Blogs and Podcasts

VMware Aria Operations (formerly VMware vRealize Operations) automates and simplifies IT management with full-stack visibility from physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure including Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers to the applications they support. It delivers continuous performance optimisation, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. It is available on premises and as-a-service. More information on this product here, and link to my blogpost. An arbitrary file read vulnerability in VMware Aria Operations was privately reported by Yu Dai of NSFOCUS TIANJI Lab to VMware. There are updates (patches) to remediate these vulnerabilities in the affected VMware products. What Exploit does this Vulnerability Present? A malicious actor with administrative privileges may be able to read arbitrary files containing sensitive data.  Remediation To remediate CVE-2022-31682, apply the patches listed in the ‘Fixed Version’

VMware vCenter Server is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud with confidence. With VMware Center, you gain centralized visibility, simplified and efficient management at scale, and extensibility across the hybrid cloud from a single console. Here is the link to my blogpost. The following vulnerability was reported by Yaron Zinar and Sagi Sheinfeld of Crowdstrike to Vmware. The vCenter Server contains a privilege escalation vulnerability in the IWA (Integrated Windows Authentication) authentication mechanism. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.1. Impacted ProductsVMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) VMware Cloud Foundation (Cloud Foundation)What Exploit does this Vulnerability Present? A malicious actor with non-administrative

This morning I was thinking about various backup solution, and one thing cross my mind.One of great advantage about Veeam over other vendors(BEYOND THE FACT THAT THE BACKUP WORKS. ALWAYS. GOOD. EVERYWHERE.) (If you have used other solutions in the past you know what that means.)is that Veeam release a free Community Edition, an almost full feature version to be tested heavily in our lab so we can fully understand the product, and try on our skin basics about backup and recovery.It is taken for granted, but it is a significant added value to me.So, thank you Veeam.Have you ever thought about it?

 Hi everyone,Have you ever wanted a chance to get Microsoft Certified? Now’s your chance!If you haven’t seen the Cloud Skills Challenge before, it’s simple. Microsoft provide multiple learning ‘Track’ options, courtesy of their free Microsoft Learn resources. If you complete one or more tracks within their pre-defined challenge window (12th October to 9th November 2022), you’ll earn one free exam voucher, valid for a selected list of exams.Interested? Read on! What are the tracks? These tracks tend to change every Cloud Skills challenge, this time around the tracks are:Microsoft Ignite: Intelligent Cloud Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud App Maker Challenge Microsoft Ignite: AI Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Modern Work Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Field Service Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Protect Everything Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud Developer ChallengeSee below for a breakdown of these tracks, and the exam & certification path they’re aligned to. Microsof

Protecting your Business communication is not joking matter. “Your business” means many things to many different people. For some it is their commercial endeavours, for others it may be their Church, Synagogue or Mosque communication, it may just be the communication that you have with your child’s educational institution. Either way our digital communication has become an important pillar of our daily life and you owe it to yourself to make sure that it is protected.  

Hi everyone! I would like to share with all of you, this fantastic site with a lot of useful virtual appliances and tools!Maybe most of you will already know it, but I want to expose it and put it on everybody's radar!BITNAMI by vmware! Every time I need to deploy something, specially when its in the Lab or for test / Dev, I look in here,I don't want to re-invent the wheel, if is already created, why don't use it instead of re-installing and dealing with issues and research. When I need to deploy a LAMP, WAMP, or any other application listed in here, they have a lot! I gram a .ova and deploy it on my virtual lab! Now they also cover Kubernetes, cloud providers, docker, and of course vmware!  Do you have any other place where you usually pick your applications / tools?Please share it to build a list of resources for all of us!I will try to catch them all and get them on a cool list! 😃 enjoy!

 It took two tries, but I completed the Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) certification exam.  While taking it twice was not my ideal way to pass the exam, I found the newest version of the exam much easier to handle, including the setup and much better than the initial exam release for v1.  Below are my thoughts on the exam itself and things you can prepare before you book it. Training Requirements If you are new to Veeam exams, there is a requirement for taking the courses before you site the exams for both VMCE and VMCA.  While I had the VMCAv1 already, and I didn’t need to sit in the class, I did nonetheless.  I am thrilled I sat the course as it was a complete overhaul of the v1 course and a much better way to learn is primarily hands-on.   You can read my course review here -Veeam Certified Architect 2022 - Course ReviewFurther, each is now a “versioned” exam for each year - in this case, VMCA 2022, with versioning done on an annual basis.  Each exam will need to be independently

I created this topic to put some order to @haslund  20 threads about his fantastic VMCA 2022 Official prep course, so we avoid dispersing information, questions and answers unnecessarily.@Kseniya hope this help our community.Remember to tag @haslund  when you need an official answer and to thank him for all his amazing work, of course :)   Sources of first topic: 

The walkthrough of the official #VMCA 2022 practice exam question 40 is ready.“The one with the final question”. Thank you so much for watching the series. 

