Blogs and Podcasts

Hi Folks I decided to take a fork in the road and discuss Veeam 12 briefly in Kasten Konnekt so putting this in the general area :)   

Some kind of funny: A new kind of ransomware was found in India. It does not demand a ransom but donations like: new clothes to homeless, feed kids in branded pizza outlets and provide financial help to anyone who needs urgent medical attention but cannot afford it. If victims can proof good actions, they receive decryption kid. Please don't misunderstand, I am still against cyber attacks like Ransomware, but at least the needy here have something out of it.https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/goodwill-ransomware-detected-in-india-makes-victim-donate-to-poor-provides-financial-help-to-needy-patients/articleshow/91736850.cms

Hi everyone, Did you know it’s possible to access the full desktop editor from a mobile device? I don’t know why all the options are hidden by default but it’s really easy to get them back. All you need to do is change your zoom settings on your web browser. I’ve only tested this in iOS but check my GIF below and you’ll see all the cool options appear when I hit 50% zoom.Want to return to the mobile optimised editor? Just increase your zoom level back to default and everything will return to normal! You can do this dynamically whilst making your post, no need to refresh the page each time!

  Today Veeam have launched the new Veeam Backup for Office Microsoft 365 v6! That’s right, it’s had a slight name change to align with Microsoft’s rebrand of Office 365 to Microsoft 365. Excited and want to check it out? Download it here. Veeam have also updated their Helpcenter ready to explain all the new features. As always, Veeam have accompanied this release with a set of release notes, available here.In this bl

Veeam storage functionsIs Veeam the most significant storage company that no one knows about? One of the essential features of any Veeam Backup and Replication architecture is the storage hardware that the backup target or backup repository will sit on.  The repository performance, features, and scalability are critical to ensuring that the Veeam deployment will meet customers' needs for quite a while.  Unfortunately, this is the component that many customers tend to make bad decisions, usually due to VARs and storage vendors trying to make the backup decisions for the customer.  This is easy for the partner and storage vendor community to do because, as we

The Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP products supplies an effortless way to protect workloads running in one of the hyperscale public clouds. Workload protection is done by taking native snapshots and copying snapshots to object storage for a defined period. A full instance recovery and file-level recoveries can be performed from the backup. But this only scratches the surface of what Veeam can do with a cloud-based backup.  To use advanced storage functions like Instant VM recovery directly to an on-premises hypervisor, full instance recovery into another hyperscale cloud, or copying backup files to an on-premises harden repository will require Veeam Backup and Replication to be integrated with Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP through what’s called an “external repository”.  The Veeam Backup and Replication external repository is a read-only connection to the Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP object-based storage repository. It allows V

IntroductionObject storage vendors all have configuration considerations that must be accounted for as part of the process of designing Veeam backup repositories. Some of these considerations can be limiting, while others simply help dictate architecture decisions. In this post, I discuss on-premises vendor considerations, and how Veeam job settings can make an impact.To accommodate for vendor specific on-premises Object Storage Device limitations, it is sometimes necessary to adjust Veeam’s storage optimization settings. Every on-premises Object Storage vendor may express these limitations differently, but it usually boils down to the ability to handle large amounts of object metadata (and therefore number of objects) per bucket and/or device.In our experience, using larger storage optimization settings (job block size) with on-premises Object Storage devices typically works b

Hi, I realised that nobody has ever mentioned the Veeam Custom Search tool on the community hub, and I wanted to make sure everyone knows that this tool exists. http://vee.am/VeeamCustomSearchFirstly, what is it?It’s a custom search engine powered by Google that focuses on delivering results from the various Veeam resources.The primary page of that link is deceptively simple, to the point you might think the page hasn’t loaded, you’ll just get a search bar that will present search predictions based on Veeam searches.Once you’ve searched is where the magic happens, you’ll see results from a variety of Veeam focused sites. Such as the R&D forums, the Helpcenter, whitepapers, KB articles, news

Just read the announcement of Anand Eswaran: Veeam Is Now The Tied #1 Data Replication & Protection Provider Worldwide! https://www.veeam.com/blog/number-one-data-replication-protection-provider-worldwide.html Veeam has reached the status of being tied as the #1 provider worldwide during 2H’21 in IDC’s data replication and protection market.Nice global data:#1 in EMEA #1 in LATAM #3 in APJA part for this great success is certainly also the strong community 

 Hi everyone I'm sharing this kind of configuration aimed to strengthen the security of immutable data backup against ransomeware attacks or possible 0 day \vul of the O.S. Linux used to deploy a Hardened Repository.Thanks to Veeam, it is now possible to perform immutable backups via Hardened Repository.This technique aims to safeguard the databackups saved on Raw LUN Volumes of a storage in “Locked Volume” mode on Hardenend Linux based repositories.The combo is to use the Hardened Repository to which present a RAW LUN Volume formatted in XFS to support block cloning, in this case Infinidat + the functionality/utility Snaprotator, allows to schedule a snapshot of one or more Volumes in "Locked Volume" mode.Tested also the restore, re-presented the Snapshot Volume on the Hardened Repository, the only trick is to force the change of the UUID of the Raw Lun, if not it is not mountable by the O.S. because of duplicate UUID.

