Blogs and Podcasts

 WhyA Key Management Service (KMS) is a system or platform that securely stores, manages, and backs up cryptographic keys. These keys are used for encrypting and decrypting data, as well as for digital signatures. Key Management Services are crucial for organizations that deal with a large number of digital keys and certificates. They help ensure the security and integrity of sensitive information by providing a centralized and secure way to manage cryptographic keys. Without a proper key management service, organizations may face challenges in locating and managing their keys, which can lead to security vulnerabilities. A Key Management Service is an essential component of a robust security strategy, ensuring the secure and efficient management of cryptographic keys and sensitive data.FortanixThe Key Management Service by Fortanix Data Security Manager facilitates unified management of keys, encryption, tokenization, and secrets management across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures

Another possible topic for a future VMCE study group 😃.We are not robots, although sometimes on a Monday morning I sure do to feel like one. I think that there are very few of us out there you can claim that our performance is always consistent. There are some people who I would term are forever 1 + 1 = 2. However, I know for a fact that I can be 1 + 1 =20 on a certain days, and before I quit drinking beer you could have stuck a random number generator in that equation for all my consistency was worth.We often hear about great athletes, artists and others talking about being in the “zone”. As I understand it this is a state where things are just flowing, complications become easy and performance is optimal. Whatever you want to call such a state we can probably all agree that there are times when we feel that we are getting the best out of ourselves and times when we are not. In other words there are situations when we are not performing to or even near our maximum capabilities. This

Hi everybody. I’ve put a small blogpost togethers about an issue I experienced last week with the all-in-one ISO to create a hardenened immutable repo. This ISO was GA’ed during VeeamOn during the session of @Rick Vanover@HannesK  and Christoph Meyer. (more info here ) It seems that the script is too eager to reinitialise all disks during the setup. So I ended with a blank GPT partition on an hybrid USB drive/virtual DVD device. 😬 All details can be found on my blog: https://integriservices.blogspot.com/2023/12/hey-immutable-script-do-you-just-ruined.html Maybe something that can be optimized with the release of an updated version. Thanks for all your feedback on this !

Hi Everyone,This morning I went and took the V12 Exam. There were some huge non related hurdles involved but in the end all was good. To start with the night before I got some other news that kept me awake for most of the night. You know something not awful, not great but enough to… keep your brain working. Then you start to get annoyed as you know that you have to sleep for the exam BUT getting annoyed also keeps your brain alert. In the morning I was completely exhausted. To make matters worse Winter decided to show up and it was freezing. I decided to go to a testing center which now after the pandemic are all located way out in Polar bear land. The transit app lied about the bus arrival time and I froze, then the transit app lied again about the second bus. Then I arrived and the test center folks did not show up 15 minutes early anyways so I was left to wander in the vast waste lands of suburbia parking lots with a billion mile an hour wind attacking me.Finally I got in and sat do

IntroductionRansomware attacks are top of mind for all IT professionals and backups are the last line of defense.The single most important best practice is to make sure you can recover from your backups by: Implementing immutability Encrypting your backups Verify recoverability Have a recovery plan Harden and limit access to your backup infrastructure, especially the repositories.  Ample security guidance can be found in Veeam's user guides and best practices.Curated by Veeam Solutions Architect and Systems Engineers, Veeam has also published a library of Technical Security Blueprints to address joint Vendors configurations. In this post, I would like to focus on Hardening and Limit Access to ObjectFirst repositories. For those unfamiliar with ObjectFirst, it is a Veeam dedicated S3-Compatible Object Storage appliance that implements Out Of The Box Immutability (Ootbi) and leverages Veeam Smart Object Storage API.My colleague, SteveF, has blogged about the SOS API and ObjectFir

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

In the realm of data protection and recovery, the term "snapshot" often emerges, lauded for its efficiency and speed in capturing point-in-time states. However, it's crucial to dispel a common misconception:snapshots are not synonymous with backupsThey serve distinct purposes and possess fundamental differences that impact their reliability and comprehensive data protection capabilities. Key DifferencesDependency: Snapshots are often reliant on the original data source. If the primary data encounters issues, such as corruption or failure, snapshots tied directly to it may become compromised. In contrast, backups maintain independence from the original source, reducing the risk of losing data due to primary system issues. Data Retention: Snapshots are typically short-term solutions for immediate recovery needs. They may not suffice for long-term data retention or compliance purposes. Backups, on the other hand, are designed to retain data for extended periods, adhering to regulatory req

