1st Annual Veeam Community Hackathon
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Today I want to share a sneak peek at the next release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, v6a. Like traditional minor/interim releases, this release will mainly include bug fixes. However, there’s an interesting feature being released that I’ll be sharing some details on. Goodbye Exchange, Hello Teams Export APITo understand what’s changing, we need to understand what is going, and why this change is necessary. Currently, Veeam are protecting Teams channel ‘chat’ data via Exchange Online. Notice I say Teams channel, currently Veeam doesn’t protect any ‘Direct Messages’, either 1:1 or group chats, so chat in this context refers to posts and comments within a Teams channel. How does Veeam currently process my Teams data?To achieve the protection of this Teams data, Veeam reads a hidden folder within Exchange Online, called ‘TeamsMessagesData’. This is true whether you use Basic or Modern Authentication.If you weren’t already aware, Microsoft are completing removing Basic Authentication S
Azure AD is a cloud-based multi-tenant directory and identity service that provides identity and access management capabilities in the cloud.Since choosing the correct authentication method is the first concern for organisations wanting to move their apps to the cloud. The following section helps you decide which authentication method is right for you by using a decision tree. It helps you determine whether to deploy cloud or federated authentication for your Azure AD hybrid identity solution.Scr: MicrosoftTo choose an authentication method, you need to consider the time, existing infrastructure, complexity, and cost of implementing your choice. These factors are different are different from Organisation to organisation. Because of this, I will be highlighting on the different authentication methods. They are as follow;Azure AD password hash synchronization: This is basically the simplest way to enable authentication for on-premises directory objects in Azure AD. Users can use the same
See here how it works in a step by step guide.To start in Instant SQL Recovery wizard, select your server and choose Restore application items.Here you choose if you want to restore to the latest available restore point, or select a listed one. At the end of wizard press Browse. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server starts.Choose the database you want instantly recovered and select to do so. You have these options to choose from: Latest restore point. Point-in-time state. Recover to another server. This you can used to recover DB using a different name while original DB is still in place. In this demo, I selected point-in-time state to show additional options.Select point-in-time state you want recover to.Notice:First option recovers to date and time, recovery point was created. Second option lets you choose the exact date and time to restore to. As noted, transaction log backup is required here. Checking option to restore to a specific transaction, lets you choose a marked tran
It is always interesting, when thinking of special situations, to ask: What happens, when …Here are the answers to at least a few of these questions - for immutable backups in VBR v11:What happens, when…… removing immutable restore points?Task starts and ends up with errors. No restore point is removed.Warning when trying to remove immutable files… hacker changes date/time on Veeam server to remove files with next backup run?Excellent question! But it will not work! Configured period of time is checked at Linux server, not at Veeam B&R Server! So a job running one year in the future will create new files, it cannot delete old ones.… enabling feature at existing repository, not compatible with hardened repository?Veeam checks if there are backup jobs configured with an incompatible backup chain. If found, error is shown:Error with not compatible backups… changing a backup job writing to immutable repository?When backup chain is changed to an incompatible one, error is shown:… days
Veeam Backup and Replication is comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution which is capable of creating image-level backups of virtual, physical servers, cloud machines, and restoration as well. The technology used in the product optimizes data transfer and resource consumption, which helps to minimize storage costs and the recovery time in case of a disaster. Veeam Backup and Replication provides a centralized console for administering backup, restore, and replication operations in all supported platforms (virtual, physical, and cloud environments). The prerequisite requires you to have a SQL Server already running in your environment. Please see "how to download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Express Edition and Microsoft Management Studio on Windows Server", how to install Microsoft SQL Server 2019 and MsSQL Command line tools on Ubuntu Linux, and how to install MSSQL Server 2019 Developer Edition and SQL Server Management Studio on Windows. With Veeam Back
Sizing for NAS/file share backup can appear difficult initially, but with the help of the unofficial NAS Calculator by Hal Yaman it definitely will be a bit easier.As you can see from the screenshot below you need to know roughly how much source data in TB your file share(s) contain, how many files and directories. In case you are wondering what is primary vs secondary repository? Primary is for your short term retention (newest version) and secondary is for long term retention (older versions than newest).The user guide has some good info on the secondary copy settings.Once you have filled all out, just click the Calculate button to get full sizing for all components:Cache repository File Proxy Primary repository Secondary RepositoryHope this was useful and please do post any questions or comments.