This week again taking a break from Kubernetes but will be back next week. Today a quick word about the R&D Veeam Forums and the Hub too. Honorable mentions @Chris.Childerhose @Mildur @hinmeister416 just to name a few.   

What? The Kube Vanguard posts a non-Kubernetes post, it must have been that asteroid we hit yesterday with the Dart Probe!  

Microsoft has announced, that they are disabling basic auth on October 1st, 2022 for all tenants. It doesn‘t matter if you use it now or not. It gets disabled after October 1st, 2022. From the announcement post:Today, we are announcing that, effective October 1, 2022, we will begin to permanently disable Basic Auth in all tenants, regardless of usage (with the exception of SMTP Auth, which can still be re-enabled after that).Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-and-exchange-online-september-2021-update/ba-p/2772210 How is this relevant to our Veeam Backup Office 365 Installations?Today, Veeam can backup Office 365 data without basic auth (modern Auth Only).But this has some limitations. You can find them in this post:https://www.veeam.com/kb3146As soon basic auth is disabled from Microsoft, vbo servers with organizations and „modern authentification with legacy protocols“ or „basic authentication method“, backup jobs will most likely st

Modern business requires a Modern Data Protection solution that not only allows for the backup and recovery of core infrastructure, clouds, and applications but enables the lowest possible operational overhead through advanced automation, monitoring and orchestration. With Veeam Modern Data Protection, your critical data such as Microsoft 365 Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint online will be protected with just one integrated solution. However, Veeam also offers Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 as a standalone product to protect and restore Microsoft O365 data, including Office 365 mailboxes, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, and Teams. It allows you to timely back up your data weekly, daily, or as often as every five minutes.Here is a guide on why is it imperative to protect Microsoft Office 365.As of today, data is the most critical resource and valuable currency in the world. In Cyber Security, we refer to data as the New Oil. This Forbes link will highlight more on this

Wasabi recently released their Wasabi Cloud NAS offering and you may wonder, like some of the SEs I work with, if Veeam can protect its shares.The answer is: YES, of course!If that is all you need to know then you can stop reading, else keep scrolling down. IntroductionWasabi Cloud NAS is presented as the “Bottomless NAS file storage”.It installs as a service on a windows server and offers a nice and simple UI allowing you to configure your replication and offload policies.Based on these policies, the service will only keep small stub files on local disk. It is 100% transparent to the end user, extremely simple to use and with zero egress/ingress fees from Wasabi, makes for an attractive/interesting NAS solution.How can we protect it? That is what you are about to find out.In this post we will explore some basic backup and restore operations, list some caveats around offline extended file attribute, discuss what happens when you leverage Wasabi Cloud NAS’s file versioning and Complianc

Again, we have a cool opportunity to win some cool gadMicrosoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft.gets. Register with Veeam for a chance to win a Canon Camera or other great prizes, and a Free T-Shirt. Enter To Win Great Prizes with the following registration link: https://bit.ly/veeamplusmicrosoft After registering, do not forget to share on Social Media to gain extra entries, make sure to use the following hashtag #VeeamatMicrosoftIgnite2022. This piece was shared on the following link1 and link2.For some of us that are not so familiar with this event, Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. You can register via the  the following link: https://register.ignite.microsoft.com/.By registering any participating in the event, you will be able to explore the latest innovations, learn from product experts and partners, level up your skillset, and create connections from around the

If you had this on your 2022 IT bingo card, well done, you probably should try the lottery. If you’re less psychically gifted however, this announcement is slightly bizarre. Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re intending to retire their Basic SKU IP Addresses. Here’s everything we need to know. Basic SKU only, Standard SKU Unaffected It wouldn’t be much of a cloud if we couldn’t access it, so don’t worry, only Basic SKUs will be impacted by this change. Microsoft have announced that on the 30th September 2025, Basic SKU IP addresses will be retired.Further, from the 31st March 2025, you won’t be able to provision new Basic SKU IP addresses. How do these SKUs differ? Static/Dynamic IP AddressesAll IP Address allocations are static within the Standard SKU, whereas the Basic SKU offers Dynamic/Static for IPv4 and Dynamic is the only option for IPv6. Security ModelStandard SKU IP Addresses follow the ‘Secure-by-Default’ model. This means it’s mandatory to utilise a Network Security G