Everyone that knows me a little, knows that I’m a big fan of the 3-2-1-1-0 golden backup rule just like @Rick Vanover is also a big fan of this rule.In every conversation with a customer I will discuss and clarify this topic.For those who don’t know what the golden backup rule 3-2-1-1-0 means 😁, I wrote years ago a post of this topic it with more explanation (it pas my first post that achieved the weekly recap 🤗). Since then more followed...More info : 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource Hub Well, in my opinion this golden backup rule is from now on not sufficient anymore and should be improved to a new rule!Why?Well, in version 12.1 of VBR there will be a lot of new functionalities regarding to detect ransomware, malware and detect suspicious activity in different ways.Therefore the current 3-2-1-1-0 is not sufficient anymore and should be changed to the platinum backup rule 3-2-1-1-0-0 😁 !!!So, there is an extra 0 being added and should stand for :0 should be t

Hi Veeam Cloud Service Providers partners! Veeam released the Service Provider Console version 7 in FY23H1. It is very important to carry out this update as many benefits and improvements have been added for you! For a detailed step-by-step guide on how to upgradeStep by step to upgrade Veeam Service Provider Console to v7 – Cloud and Roll (cloudnroll.com) References:Upgrading Veeam Service Provider Console – Veeam Service Provider Console Deployment GuideKB4441: Release Information for Veeam Service Provider Console 7 Cumulative Patches

Good Community Day to everyone -I am pleased to share with the Community I scheduled my VMCE 2023 on v12 exam for this morning and was able to pass; even scored a little higher than the goal I set for myself. I was able to get into the 800s, so was pleased with my result.@Michael Melter created a post just under 2 weeks ago, and shared some great information. For a review of his post, you can read it here:I won’t re-hash the same things, but will give a little bit different take from my perspective though. Like Michael shares in his post, follow through the VMCE v12 Study Guide, as well as Anton’s What’s New document to review all the new features Veeam introduced with v12. And, this may seem common sense, but some may not take this to heart, but I also spent less time reviewing things I felt confident in, and spent more time with things I didn’t. Then, I took notes on them in a note style I could remember the info better. I spent a LOT of time in the User Guides.As for the exam, I cho

It’s the year of Linux!!! Well, at least for me it is. 😉 I’ve used a decent amount of Linux CLI over the years in managing vSphere environments, but not learned near as much as I wanted to. I always felt a void in my depth of knowledge & expertise about Linux. So I started this year going all in with LFCSA (Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administration) video courses on Pluralsight, learning about Linux Storage, Operations, Users & Groups, Service, and Network Management.Because I’m way more comfortable now using Linux, I’m planning on implementing Linux systems as Veeam Backup components in my environment to decrease the heightened security risk Windows systems tend to pose. As such, I’ve been reading up on Linux implementation in Veeam’s User Guides, starting with the Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) User Guide. I thought I would share my Linux Agent journey from Preparation, to Install/Implementation, to “Hiccups” encountered, to Backup Success with the Community in hopes ot

 In my last post I covered the requirements and necessary steps to configure immutability for HPE StoreOnce with Veeam V12. In this post I want to focus on how immutability behaves in different scenarios.Enable immutability for existing Catalyst storesIf you have existing Catalyst stores, the good news is that it’s possible to enable immutability for them. Let’s take a look at the Veeam helpcenter:Note that if you enable immutability and Veeam Backup & Replication does not start a new backup chain and still continues the chain, the whole backup chain is marked as immutable.https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/storeonce_supported_features.html?ver=120#immutabilitySo, after you configure immutability, the current or new backup chain will be made immutable. All other existing backup chains won’t be touched and therefore stay mutable.This is also exactly what I could reproduce in my lab environment. After enabling immutability, the current chain is made immutable, while all

