VeeamOn Tours 2024
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I recently wrote a blog about using Synology Immutable Snapshots and Replication. Check it out below and find it on my blog as well - Just Virtualization Blog Synology - Immutable LUN Snapshots with Immutable Replication I have been using Synology NAS devices for the past two years in my homelab with VMware vSphere 8.0U2, vSAN, Intel Optane, Veeam Backup & Replication, Backup Eagle, Runecast and a host of other things. I have my newest DS923+ set up as my primary storage for my VMware environment and my older DS920+ is my backup NAS as well as Replication partner.One thing that comes with the Synology DSM 7.2 upgrade (OS) is the ability to set up snapshots on a schedule, including Immutability. With Ransomware on the rise protecting your systems with backups alone is starting to not be sufficient enough. Enter the Immutable storage snapshots with replication on the Synology NAS devices.In order to configure storage snapshots with Immutability you first need to create a LUN within
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.In the meantime, I've had to really dig into doing a lot of Scan Backup and manual scan tasks, as well as get creative in how I do forensics on my systems to make sure the Malware Detection events I'm receiving are false positives. And if not, take care of those issues appropriately as well. I thought I'd share some of the forensics and analyses processes I'm doing in my environment to help the Comm
Quite a cool new feature is the ability to enable Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for the VBR console login. With this a user has to enter username, password and an additional confirmation code that comes from a Authenticator app like Google Authenticator.At first login, User can add VBR to his Authenticator app.It is really simple to use.BUT: 2FA works only for VBR console, NOT for PowerShell!Another security improvement is the option for Automatic Session logoff:
Protecting DB2 servers with Veeam Backup and Replication is pretty straightforward. The IBM DB2 can be protected with the following Veeam jobs:Classic VM backup jobs Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) jobs Enhanced NAS backup jobsTo ensure that the DB2 DBs are in a consistent state, IBM DB2 commands will need to be called to either create a native DB2 database backup or to put database(s) in a quiesced state so that a clean application backup of the database can be made. DB2 has several ways to perform backups from the CLI that make backups of the database reasonably simple.Native flat file backup can be performed against an offline or online DB. The options include using full, incremental, and differential backups A simple pause and resume of the DB2 writer that can be used to store (and VMware) snapshots that Veeam Backup and Replication can leverage. The ability to leverage storage array snapshots as restore points through a component called IBM DB2 ACS. I will not discuss this process as
It’s that time of the IT lifecycle again, where we talk upgrades and decommissioning.On the 12th July 2022, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 will go End of Life. Not just to extended/security patch support, but completely out of support.So, why am I talking about Veeam? If you’ve got an installation of Veeam that utilised a SQL Server Express database, and you installed Veeam prior to 9.5 Update 4, odds are you’ve got a SQL Server 2012 Express database. This creates a security risk as of the next Microsoft patch cycle, scheduled for the 12th July 2022.I would also like to state that whilst this isn’t the focus of the article, if you’ve got a Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam ONE environment that’s not running v11 yet, you really need to upgrade, as everything prior is at end of fix. Which version of SQL Server should I migrate to?Unless you are limited by the operating system support for SQL Server 2019, I don’t recommend going for anything older. This is because SQL Server 2017, whils
Veeam Backup and Replication V12 have a lot of improvements and new features in it. If you are upgrading to V12 or installing Veeam Backup and Replication, there are many things that you should consider when planning your upgrade or installation.The following are a few of my thoughts to help guide you in forming your implementation and configuration decisions.If you are upgrading to VBR V12, your first step should be to consult the following documents located at helpcenter.veeam.com:What’s New Release notes VBR V12 User Guide The release notes document has a good section detailing the upgrade process.Installation/Upgrade of the VBR console serverLet’s start with the installation and process and what to expect.VBR V12 uses the same license key format as V11, so there is no need to update to a V12 on the customer portal. The installation GUI is revamped and looks slick. As it is new, you will notice that some options have been rearranged, so take your time and pay attention to what