I want to share my experience of an Active directory migration through the VB Replication software related to an Active directory environment 2012 R2 - forest and domain functional level 2012 R2.The customer asked me to migrate 3 Domain controllers from an old VMware 5.5 to the new VMware 6.5 infrastructure for a technological refresh.Given that the best solution from Microsoft is to create new VMs and promote them Domain Controllers and transfer FSMO roles.That said, there are scenarios like mine, where this type of approach was not possible as it was mandatory to maintain the same FQDN and IP address due to application configuration problems.Microsoft advised against demoting and promoting a DC with a different OS but with the same FQDN and IP, even if my environment was relatively small 3 DC one forest \ domain and not complex it could be done with the metadata cleanup procedure but the customer did not give the approval. So I have adopted the solution of VM replica. Scenario -----
NEW Veeam Agent for Mac, included with Veeam Backup & Replication, delivers easy and scalable Mac backup and recovery for even the most demanding organizations.Veeam Backup & Replication introduces another new agent (Veeam Agent for MacOS). I wanted to go through a very quick look at the install of the Agent and what it looks like at the Backup & Replication end. My MacBook Air thought add this to the home Veeam Backup & Replication server v11. Veeam Agent for Mac Overview Veeam Agent for Mac New Features and Enhancements System Requirement Release Notes User Guide To install Veeam Agent for Mac and all the required components Preparing the Agent for MacOSDue to managed by VBR, a NEW Protection Group needs to be created under Physical Infrastructure of Type Computers with pre-installed agents. We need to add to NEW Protection group and get the package files to install locally on our MacBook Air. Give your protection group a name first.You have to choose a local path to
Recently, Lionel Gilles, a French-based Offensive Computer Security researcher based in Paris, France published a PoC tool on NTLM Relay Attack known as PetitPotam that exploits the MS-EFSRPC (Encrypting File Services Remote Protocol). PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect users. Here is an example of such documents: NT LAN Manager: How to prevent NTLM credentials from being sent to remote servers. Below are some related guides: Active Directory Authentication methods: How do Kerberos and NTLM work? how does cached domain logon work?, and What is Pass the Hash Attack and how to mitigate the attack. PetitPotam takes advantage of servers where the Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) is not configured with protections for NTLM Relay Attacks. The mitigations below outline to customers how to protect their AD CS servers from such attacks and help in mitigating the W
Veeam Backup & Replication supports and understands vSphere tags allowing the creation of Backup and Replication Jobs by selecting VMs to backup based on Tags.Tags concept was introduced in vSphere 5.5 and basically it is a label you can assign to any object (VMs, storage and so on...) in the vSphere inventory. You can assign a tag to a specific category to better identify a VM type or simply the installed OS.The use of Tags during Jobs configuration is pretty easy to configure. In the configuration wizard click Add button to add objects to backup. Click the tag icon to display VMs and Tags, select the item you want to include in the job then click Add.Using Tags you no longer need to edit a specific Backup or Replication Job to add or remove a VM. A simple click in the Tags panel of the particular VM in vSphere Client does the trick.No Backup tag?... why you should use it? Well, the No Backup Tag can be used to specify which VMs are not included in any backup on purpose. In big en
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
Hi all, Everyone that knows me knows that I am a massive Python geek and data science nerd outside of being a full time nerd. Anyway I’ve been working on a YouTube series on using the Veeam API with Python showing the long way and the easy way to connect, discover, manipulate and visualize data from the APIs.I will be doing deep dives later in the series as well as creating interesting apps and widgets with one of Python’s many libraries. I’ll also be branching off into other languages like C# and Golang overtime.The GitHub repo of all the Jupyter notebooks I am using in the series can be found here:https://github.com/shapedthought/veeam-api-and-python-youtube If you have any suggestions for reports or visualisations of data please let me know and I’ll try work them into the series.