Hi allI already read and know different articles and posts of different people like @MicoolPaul, @olivier.rossi, @Chris.Arceneaux and others regarding object storage and the used block size.In this article a bit more about that in combination with Veeam Cloud Connect. Goal : My goal is to setup a new Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure for multiple hundreds of customers. Setup : The setup of the Veeam Cloud Connect is a infrastructure that consists of several SOBR’s that consists of multiple extents (performant block-storage physical servers with REFS - 64K) in a performance tier in 1 datacenter and a capacity tier with object storage (performant physical object storage devices) in another datacenter with using the copy-mode and immutability.Of course there is a performant interconnection between the 2 datacenters. Advantages of this setup : There are a lot of advantages in my opinion in using that setup : we use 2 datacenters and all data is being copied from 1 datacenter to another da

Alt Text: Graphic with blog post titleDon’t you just hate it when something is working and then it breaks?I was working with a customer recently that had their Azure Storage configured as a backup repository within Veeam (Direct to Object Storage) and all was working great. However, after a few months Veeam was attempting to perform lifecycle operations such as creating synthetic full backups and purging old restore chains, and then suddenly a backup job started to fail.After diving into the logs I could see the following error was happening with every backup attempt:Details: HTTP code: 403, Content Length: 246, Code: AuthorizationFailure,<DATE TIME> :: Error: This request is not authorized to perform this operation.Failed to copy azure blob. Source path: [{ContainerName}//Veeam/Backup/{Folder Name}/Clients/{GUID}/{GUID}/Metadata/Checkpoint/1. Version: [{File Version Date}].], Target path: [{ContainerName}//Veeam/Backup/{Folder Name}/Clients/{GUID}/{GUID}/Metadata/Metadata/Checkp

Hi everyone!I had a case during this week, and I wanted to share my experience / workaround with y’all.I wanted to export a backup to an external drive, the VBR was a virtual machine, and no access to the Hypervisor to plug the USB and push it to the vm.Now you may think, mount it somewhere and share it over the network as a shared folder…I did, and was not working, some windows stuff that we were not allowed to share any unit, and was driving us crazy!We did some research, and remembered that there was a way to share / mount remote USB Devices over the Network! now, time to give it a shot!The idea is very straight forward, a Server machine, where the USB Devices is located at, and a client, to mount the remote resource as “local”.The tool name is VIRTUALHEREUSB SERVER(Local USB Drive)→NETWORK→USB CLIENT“Remotely mounted USB Drive”You simply download the Server and client, and execute them in the decided machines, couple of easy configs, and you are good to go, let me show you some scr

A bunch of new vulnerabilities was discovered on Veeam One against the SQL Server connection: You can see all of these on the new Veeam KB4508. Don't hesitate and update your Veeam One environment right now.

Hi there,I would like to share with you that applications for the following 2024 program are open. Existing vExperts and those aspiring to be part of this esteemed community are encouraged to submit their applications for consideration. Similarly, the Cisco Champion program welcomes both current members to reapply and prospective participants to submit their applications for review.For more information on the vExpert program, please take a look at this piece from @victorwu   

1 week ago I had to work during the whole weekend 😉Yes, occasionally some work for customers needs to be done during a maintenance window, often during the weekend, not possible during weekdays.If it doesn’t happen every week and it is possible to schedule it when it suits for yourselves, no problem 😁.Well, last weekend I had to work with a colleague of mine for a customer in a datacenter.Because of the very bad implementation before of the infrastructure (not done by us 🤗), we needed to verify and document the whole setup and every network-connection.Why?We had to turn off the whole Hyper-V cluster, storage, servers, virtual machines, …Afterwards we needed to remove all cabling, reorganize all devices, change the configuration, recabling everything and turn on the infrastructure again.You wouldn’t believe how bad the setup was!!!All went spotless 🤣, it was not our first time we did some project like that : my colleague, a network and firewall specialist and myself a backup, hyperv

Alt Text: Banner graphic displaying the post titleHi,Another quick hint from the field. I’ve seen on multiple occasions that Veeam can get stuck when moving metadata between cache repositories. I needed to move a batch of NAS Cache metadata to a new location, due to a change in Veeam Backup & Replication v12, whereby now it is recommended that you provision no less than 1GB of cache space per 1 million file versions, per backup job. A bit different to some of the previous ‘best practice’ guidelines of ~4GB total!As a quick side note, the Veeam Best Practice documentation now suggests 5% of the source data size as your cache size when using object, but I’m sticking to the Veeam Helpcenter documentation’s 1GB per 1 million file versions guidance, as it’s a good minimum for sizing. The Veeam Best Practice documentation doesn’t always scale well once you’ve got TBs of data. For example: At 50TB of data across 25 million files, your sizing with the best practice starts at 2.5TB of cache