Hey everyone,Starting the beginning of January 2021 we're going to see Veeam simplify the license offerings available to customers. Historically Veeam have always offered a "per socket" perpetual licensing model, which was great when we were just considering protecting our vSphere & Hyper-V infrastructure, but as Veeam has grown and produced additional feature capabilities such as NAS Backup, Cloud-native Backups for AWS and Azure and Physical server and workstation protection options, this licensing model hasn't suited them all. Then Veeam introduced the Veeam Universal License (VUL) subscription, streamlining the licensing experience for customers by offering a "per workload" backup model, allowing customers to mix and match different products as part of their overall Veeam licensing. This license becomes increasingly appealing as customers wish to test adoption of different clouds, they protect their workloads, regardless of whether they are physical, cloud or virtual. Earlier t
While I was studying for the VMCE, a detail on deduplication caught my attention.I’m talking about inline deduplication. What's about?Inline deduplication is a feature offered by Veeam B&R and it’s used to reduce the amount of storage space required to store backup data by removing duplicate data. One of the main benefits of inline deduplication is in fact that it can significantly decrease the amount of storage space, amount of time and resources required for backups and this can be especially beneficial for organizations that generate a large amount of data on a regular basis. Another advantage of inline deduplication is that it can improve the efficiency of backups, ‘cause backups can be completed faster and the amount of data that needs to be transferred and stored is reduced. An example?An immaginary company named CatsFood has a file server that contains 10 terabytes of data and the organization wants to create a backup of this file server using, proudly, Veeam. Without inl
The importance of Veeam Data Movers Veeam Data Mover performs data processing tasks on behalf of Veeam Backup & Replication, such as retrieving source machine data, performing data deduplication and compression, and storing backed-up data on the target storage.For Microsoft Windows servers, Veeam Data Movers are persistent, that is, Veeam Data Mover is uploaded and installed on a server only once. Veeam Backup & Replication automatically installs Veeam Data Mover when you add a Microsoft Windows server to the backup infrastructure.For Linux servers, Veeam Data Movers can be persistent or non-persistent. Non-persistent Veeam Data Mover is uploaded and removed each time Veeam Backup & Replication addresses a server.For Veeam Data Mover to be persistent, you must specify an account with root or equivalent to root permissions when adding a Linux server. Persistent Veeam Data Movers are required for the following backup infrastructure components:Hardened (immutable) repositorie
Greetings friends, some time ago I wrote about how to enable these notifications for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, it was a success, and very simple until Microsoft, and Google, disabled the normal SMTP on TLS, so many people ended with these notifications broken due the force of OAuth.Since Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7, you can configure OAuth on the Console, for regular email notifications. But the Audit Email Settings configuration API wasn’t that trivial andeasy to setup, until today. We will go step by step, so you can have those Audit operations working again. Let’s go.Recommended – All Automated!Please come here to find everything automated:https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-podcasts-57/scripts-veeam-backup-for-microsoft-365-audit-email-audit-users-5351You will find there two scripts to make your life easier with this.Audit Diagram in Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365Before we start with the subject, I think a diagram about how all these works can help us better understan
Veeam Backup & Replication utilises a NAS-Based Repository to store backup files, VM copies, and metadata for replicated VMs. File-sharing protocols like SMB or NFS enable users to access files and directories on a computer, server, or virtual machine via the network by configuring a directory as a file share. Any operating system supporting these protocols can host a file share.The DS923+ serves as an ideal solution for storing backups on your Synology system, particularly for organisations utilising third-party backup software like Veeam Backup and Replication. It provides a perfect repository for business/mission-critical data and backups in both company environments and home labs. You may want to learn how to Step-by-step guide on how to set up the Synology DS923+ NAS, and How to Protect Synology DS923+ NAS, and then proceed in setting up Synology NAS as a Backup Repo.DS923+ as a Backup TargetThe Synology 923+ NAS systems as mentioned above are a reliable storage destinations f