Veeam launched the veeamazing new v11 last week and with it, some amazing new features. In this blog post I’ll be highlighting the licensing requirements for these new features and a few other pre-requisites to use them. Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP)Veeam CDP enables organisations to achieve aggressively low RPO whilst still retaining the flexibility required by organisations for their retention needs. To utilise Veeam CDP your environment needs to be:VMware Environment using vSphere 6.5 or newer. Veeam needs to have either a Veeam Universal License or Enterprise Plus when using a socket-based license. Replication target can’t be a Veeam Cloud Connect Replica. Veeam Hardened RepositoryThe Veeam hardened repository is designed to help keep backups safe and data integrity assured. It’s great to see this feature requires no specific licensing from Veeam, however there are some pre-requisites to be considered:Only Linux repositories currently provide immutability Only certain task
We are proud to announce the release of our first joint Legends project: Veeam Backup & Replication Pocketbook v1.It is a collection of best practices from the field.The following topics are covered:Backup Basics Security Hardened Repository and Immutability Performance SOBR Capacity Tier Offload SureBackupWe are discussing each recommendation with benefits, disadvantages and links to more information. Currently the Pocketbook can be downloaded here as a pdf-file. We are looking forward to your feedback!Enjoy reading! Contributors (in alphabetic order): @falkob, @Geoff Burke, @JMeixner, @Link State, @MicoolPaul, @regnor, @vNote42, @wolff.mateus
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
Hello everybody!Today I’m coming to talk about archive backup with blob Azure.Archiving is good option to save money with your full (GFS) backups. It means that you can save your backups as archive instead of traditional hot/cool blob of Microsoft Azure.To do that you need configure a Scale Out Backup Repository with the Archive Tier enable.After that you can move your full backups older than X day to this kind of archive, as this example: But first you need to configure your blob repository as an archive option. To do this go go to Backup Repositories inside Backup Infrastructure menu. Right click on the pane and chose Add backup repository… On this screen chose Object Storage: On the next step choose Microsoft Azure Blob Storage option: After that click on Azure Blob Storage Archive Tier: Type Name and Description of your archive blob: Enter with your Credentials for this blob and chose what Gateway Server will be used for this function: On the next screen you just need to set what C
I had a discussion recently about backing up ‘standalone’ ESXi servers, without the vCenter Server application. The discussion started around we were sharing my homelab but the use case became attractive for retail, edge and other ROBO scenarios. Why no vCenter Server Application?I do not run the vCenter Server Server Appliance (vCSA) at home simply because I don’t need it. At home I recently simplified my home lab. In March and April, I had to work from home for a while and it made me think about the home lab since I wasn’t travelling. I upgraded to a new host (still on vSphere) but really don’t need the vCSA. I do *not* use the free ESXi hypervisor, as I use the vExpert license on the host to unlock the full APIs that I need for backup. In our work lab environment, we definitely use the VCSA for a number of environments and if I need that type of environment, I’ll do that over there.It’s interesting when you use the ESXi host in a licensed mode, it allows a number of Veeam capabiliti
What Can Be Backed Up?User profiles with all content Custom selection File based backup with native APFS snapshots Restore On Client Side Veeam Agent For Mac Supports…back up files and folders save coloured tags restore specific files or the whole ‘Users’ folder schedule backups send backups to VBR / VCC / Local drive (including encryption) provide basic local UI for FLR Snapshot SupportNative APFS snapshot supportAutomatic snapshot mode selection in single jobUsers on APFS backed up with snapshot Users located NAS share backed up without snapshot USB drives backed up without snapshot MAC OS versions will be supported10.13 (High Sierra), 10.14 (Mojave), 10.15 (Catalina) Can I restore files from the VBR console?”Copy to” (Linux & Windows) is possible. No direct restore Deduplication appliances are supported !
