Blogs and Podcasts

During the World Cup, Kasten scores goals like Messi More and more teams are running virtual machines and containers side by side on the same Kubernetes platform. OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt) has made that a practical, production-ready reality — and Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes v9 makes sure data protection scales right alongside it. This release brings efficient incremental backups, granular and VM-aware restores, and resilient, governed disaster recovery to OpenShift Virtualization environments. Efficient backups built for VMsThe centerpiece of this release for virtualization environments is the work done with Red Hat on incremental efficiency.OpenShift Virtualization Incremental Backup APIKasten v9 supports Changed Block Tracking (CBT) at the hypervisor level through the new OpenShift Virtualization APIs. Instead of reading entire disks on every run, it captures only the blocks that changed. The direct payoff is lower compute overhead, shorter backup windows, and the ability t

When backup projects are implemented, it’s not just about architecture design, configuration, features, and price. Once environments grow, responsibilities shift between internal teams and partners, or additional services such as Microsoft 365 are introduced, another topic should move to the foreground—one that may have been underestimated at the beginning: the licensing model.Subscription and Rental are not just different purchasing paths—they impact scalability, usage measurement, billing, and the question of whether backup and monitoring can truly be delivered as a single, end-to-end view. In this article, I compare both models from a practical perspective—looking at Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE, and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365—and explain why mixed licensing worlds can sometimes become a stumbling block. 1) Why licensing is more than “annual vs. monthly”In theory, licensing is something for Procurement: term length, price, discount, renewal.In practice, the licensin

A very wise man once told me: “It is more often than not cheaper to pay for something than to receive it for free”. So yes, you read the headline correct.What might be happening in the ICT arena with AI seems like a movie some of us has seen before. Remember that thing called the “Dot-Com Bubble”? I feel the need to explain, as in talking to some up and coming technical resources I got blank stares before I realized most of them were not born yet when it happened.The Boom: From 1995 to the year 2000 investors went wild investing in any company ending in “.com” – simply because they were internet based. No thorough due diligence, most of these startups had little to no profitability, unrealistic business models and no proven revenue streams – it was all based on the “dream”. Trillions of dollars were invested, so much the Nasdaq rose 582% during this period.Things were great in the industry back then, parties insane and money being spent on everything except common sense.The Burst: Earl

Well now that my book is out of the way I am starting up some blogging again and a series on different aspects of things for v13 over the next 10 weeks (one per week).  The first one is below and can be found at my blog site -What to Check After Upgrading to Veeam v13 Introduction A successful Veeam v13 upgrade should be treated as the beginning of operational validation, not the end of the change window. The installer may complete cleanly, but production confidence comes from confirming that scheduled backups, restore workflows, repositories, and notifications all behave as expected after the platform change.In most environments, the post-upgrade risk is not an obvious failure. The larger concern is a subtle change in transport behavior, permissions, or reporting that only appears once the next backup cycle starts. That is why the first checks after a v13 upgrade should focus on job execution, restore testing, and anything that affects the recovery path. Check Core Platform Health Sta

I have a lot of jobs that are getting a new naming convention. The old way to do this was remove from the job from the configuration, modify the folder name on the repository, rename the job, rescan the Repo, then map the back files to the job.   I found there is an updated way to do this and is a welcome feature to save time. To go one step further, it is not recommended to use the remove/rescan method due to the fact the files get new identifiers that cause the restore points to be seen as new data by all tape and cloud storage offload jobs.  To test it, lets create a new job.In my case it’s called “___TEST_NAME_CHANGE” to keep it at the top of my screen.  Next, after running a job, we will click “Disk” on the left to make sure there is a backup on the Repository. It’s similar, but it’s not quite the same screen. 😉  Now, return to the Backup page, right click your Backup job, click edit, and lets rename it.   On the Backup Job page you can see it’s been renamed.   On the Disk page w

Do you ever hear something and then just keep repeating it in your head?That happened to me at VeeamON this year. Anand, Veeam’s CEO, said something that really stuck with me:“The control point is the data itself.” ( https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mmZHsnvRdMc)And the funny part is… it sounded obvious. Almost too obvious. But at the same time, I realized I hadn’t actually been thinking about it that way before.I kept going back to it. Read a bit more on the topic. Looked at how people talk about similar ideas — data-centric architectures, data-driven security and you start to notice a pattern. The industry is already moving in that direction.And once you see it, you can’t really unsee it.For a long time, when we talked about “control” in IT, we tied it to infrastructure. First the data center. Then virtualization. Then cloud became the new center of gravity. Each step felt like this is it — more control, more flexibility, better outcomes.And if you think about it, that made sense.Contro

Now that Veeam is solidly settled in Linux Land I thought it would be fun to occasionally post some useful tricks.When it comes to command line editors, some folks like nano, some vi. I got used to vi.If you want to run a command in vi and save the output in the file you can do it by typying bang bang while in command mode followed by your command. The output will be pasted into your file. !!cat/etc/os-releaseCreate my fileLets grab the info and put in our fileBOOM!I can save that file and keep it I don’t know how often you will need to use it, but it beats copying and pasting back and forth.On the cli itself !! runs the last command that you did.   