ALT TEXT: Banner with blog post title “Veeam & File Shares: Licensing & Feature Comparison” Hi!Today we’re going to talk about file shares and how to protect them. We’ll also look at how Veeam handles the various backup options available within the Veeam Universal License.File shares can take many forms, so we’re going to look at the following:A Physical/Virtual Server A NAS/SAN/Storage Device with File Share capabilities Azure Files Amazon EFS (Elastic File Systems) Physical & Virtual Servers Before Veeam introduced native file-share support for Veeam Backup & Replication, you could still backup physical or virtual servers. This was achieved via native hypervisor integrations, or the use of the Veeam Agent, on supported operating systems.When protecting servers that provide file shares from a traditional Windows/Linux/UNIX operating system, we license each server, without many considerations to the file shares themselves.There are a few considerations still to talk abo
Backups of VMware vSphere VMs can be done with one of three transport modes. Each of these modes also provide the possibility to restore data. This post is about 3 reasons why direct SAN restore failover to NBD. Incorrect VMDK typeVeeam can only perform direct SAN restore with thick provisioned VMDKs. If any disk of a VM is thin provisioned, restore will not leverage SAN directly. Both, thick eager and lazy zeroed are supported. In my experience, eager zeroed is much faster from a restore point of view! So I recommend, to use this format.Note: you should not rely on the provisioning type you chose at VMDK creation: Thick provisioned disk can become thin if it is expanded.Fortunately, Veeam provides the possibility to change disk type in restore wizard. So you can be sure to use thick VMDKs when you enter this within the wizard. See here in Full VM Restore wizard:And in Virtual Disk Restore wizard: Disk is logically locked in Veeam proxyIf your Veeam proxy server is Windows based, it
This document provides step by step instructions to configure Azure Active Directory for SAML authentication in Veeam Enterprise Manager. There are four editions of Azure AD (AAD): Free, Office 365 (which comes together with O365), and two Premium editions P1 and P2. Comparison for all of them can be found at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/active-directory/Below you can find steps to setup Veeam Enterprise Manager and Azure AD integration based on AAD from Office 365.Let’s start with the Azure side. Go to Azure portal then go to Azure Active Directory. Go to Enterprise applications → New application → → “Create your own application” → then provide a name for our application i.e. Veeam EM, and select “Integrate any other application you don’t find in the gallery” → Create Within a few moments’ applications will be created and visible under Enterprise Application view. Open it. Now let’s add some users (Step 1). In this version of AAD, only users can be added. In Pre
If the backup jobs fail and show an error message is “Unable to allocate processing resources. Error: Unable to find Hyper-V hosts where VM 'xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx' is registered: Failed to connect to Hyper-V Integration Service on host, port 6163”. I tried to review the settings, and all of them look fine, but the backup jobs failed always. I have run into these issues sometimes, it’s easy to solve, you just need to reboot the Veeam management server or restart the Veeam services of the Veeam management server.
With v12 it will be supported to use group Managed Service Account (gMSA) for user credentials.For my understanding of gMSA it will be necessary to have VBR server in a domain. Because it will still not be recommended to join this server the production domain, a special resource or management domain could be needed. For more details we will have to wait for general availability to get the user guide.If you have more ideas about gMSA implementation, let us know 😀
Greetings everyone, as you know I have been working on Grafana Dashboards across all Veeam RESTful APIs (the only one pending is VBA GCP), but as the time has passed, the releases and core products I was using have evolved as well…I am talking about the time-series I am using to store all the recollected data from the APIs. I was using InfluxDB v1.x (latest stable release is v1.8), but InfluxData is about to deprecate it and consider it end-of-life at the end of 2021. That left all the Community using it with the only option to go to InfluxDB v2.x, and start leveraging Flux, the new query language, which is extremely versatile btw.Introducing the new Grafana Dashboard for Veeam Enterprise Manager for InfluxDB v2 using Flux, and Grafana 8.xBefore go any further, I just wanted to thank tigattack who contributed to the Script that pushes the data to InfluxDB v2.0.Now, there it has been ton of work, as I needed to craft all the queries again from scratch converting legacy InfluxQL things l