Alt Text: Header Image with the text “In the Lab With: Veeam”, subheading “Breaking the Consolidaiton/Merge Stalemate For VMware vSphere & Microsoft Hyper-V”Have you ever seen a snapshot/checkpoint fail to merge? Maybe VMware vSphere was telling you that a virtual machine required consolidation, or Microsoft Hyper-V reported that the checkpoint couldn’t be merged. Whatever the reason, it’s a painful situation.Or should I say, it’s a painful situation, ONCE you notice! And IF you don’t, you have a disaster approaching. Why Snapshots/Checkpoints are bad in the long-term If you need bringing up to speed as to why we don’t like snapshots/checkpoints sticking around, here’s the non-exhaustive, good to know key points:Snapshots/Checkpoints make the original virtual disk a read-only file, and all changes from the snapshot/checkpoint creation point forwards are saved to a ‘delta’ virtual disk. This will consume more storage space. Snapshots/Checkpoints cause increased IO penalties, reducin

I just want to share two tips for the VBR console that can make life simpler. Both of them are related to the live job protocol. I made two GIF files to illustrate them better.Historic viewFirst is to show not just the current running respectively last run, but also log of all previous runs. This can easily be done be using left and right courser keyswithin the log viewer. This looks like this: Last 5 minutes vs. all time performanceSecond is to simply switch performance graph between last 5 minutes and all time view. This can be done by just clicking into the graph. I hope you find this useful as me!

Finding Indexed JobsWhen many users start with Veeam, they turn indexing on for everything not understanding what it does or that it requires Enterprise Manager. The environment I inherited had this exact issue.  I have modified the jobs that the file servers are still indexed for quick search/restore but here is a handy little PS command to find all of the jobs using indexing on your Veeam Server. Script Get-VBRJob | where {$_.GetVSSOptions().WinGuestFSIndexingOptions.IsIndexingRequired -eq $True}   Listing all VM backup sizesAnother helpful PS script is to get the size of all of the VM backups. I often want to know which VM’s are taking up the most room, and having a total of the VBK’s and VIB’s without doing math on 30+ incrementals.This will gather all the required info and can be exported if needed. If you have multiple repositories the jobs may show up more than 1 time as there will be a separate entry for each repo.  It’s still a great way to charge back to the VM owners.    Scr

Hi everyone,  For a possible upcoming project on the Veeam Community Hub I am looking for someone who has a feeling with Automation. While I cannot share much about the project just yet, I am looking for someone that would have time to assist me and probably someone else in organizing events, blogs, content etc. Please reach out to me with an DM if you are interested

In other topics I have talked about how to make a Veeam On line design, but ... For those who continue to use visio, I leave here the Stencils where you can download them for free …https://www.veeam.com/es-lat/vmware-esx-stencils.html?ad=in-text-link   

In the past years, IT has changed dramatically. The pandemic accelerated Microsoft Teams and overall Microsoft 365 adoption, Office co-authoring surged, and organizational data found its way to all sorts of cloud apps.In this webinar, Jay Gundotra (from ENow Software, the fabulous Karinne Bessette (Technologist at Veeam) and I discuss how things have changed from their perspective.Working with organizations has offered us many insights in the way people think. While discussing our experiences, we found three common myths:We have a 99,99% SLA. Monitoring Microsoft 365 is unnecessary.Procurement is in charge of managing Microsoft 365 licenses. They’re in control.Microsoft takes care of backups as part of Microsoft 365. We don’t have to do anything in that area to ensure business continuity. Most organizations believe these myths to be true, but they are not. 😆In fact, it’s dangerous to assume these myths are true in this cloud age, as they may result in downtime and data loss at a highe

CT4 has a vision to create and distribute world-class software products that control and protect data while also translating data into meaningful insights, clear actions and measurable outcomes for their clients. Dan Pearson and I talk about how CT4 have evolved into a data centric company with three products in market.Dan and I also talk about their IoT offering Canopy and how data has become central to all offerings that CT4 do. 

During troubleshooting a backup environment, it’s common the necessity of test ports responsivity of our backup servers, like Veeam backup server, mount server, proxy or repositories.We normally do that with telnet. However, by default telnet client is not installed during Windows Server and the Veeam Backup Server often is our principal component our backup infrastructure.So, if you want to test some communication port without install telnet client, you can use PowerShell for it.Use the sintax below:Test-NetConnection -ComputerName <IP> -Port <port>Here is an example for the command:An interesting point is that if the communication port is not well succeeded, the utility make an aditional ping test: 

The sequel of part 3 and last part 😄  How it works with Linux or shared folder repositoriesAs example : we connect a USB disk to a USB3-port at a NAS-device that is shared as a SMB-shareIn that scenario it’s behaving differently (it uses a limited version) than when using a Windows Server repository.Why limited?VBR keeps only information about the latest backup chain.So how is this performed :VBR creates the first time of course a full backup file on the currently attached disk, afterwards it creates incrementals until you swap or the number of configured restore points! It checks if the current chain is consistent, if so it will create a new incremental restore pointIf you swapped the disk, the chain is not consistent and will create a new full. Even when there is already a previous backup chain present. If forgets all information about former backup chain. So as before, I configure the job again with 7 to 10 restore points.So what will happen in the scenario of 7 restore points and