The HPE Discovery 2026 concluded just two days ago, and important initiatives were announced that significantly strengthen the 15-year partnership between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Veeam.As we know, many companies are moving their AI projects from the pilot phase to production.However, capabilities and requirements related to data governance, compliance, sovereignty, security, and resilience are becoming essential. It´s necessary to ensure that AI models have access to reliable information and that confidential data remains compliant with regulatory requirements.These challenges are directly related to the growing use of AI applications and autonomous agents interacting with enterprise data and business systems.For all interested in this topic, I recently explored some of the governance and security challenges associated with autonomous AI systems in a separate article: Agentic AI: Managing the Autonomous Risk - CloudnRollAt the same time, cyber threats, ransomware attacks, and da

 Unofficial, community-built tool — not an official Veeam product and not supported by Veeam Support. Results are estimates derived from a parsed log and should be validated against the official Veeam calculators, the Veeam Help Center, and Best Practices documentation. For final sizing decisions, loop in a Veeam SE / Solution Architect.When reviewing a Veeam environment— usually because there's a sizing conversation coming, or someone wants a second opinion on whether a setup is sane. And almost every time, the information I actually need is sitting right there in the VMC.log. Proxy count, repository layout, retention, GFS, agent jobs, whether immutability is on, what the NICs are doing. All of it.The problem is it's buried in a few thousand lines of log, and after the third or fourth time of Ctrl-F-ing my way through one of these to pull out proxy task counts and squint at retention policies, I got tired of it.So I built something to do the reading the log file for me.It's called Vee

I recently stood up a new Nutanix cluster and needed it protected with Veeam before workloads went live. If you are used to doing this with VMware or Hyper-V, the Nutanix AHV workflow in VBR v13 feels different. The proxy model is different, and the old AHV proxy appliance is no longer part of the setup.This walkthrough covers the adding the Nutanix environment, configuring AHV workers, running the first backup, and proving both full VM and file-level restores. What you should have before you start VBR v13 with the Veeam Plug-in for Nutanix AHV installed on the backup server. Veeam documentation currently lists VBR 13.0.1.1071 or later with AHV plug-in 13.9.0.212+ as the supported baseline. Nutanix AOS 6.8.1.6+ Prism Central pc.2022.6 through pc.2024.3.1.10, or pc.7.3+. Versions 7.3.1.2, 7.3.1.3, and 7.5.0.0 are explicitly excluded. Admin credentials for Prism Central or Prism Element. iSCSI Data Service IP configured in the Nutanix cluster settings. If it is not set, backup jobs can f

 Hello guys, if you don't remember which version of Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) was used to create a configuration backup, this command can be extremely helpful. It allows you to analyze the configuration backup file and identify the VBR version information, making it easier to determine the correct Veeam release to install before attempting a configuration restore. Veeam.Backup.Configuration.Tool.exe /file:"D:\Backup\ConfigBackup.bco" /analyzefile The command analyzes the specified .bco file and displays metadata about the configuration backup, including the Veeam version that created it. This is particularly useful during disaster recovery scenarios, migrations, or when restoring an environment after a long period without documentation.

I’m wrapping up the first phase of my Veeam for AWS journey.I actually started this lab from some ideas I shared in the post below: In this video, I go through the full workflow:• Protecting AWS workloads like EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, VPC, EFS, and FSx• Creating Replicas, Snapshost, Backups and performing restores• Testing cross-region recovery (Virginia, Ohio, and California) Link bellow:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j76Xt0R55Pg&t=63s(It’s only in Portuguese, but the YouTube subtitles work really well.) The architecture looks something like this:Not exactly — I made a few changes along the way. I’ve organized the entire video into timeline chapters, like this:You can jump to any section you want. I hope this material can help someone who needs it.Thanks to ​@Madi.Cristil , ​@NikolaPejkova , ​@safiya , ​@Rick Vanover  for all the support you’ve given us.Thanks ​@NikolaPejkova for the licenses! Next up is Redshift! 