I wrote already a post about checking Microsoft ReFS space savings. Now I want to show some basics to check XFS savings too.To check space savings on repository layer go to the repository directory and run: ls -lhsYou can see the size of each file and the total size of all files. If there a way to much files, run ls -lhs | grep total Compare this to the size allocated on the volume. To show this, run df -h In this example you see space savings of: (86 - 35) = 51G Another way is the use the command xfs_bmap. It works on file-level and is very technical. I am still not sure to interpret all output correctly. At least it can show, reflink works!To show all extents of a file, this command can be used: xfs_bmap -e -l -p -v -v -v filename. Here also additional information like a legend is displayed.I made a small script to show the size of all shared extents of all *.vbk-files. But do not overstrain it, its experimental.#!/bin/bashfor f in *.vbkdo echo "File $f size of shared extends:" xf
Because VMware snapshots is always a topic for backups, I want to share my latest experiences with VM-snapshots on NFS. I had to troubleshoot a problem with system time within a VMware vSphere VM. During backup VM freezes for more than 30 seconds. When this happens, system time in VM also stops and resets to current time after the freeze. And this behavior causes massive problems in the application-layer. During troubleshooting we found a very slow VM snapshot deletion on NFS volumes on ESXi hosts.EnvironmentIn this setup, we were running:HPE SimpliVity Hyper-converged infrastructure running in current Version. Notice: SimpliVity uses NFS v3 to present volumes to their hosts. VMware vSphere 6.7 in quite current version. Current Version of Veeam Backup and Replication.SymptomsSlow VM snapshot deletion on NFS volumes on ESXi hosts. Snapshot removal of comparable VMs, running on block storage last about 1-2 seconds. Deletion of a snapshot, hosted on a SimpliVity volumes (NFS v3) lasts at
I wanted to share a couple Veeam errors I experienced on my Replication (DR-side) server after I replaced server hardware. Not sure if anyone has experienced either of these errors, but they were quite frustrating to work through. Let me know if you had a similar experience/occurrence and what you did to resolve it. Maybe what I share here will help someone.As I was replacing hardware in my DR side vSphere Clusters, on my VBR server, I would perform a vCenter rescan to make sure VBR would see the new Hosts and my Replication jobs would run successfully. Because all the tasks involved with replacing h/w is time-consuming, I was only doing 3-4 Hosts a day (took 3 days for 10 Hosts), so I had to do this rescan several times. I think I only verified 1 or 2 jobs out of around 12 I have, but they run good. On the 2nd day, I noticed 1 of my jobs failed. The error shown was below:So, it appeared to me like Veeam didn’t actually update all references to any of my old Hosts and their associated
ReFS (Resilient File System) is a file system by Microsoft that provides - since Windows Server 2016 - a feature named Block cloning. Basically it uses pointers to already existing blocks instead of copying or re-creating them. This saves time and disk space. Veeam uses this feature for synthetic operations like merging incremental backups with full or synthetic full.In my opinion Microsoft does not offer a proper utility to analyse ReFS space savings with Block cloning. I think there are at least three ways to show the space benefit of Block cloning:Windows explorer Application that makes use of Block cloning Timothy Dewin's blockstat.exeWindows explorerThe native way to calculate saved space is to simply compare the sum of all files in a partition to the used space of the same partition. Because the partition view includes the space savings and file view does not, the difference shows saved space.As you can see, there are about 44,4 GB space savings. Keep in mind, the properties of t
Just a quick reminder to everyone that all good things must end at some point. The following products will no longer be supported by Veeam from the 1st January 2022.Veeam Backup & Replication 9.x Veeam ONE 9.x Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator 2.0 (Formerly known as Veeam Availability Orchestrator) Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v3 Veeam Agent for Linux v3Also in the near future is the end of support for the following products:Veeam Service Provider Console v3 (March 2022) Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 (April 2022) Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v4 (November 2022)You may be thinking “I haven’t seen an update for a long time for these products, I thought it was end of life anyway”. That’s because Veeam have a two-stage sunset policy for support. Stage One: End of FixWhen a Veeam product reaches end of fix, no further updates/patches or hotfixes are created for this as the general rule. In extreme case-by-case circumstances, an exception may be made. But you c