Morning, Just a quick one from me today I wanted to share.I was playing with VDRO, and scratching my head as I was playing with restore plans, but I couldn’t find a very crucial step. ‘Prepare DC for DataLab’. It’s documented here: Prepare DC for DataLab - Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator User GuideI’ll quote the key text as to why we need this:This step is required for a domain controller to be started in a test lab environment. This must always be the first step for the domain controller in a lab group.This step ensures the VM will reboot to exit DSRM (Directory Services Restore Mode) and therefore will function correctly as a domain controller in the lab. Seems pretty important right?Well, when I went to create my restore plan, I couldn’t find

Today I’ve noticed that Veeam have released the full upcoming agenda for their premier data protection event: VeeamON 2022!I just want to talk through some of the personal highlights I spotted from the agenda.Hands on Labs (Virtual & In-person) Veeam Backup & Replication v12That is not a typo, Veeam must be feeling pretty confident about the shape of v12 by now as next month they’ll be allowing hands on labs of this unreleased product. Check out the description below:In this lab, you will be working with a Veeam Backup & Replication V12 environment where you will learn the basics of Veeam Backup & Replication, test out some of our upcoming new features, and perform typical Veeam backup operator tasks though an interactive step-by-step lab guide.I can only speculate as to what upcoming features will be available to test, but I’m looking forward to see

 Hi all, I share the lab I created to test the CDP feature.HW List:VmwareServer: 4 UCSC-C220-M5SX - VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 15256549 VCSA 6.7.0 15129973 Storage: Dell Storage SC 5020 VBR+CDP-Proxy Source 1x4 vCPU – 16 Gb RAM CDP-Proxy Target 1x4 vCPU – 16 GB RAM System Requirements - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com) Requirements and Limitations - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)

Most of you probably already know or have heard this statement: Snapshots are not backups! Just last week a German hosting provider did lose 1500 snapshots because of failing hardware. And who hasn’t experienced some horror stories about (forgotten) VMware snapshots. Because of that I wanted to highlight this with a dedicated blog post. 

You can think what you want about Facebook, but they operate a massive amount of compute and storage unites. And it seems, they have some scientist investigating interesting phenomenon like this. To be honest, it is not primary backup related but in the second instance it is restore related 😀Briefly summarized:They found out, CPU can perform computations incorrectly. So it comes to silent data corruption by CPU. According to their observations these failures are reproducible and not transient. When you think about data-reduction technologies like compression this really can cause problems. As the following article describes, these corruptions occur at scale. Interesting is also how they test their hardware.Read more details here:https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/03/18/facebook-investigates-silent-data-corruptio

I have been a Veeam Vanguard for five years now and was fortunate enough to have attended the VeeamON 2017 event in New Orleans, and it was fantastic.  Great sessions, lots of networking and meeting more of the Veeam folks as well as Vanguards.Being a Vanguard is a real honour, and many people ask me when they see my Veeam Vanguard jacket or shirt - What is Veeam?  My answer is a typical one - it is backup software for your infrastructure for now and the future, leading to a conversation around technology, backups, and many other things.This year's event is back in Las Vegas in the hybrid mode with in-person and virtual attendees.  It will be the first event since 2019 in Miami that will be back to live attendance which is a great thing.  In the last couple of years, with the COVID pandemic, the switch to all virtual has left many people feeling

​It's been almost a month since the release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6. If you're looking for all the details of v6, then check out @MicoolPaul’s post: Until now no bigger problems were discovered or reported. There's only a known issue, that the CPU load in idle is higher then usual; no big issue, but if you want to solve that, there's a hotfix available: https://www.veeam.com/kb4294 One change, which didn’t get much attention so far, is the newly designed setup: I r

Hello to share a new vulnerabilitySpringShell attacks target about one in six vulnerable orgs (bleepingcomputer.com)(1) New Messages! (checkpoint.com)Spring4Shell: Detect and mitigate vulnerab

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 Jo

Sometimes you just want to do a quick test which requires S3.You can in seconds flat setup a Minio instance on your laptop for this purpose.Go to Minio’s download page: Run the Powershell command as shown in the instructions: Minio will be downloaded: The instructions on the Minio page say to set a username and password. I did this below but when I brought up Minio it still had the default password. 

After my last post highlighting the Veeam software that reaches end of support in 2022, I wanted to expand this further and discuss software that Veeam works with that will be approaching end of life in 2022. Why does this matter when I’m just trying to protect the data?Times change, and software changes with them, until it’s no longer supported. At any point, a patch to an operating system, a .NET framework update, or anything else really, could end up with the software no longer being backed up properly, or not working at all in production. Without valid support there’s no process to get a fix, and whilst your backup software may still be in support with Veeam, if the vendor won’t fix the problem, it’s time to start panicking.With this in mind, lets explore the software & operating systems being declared end of life in 2022 so we can start planning our upgrades/migrations if necess

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,

Veeam recently released Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6, as part of getting up to speed with the release, I’ve been reviewing the help center documentation. Today I came across an interesting note within the backup applications section, something that was completely missing from the release notes. It said:Using multiple applications may impact the performance of your production SharePoint environment. This functionality will be deprecated in future versions of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/backup_applications.html?ver=60 For a while, the advice to leverage the best backup performance from SharePo

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.

There are two critical CVEs that affect Veeam Backup & Replication and account for two of the three critical Veeam Backup & Replication CVEs, and the most serious of the products affected. The Critical Veeam Backup & Replication vulnerability notes include: CVE-2022-26500 | CVE-2022-26501CVE-2022-26500, CVE–2022-26501: These two CVEs relate to Veeam Backup & Replication allow executing malicious code remotely without authentication. This may lead to gaining control over the target system. This carries a CVSS rating of 9.8 and is classified as Critical.Cause? – The vulnerability is caused by the Veeam Distribution Service, running on TCP 9380 by default, allows unauthenticated users to access internal Veeam API functions. An attacker may send input to the Veeam API which may allow uploading and executing mali