I know I’m late, but spending an extra 4 days in Prague was a blast and the jetlag kicked in hard after being awake over 26 hours coming home! First off, Thanks to @Rick Vanover @Madi.Cristil @safiya @NikolaPejkova  Nikki Adkins, and everyone else for their hard work. As this was my first summit (and first time out of NA) I had no clue what to expect and a bit nervous about the trip. Everything exceeded my expectations from the hotel, the sessions, events, the venues and swag 😄! I already want to go back to EU and explore more.  The flight there was a bit rough. Having someone take their shoes and socks off and bump you with their foot for a few hours is not my idea of a good time, but I was able to keep my cool and power through. I met @Chris.Childerhose and @Matt Crape at the airport which made my trip to the hotel stress free. We were all a bit more tired than expected so the Uber instead of transit was the right call. I was pretty happy with the weather in Prague when I checked my

Hi All, In this article I am going to show how to configure custom AWS tags on Veeam Backup for AWS (VBAWS) workers. This is really helpful if you need to use tags for billing purposes for example.This procedure is only possible, at least until the moment I am writing this post, through restAPI. In Veeam for AWS we use by default the port 11005 for the restAPI, so you need to make sure you open this port on the security group that is associated with the VBAWS instance. Since you have the port open, the first step is to access Swagger, the restAPI tool built-in the VBAWS appliance.Open your browser and type:https://<hostname or IP of your appliance>:11005/swagger/index.html Expand the Method TOKEN Expand POST /api/v1/token and click on Try it Out.From the Grant_type drop-down menu, select Password, type the same credentials used to log into the appliance in the fields Username and Password. All other fields can remain blank and click Execute. Wait for the response from the server.

A Deeper Look at the Smart-EntityIn my Veeam Amazing Object Storage Tips & Techniques Part 4 I provided a high level introduction of the Smart-Entity feature of the Smart Object Storage API (SOSAPI).  In this article, I will explain how our Technical Alliance Partner (TAP) Object First has implemented the Smart-Entity as part of their object storage solution.Let’s start off with a reminder of how the Smart-Entity feature works:Veeam Backup & Replication will tell the object storage platform how much data VBR is about to send it as well as for what object (virtual machines, cloud vms, NAS file share, and Physical machines).  The object storage platform can then use this information to determine what node/endpoint will receive the backup data The object storage platform then provides VBR the node name/endpoint address to send the data toBefore I dive into the details of how Smart-Entity works, let me define what an entity is.  Veeam Backup & Replication uses backup jobs to pr

 Using Veeam we can have various types of files. But do you know all of those file extensions? Here is a list of the main files: .vbm - backup chain metadata file.vbk - full backup file.vib - incremental backup file.vrb - reverse incremental backup file.bco - configuration backup file.lde - veeam explorer exported file.ldf - Microsoft SQL Server Log file.mdf - Microsoft SQL Server master database file.vsm - Microsoft SQL Server transaction log backup.vom - Oracle database log file.lock - lock file.vblob - file that stores data from the file share (NAS) backup job.vindex - binary metadata file that describes backup files (names and versions) of file share backup job.vslice - binary metadata that describes allocation of data in VBLOB backup files Have you in mind any other kind of file extension that are associated with Veeam?Put here on the comments that I will add to this list.

VEEAM 100 SUMMIT IN PRAGUE Last week I had the great pleasure to attend the Veeam 100 Summit in Prague Czech Republic.This event is the highlight of the year for the Veeam Community and the atmosphere and energy it creates is enough to keep one fueled with IT enthusiasm until the next summit.So what is the Veeam 100? Well I have described it before but such a great Community needs to be mentioned again and again. What’s more there is no reason why you too can’t join the Veeam 100 as well, either as a Veeam Vanguard or a Veeam Legend.The Veeam Vanguards“The Veeam Vanguard Program is Veeam’s top-level influencer community”. You can get a full description here: https://www.veeam.com/vanguard.htmlThe Veeam Legends“Veeam Legends are Veeam users and data protection industry experts who are passionate about technology, innovation and eager to further develop their career, while sharing their experiences with the community” Again you can get more information from here: https://community.veeam.