Ransomware and data attacks are everywhere and, unfortunately, have become part of daily life. A very practical protection against this is the proven Veeam 3-2-1-1-0 rule: multiple copies, different media, at least one copy external/offsite, and one copy immutable/offline, with 0 restore errors ensured by regular testing.However, once you plan to use and implement immutability, you also need to look at the storage logic of your backup data—in other words, how full backups and incrementals are linked together as a backup chain. Depending on the method, these chains may need to merge, transform, or create new full backups in the background. It’s only logical that this doesn’t always align perfectly with Immutable/WORM.To make immutability and retention work together cleanly in practice, you typically use regular full backups (Synthetic or Active) and/or, in Backup Copy jobs, the GFS function as a “chain breaker”. In this article we’ll look at:what immutability means how different backup

Veeam Backup & Replication v13 has arrived with significant improvements in security, performance, and data governance. I recently performed the upgrade from version 12.3, and in this article I share the entire process, from preparation to post-upgrade validation, following the official Veeam documentation. The goal is to present a practical, real-world experience while highlighting what’s new in this anticipated release. Preparing for the UpgradeBefore starting the upgrade, I followed Veeam’s recommended best practices to ensure a smooth and safe process. This included: Checking system compatibility, supported OS, storage repositories, hypervisors, and all backup infrastructure components. Ensuring no backup jobs were running. Updating the Guest Catalog and cleaning up old sessions. Performing a Configuration Backup, which stores all settings from the Veeam server. Creating a server backup or snapshot as an additional safety measure—especially recommended for production en

The phone rings and someone asks you to restore a file for them.  You look at your furthest restore point and notice the date they gave you is before that.  You restore the file anyways and find out it was off by only a few days. What do you do? Do you give up, or do you check to see if there is something running keeping data for just a little bit longer? Many users forget that windows can take VSS Snapshots, ShadowCopies, and restore points that often hang around, or are even automated to run. Depending on how much space is provisioned determines how many you can have and the retention.  These snapshots can even help during Veeam restore by sneaking out a few extra weeks from what you thought was the furthest restore point in your environment.   Lets start with the basic commands on adding VSS Shadow Storage on your disks. This is a per drive setting, and it is also selecting the target drive.   In this command, I’m keeping it on the same drive, allowing 5% of my disk to store shadow

Greetings friends,I wanted to share a new community-driven PowerShell report for Microsoft Entra ID protection in Veeam Backup & Replication.VBR can protect Microsoft Entra ID, which is great. But I wanted a cleaner way to answer a few simple questions without jumping between logs, CSVs, SQL queries, or job sessions.This is how it looks like: Why this report?Microsoft Entra ID is now one of the most critical identity layers in most organizations. It contains users, groups, applications, service principals, role assignments, conditional access policies, and many other objects that are essential for Microsoft 365, Azure, SaaS access, and automation.Having the backup is step one.Being able to report on it, search it, export it, and send it to the right people is the next step.This report helps answer:Are my Entra ID backup sessions running successfully? What completed with warnings or failures? How many objects were discovered and stored? Which users, groups, applications, service pri

Today while I was working in the Veeam Windows Console for v13 I hit a strange error when copying a job error message to the clipboard.  It let me paste but the error noted is just a minor annoyance.  I have reported this and you can read it below and on my blog.  Once confirmed I will update things on the community and my blog post.Veeam Console – Possible BUG – Copying to Clipboard Veeam Console – Possible BUG – Copying to Clipboard I have been using Veeam v13 more frequently lately, particularly the VSA and the Windows Console application. Today, I encountered an unusual issue with the Console application while copying an error message from a job to the clipboard for investigation. The message below appeared, but I was still able to paste the clipboard contents regardless.Copy to Clipboard Error (Potential Bug?)I have posted this in the Veeam 100 thread (not everyone will see this, as it is a special section of the Forums) as a possible bug, which you can see here if you have access

​Hi folks,If some of you have already try to delete a S3 bucket from the Object First interface you probably got the following error, even if you have delete all backups. S3 protocol does not allow deleting the bucket that contains any objects. In case the bucket was already in use, it should be cleared before deleting.Good new ! There is an utility to delete all the data from a bucket, including buckets with enable versioning.😮Oh god ! What could happen if I have some backups protected with immutability ?Don’t worry,  in case if the bucket has immutable data, it can not be deleted before the immutability period is expired. 💪 1. Installationclear-bucket utility does not require installation.Download it with Web browser using the following link: https://repo.objectfirst.com/helpers/clear-bucket.zip Unpack the zip file2. UsageStart the clear-bucket.exe program as usual. It interactively requests the information required to connect to S3 storage Endpoint URL: use the same format you use

One consequence of the market changes resulting from Broadcom VMware's new positioning of its software solutions and licenses is that the topic of “hypervisors” is now being analyzed in greater technical detail than ever before.In search of more realistic alternatives that fit IT departments’ budgets, organizations are turning their attention to market options.On the other hand, there is the open-source software community. I truly have a great admiration for the thousands of programmers, engineers, and software architects who dedicate their efforts to free software communities.Today, alternatives to the VMware hypervisor are solutions built on a stack of open-source projects, with varying degrees of customization and architectural differences.The purpose of this post is to analyze how a generic hypervisor architecture, based on QEMU and KVM, handles disk write I/O requests.It´s a fascinating topic (at least for me).Let’s explore the rationale behind the development of each component of