As you may know, with vSphere 7 Update 1 VMware introduced the vSphere Clustering Service.The plan is to get more independent of vCenter Server for certain cluster features like for example DRS.Where you certainly notice the difference, compared to older releases, are the vCLS agent VMs shown in vCenter.https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/09/vsphere-7-update-1-vsphere-clustering-service-vcls.htmlThere's no need to backup them and if you have a current Veeam version (v10a Patch 20201202 or higher), they're are automatically excluded from your jobs.The agent VMs are manged by vCenter and normally you should not need to look after them.Normally…yesterday we've had the case were some of the vCLS VMs were shown as disconnected; like in this screenshot:Checking the datastore we have noticed that those agents VM had been deployed to the Veeam vPower NFS datastore.As this datastore is managed by the Veeam server and can connect/disconnect at any time, it's a very bad location for the vCLS VM
For the last few years, I have spent a lot of effort along with others at Veeam carefully watching the industry behavior when it comes to ransomware and its devastating impact it can have on an organization. I’ve also spent a lot of time putting together a lot of great works in the form of whitepapers, webinars and other assets to get the word out. Before I forget, check out these three key whitepapers:Edwin and I recap all Veeam ransomware capabilities: https://www.veeam.com/wp-protection-yourself-from-ransomware.html Hannes from Veeam Product Management goes deep and technical on the Veeam hardened repository: https://www.veeam.com/wp-guide-protect-ransomware-immutable-backups.html Kirsten and Melissa show how Veeam ONE can help to detect and respond to ransomware: https://www.veeam.com/wp-veeam-one-ransomware.html The important takeaway is that today, it is easier than ever to have backup copies ready to restore from ransomware with Veeam.What are the Immutability Options?I say ther
VMware has announced on August 3rd that vSphere ESXi 7.x is the last version supporting Apple Mac platform.https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/88698Reasom is that Apple is moving away from the x86 processor platform.With 7.0 the MacOS platform will be supported until EOL. Guest OS support for Mac is discontinued, too. macOS guest operating system may only be operated in VMs on vSphere ESXi hosts installed on Apple Mac hardwarehttps://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2015161
While updating our VCSP stack with V11-RTM, I just stumble again onto this small but fine new feature to prioritize your primary backup jobs:More than once I had customers request several jobs to be finished with priority.You could of cause concatenate jobs with the schedule option “After this job:”. But this is not recommended as it does not use the ressources of your backup system accordingly. Valuable proxy/repo slots would linger out-of-work for quite a while.Overlapping jobs would lead to the second job jumping in with the first one still running, so saturating ressources. But this might easily oversteer and thus delay the first job.With the new option this problem can be solved by just the click of a checkbox.Prioritized jobs get a nice little flag in the job list. So how does it work?The Veeam scheduler runs all its tasks according to priorities:800: Restore jobs — restores are obviously the most important jobs 700: Continuous data protection jobs — new CDP ist also considered v
Reading through the What’s new document, I discovered an new feature/option which hasn’t been mentioned here before: “NBD multi-threading”As the performance of NBD (network) in VMware backups is often not as good as virtual appliance or direct storage access storage mode, it sounded quite interesting to try. Perhaps this way we can get over some limitations of NBD mode and better utilize the network capacity of our proxies.NBD multi-threading — The backup engine is now capable of establishing multiple NBD connections per VMDK for better performance of network transport mode. At the same time, due to the low limit of max NBD connections per ESXi host, there are reliability concerns associated with increasing the number of such connections. While our resource scheduler tracks NBD tasks per host to ensure they remain within the limit, we decided that a marginal performance benefit is not worth the risk of enabling this new behavior for our entire customer base right away, as there might b
