission to join the device to th

Hi Everyone,So as stated before my University decided to switch providers for their Alumni email accounts from gmail to O365 and that has forced me to create a new channel. This week I am getting deep into SAML territory and experiencing issues, always fun while connecting Okta and then later Auth0 for SSO.  You can get a free Auth0 account here and try this yourself:https://a0.to/signup-for-auth0

This is part three of the blogpost. If you want to read it from the beginning, head here: SOBR Archive Tier – Explained and Configured – Part 1 of 4 | Veeam Community Resource HubIn this part 3 of 4, I will walk you through all the things to set up for the archive tier in Azure. How to setup the archive tier for your SOBR in Microsoft AzureLet’s assume we already have a SOBR using a capacity tier to offload data to Azure in a specific schema. Could be either copy or move or even a combination of both to fulfill the 3-2-1 rule. A nice walkthrough of the capacity tier setup could be found e.g. here: https://jorgedelacruz.uk/2019/05/14/veeam-cloud-tier-capacity-tier-in-microsoft-azure-blob-how-to-configure-a-veeam-backup-replication-scale-out-backup-repository/This would be our starting point to enable another shift of the already offloaded data into the cheaper archive tier.Therefore, first of all we have to define another storage account in the correct tier level. In our example for Azu

Because we had already the option to backup files directly to tape, it was already possible to backup file shares to tape without backing it up to disk before. But this was limited at least to performance. This will be be much better in v12.Another limitation was that it was not possible to copy a NAS backup to tape. This will be available in v12.At least in v12 beta media pools are limited to Standard media Pools and WORM Media Pools.

Recently I had to troubleshoot an error in Veeam Backup and Replication. Error appeared at File Level Restore operations. In detail: restore Windows files from a Veeam Hardened Repository.Environment consists of existing and freshly installed proxies and repositories servers. New repository servers were Windows and Linux as hardened repository (LHR). Mount server was a physical Windows server.Problem that occurredWhen we tried to restore files from LHR we get errors like these:   We also could see that mounting of the restore point worked for a few moments. Restore Explorer also showed first directories. After a few seconds, mount point was disconnected automatically and browsing in Explorer resulted in an error.After some tests we found out, this only happens when we were using newly installed proxies as mount servers. It worked fine with already running proxies and even with new Windows repository server.That was solved the problemWhen we were checking the configuration of new proxy

IntroductionOne of the most notable upcoming Veeam Backup and Replication v12 capability is Direct to “Object Storage” backups.I thought it might come in handy to share a small AWS cli cheat sheet with the community. Initial AWS cli configurationThe first step is to run aws configureAll you need to provide are access key and secret key. You specify the --endpoint-url directly in the commands.Next, make sure you are using v4 signature aws configure set default.s3.signature_version s3v4 Creating a simple bucketaws s3api create-bucket --bucket <yourbucketname> --endpoint-url=<yourendpointurl> --no-verify-sslNote: You don’t necessarily need the --no-verify-ssl option except if like me you are lazy with certificates in your lab. Creating a bucket with object lockCheck out this great post from my colleague Steve Firmes where he discusses “How to avoid an Immutability Migraine”.The command is pretty straight forward:aws s3api create-bucket --bucket <yourbucketname> --object-

Account lockout help keep user accounts secure by preventing unauthorised users etc., from guessing the username and password. When your account is locked, you will have to wait for a specified amount of time before being able to log into your account again. Here is the link to the original blogpost. In the past, it was recommended to disable the local Administrator account due to several known vulnerabilities such as the built-in administrator account cannot be locked out no matter how many failed logins it accrues, making it a prime target for brute-force attacks that attempt to guess passwords. This is no longer true as beginning October 11, 2022, or later Windows cumulative updates, a local policy will be available to enable local administrator account lockouts.  Brute force attacks are one of the prevalent ways Windows devices are attacked today. Previously, Windows devices did not allow local administrators to be locked out. This leads to scenarios where, without the proper netwo