  When running a Veeam backup, you may encounter the following error:One or more errors occurred. (The remote certificate was rejected by the provided RemoteCertificateValidationCallback.)This issue is typically caused by a trust problem between the Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) server and a managed server or backup component.ResolutionTo resolve the issue:Open the Veeam Backup & Replication console. Navigate to Inventory. Trust allRetry the backup job.Once the certificate trust is restored, the backup should complete successfully.ConclusionIn most cases, this error indicates that the remote certificate is no longer trusted by the VBR server. Re-establishing the certificate trust relationship resolves the problem quickly.

  Back in the days...Do you remember the Matrix screensavers from back in the day? Green characters cascading down your screen while your PC idles away. Everyone had one at some point. And somehow — it was just cool.The idea hit me during one of those moments where you should really be doing something else: What if the characters weren't random glyphs, but instead IMMUTABILITY, RANSOMWARE RECOVERY, ZERO-TRUST RESILIENCE and VEEAM DATA CLOUD VAULT?As some of you may know, I have absolutely no clue about coding — but every now and then I get crazy ideas. This one is for you.     From One Idea to Almost 100 VersionsWhat started as a small weekend experiment turned into a real project. I had the idea, the direction, the requirements — and with Claude as a coding partner, we built it step by step. Every version tested, verified, adjusted. Comments added, fine-tuning done. Across multiple evenings and iterations.Then, somewhere around version 35, another idea: What if there was also a Star W

​@Rick Vanover  announced (thanks Rick!) during today’s Weekly Recap the new #EmpowHerVMCE+ Accelerator, and I can’t describe how proud I am. A lot of people worked on this initiative, but special recognition goes to ​@ertelle1, who first had this idea and whose drive, vision, and collaboration made this happen.I took part in leading the 2023 edition of EmpowHer VMCE+, and I saw firsthand how this program was an opportunity to change trajectories. Participants did not just become better technical professionals, they strengthened their confidence and sense of empowerment. They confidently stepped into the room and proved that they belong in this industry, and that they have a place on the front line.And that is powerful.Some of them changed roles, many progressed in their careers, and some, like ​@leaha  and ​@brnavarro, became familiar names in the community and are now leading the WA-IT! conversation. The impact they created is significant, they became role models and are inspiring ot

During the upgrade of Veeam Backup & Replication to version 13.2.29, I encountered the following warning during the Configuration Check phase:Trusted hosts hardeningYour remote host trust option is set to Manual. After the upgrade, open a backup console and make sure all your backup infrastructure servers are trusted. At first glance, this message may seem concerning, but it is important to note that it is not a blocking issue and does not prevent the upgrade from completing successfully.Why Does This Warning Appear?Starting with recent Veeam releases, the platform has introduced additional security controls to strengthen communication between backup infrastructure components.In my environment, the Remote Host Trust policy was configured as Manual. This means that Veeam does not automatically trust remote infrastructure servers such as:Backup Repositories Backup Proxies Mount Servers WAN Accelerators Other managed Linux or Windows hostsBecause the trust relationship must be verifie

...don't let them drift apart With Veeam Backup & Replication v13 and the new Veeam Software Appliance (VSA), many of us are enjoying the convenience of components that keep themselves up to date. The VSA is deployed and updates itself automatically — convenient, right? Yes, mostly!But there's a catch that just bit me in my lab environment, and I wanted to share it quickly before it trips someone up in production. The ScenarioImagine you already have one or more Veeam VSA appliances deployed. They update themselves — in this case to 13.0.2. So far so good.But not everything in your environment is an appliance. Your Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager might still be running on a Windows server (it happens). Enterprise Manager was therefore not automatically updated alongside the VSA — and suddenly your backup server shows up as offline in the Enterprise Manager console.  Cannot add backup server version 13.0.2.29 to Enterprise Manager server version 13.0.1.2067. Upgrade the Enterprise M

One of the most common things I notice during Veeam deployments, health checks, training that I deliver and customer workshops is that email notifications, Syslog and SNMP integration are often left unconfigured.The backup jobs work. The repositories are available. The backups complete successfully.But when I ask about notifications or centralized logging, the answer is frequently:"We haven't configured that yet." Why This MattersVeeam provides native integration with email systems, SNMP and Syslog servers, allowing administrators to receive immediate visibility into backup activities, warnings, and failures.These integrations are not just operational conveniences, they are important security controls.When a backup job finishes, Veeam can automatically send a notification email. Likewise, relevant events can be forwarded to a SNMP and Syslog server for centralized monitoring, retention, and correlation with other infrastructure events.This means:Faster detection of backup failures Bett