Blogs and Podcasts

Rewind about 2 years. We were short staffed (still are), behind on updates and upgrades and trying our best to get rid of legacy and unsecure infrastructure. After months of work, things were getting close to the finish line. Systems were running great and we were feeling quite safe and secure. It all came to a sudden halt when someone said the service desk phone was ringing off the hook and no one could log in. I tried myself, and not only could I not log in, I couldn’t ping or lookup most of the VM’s on the network.  I rebooted one of my workstations and received a 169 address. I knew right away I was in trouble. I could tell DCHP was having issues on my desktop, but on my second PC I could still ping most of the servers with static IP’s. This told me DNS was also down. Great I thought at 4PM on a Friday. We continued to do some troubleshooting and it ended up much worse. It turns out someone decided to put a VERY large file in the sysvol folder to replicate it without confirming the

I really struggled with sharing this story because it’s quite embarrassing. But, if it helps 1 person, it’s worth it. And, not all ‘save the day’ stories are about us being flawless Systems Admins/Architects...we are human, but rather how well we’ve setup and configured our recovery processes. Thanks to @Madi.Cristil for prompting me to “go for it” and just share. 😊I did end up saving the day, but it was at the cost of my own initial negligence the issue arose in the first place, albeit an honest mistake. Interestingly enough, a fellow former Veeam Vanguard (now Veeam employee) and I were discussing this very configuration mishap potential via direct message in the Vanguard Slack channel prior to it actually happening to me.CatastropheSo, what did I actually do to cause the catastrophe at my organization? First, let me start by giving a high-level overview of my backup environment. I use physical servers, with Windows OS, as combo Repo/Proxy devices for my backup environment. I also u

Hi Folks, When I think about being a Systems/Backup Administrator all of these years I can’t single out one single story that fully represents the highs and lows of this profession. So instead I have decided to write a few short sound bytes, streams from moments of memory suffixed with rhymes like one of the those “_restored” attachment names we use in order not to overwrite production. Every moment is also and emotion. We add a taint of emotional metadata to events and memories that we often don’t fully comprehend ourselves. Our work is matrix of puzzles and problems that we face everyday with our silicon little friends. Although sometimes it feels like they are our foes.  Gratitude The call broke through the comforting calm silence of a Friday morning IT room like a waiter’s tray that gets turned over in a busy restaurant. An important file was missing. It had been erroneously deleted in one of those careless human moments of blissful neglect. The stakes were very high. First attempt

I’ve posted this before in a Friday Fun comment a few months back, but I think it bears repeating, especially because Veeam really did save the day, and maybe a few lives as well!  Details may be fuzzy, but it’s all true.  It’s a long story, so maybe set aside some time for some light reading, or maybe use it as a 15 minute distraction from working so that you can reset your brain.  And I hope you learn something too!I’ve been having issues getting this post, so as much as I hate to do it, I’m going to send you over to my blog to view the entire post.  Seems like I my have gotten a bit wordy but I’ll give you a preview below. Setting the StageLong, long ago (okay, it was 2020) in a galaxy far, far away (otherwise known as a small rural community in centralish Nebraska), there resides a community hospital who shall rename nameless.  We, an eastern Nebraska-based MSP, sourced this new client and it’s looking like the beginning of a fabulous relationship. I arrive onsite on a hot June day

Happy Tuesday to the Community! In January VMware released an updated VCP-DCV 2023 Exam Blueprint for vSphere 8. It came out in good timing, at least for me, for a couple reasons. First, I wanted to get my DCV certification up to date, since for the past 2 years was not able to because the exam version on Pearson had stayed the same since I last took the vSphere 7 version in April 2021. Second, I had a long several week recovery period at home the past 2 months so it gave me plenty of time to review all (most) of VMware's vSphere 8 User Documentation and update my VCP-DCV 2021 Study Guide to 2023.As some of you know, I've been creating various certification Study Guides for close to 15 years. I started making them for my benefit to help me in my certification preparation studies. Regardless of the vendor certification, to be able to pass a technical certification exam, you need to comb through mountains of user documentation, as well as the obvious need to get hands-on experience using

Problem: Like a shooting star, sometimes can happens that some backup job on a Synology NAS fails with this error:Error: Incorrect function. Agent failed to process method {ReFs.SetFileIntegrity}.with VB&R 11.0.1.1261 and DMS 7.0.1 with a SMB share.It seems to be related to “Fast clone” feature inside Synology control panel.  Solution: Adding this registry key in the VB&R machine seems to solve the issue[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication]"UseCifsVirtualSynthetic"=dword:00000000 As reported in this thread, that registry key tweaks the full fast clone feature.https://forums.veeam.com/microsoft-hyper-v-f25/error-incorrect-function-agent-failed-to-process-method-refs-setfileintegrity-t68754.html  More about this topic:All said above, I found this topic on reddit where the issue is present on Veeam 9.5u4 and always a Synology NAShttps://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments/omridr/synology_ds1821_and_veeam_95u4/What is Fast clone:https://kb.synology.com/en-id/

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

With the release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 the Self Service Portal was also unleashed. In this video we run through a scenario where a new tenant is being onboarded from the Service Provider point of view as well as what steps need to be actioned by the tenants.

📢Join this webinar on July 18th for an exciting discussion featuring our CTO, @dannyallan , Opti9's own Sagi Brody, who is also one of our Veeam 100 members, and cybersecurity expert Guy Mizrahi, CEO of CyPROS. They'll be discussing how to tackle ransomware risks, why backup infrastructure is a top target for attackers, and how our Veeam+Observr solution sets us apart from other backup vendors in the battle against ransomware, revolutionizing your protection strategy. Don't miss out!Register in here: https://opti9tech.com/events/webinar-anatomy-of-ransomware-attack-preventing-attacks-on-your-backup-infrastructure/ Best, Madi

Do you actively use Veeam Replication?If so, how long has it been since you’ve implemented it? For me, I don’t currently use it, but am in the process of getting it going again after about an 8yr hiatus. Not too much has changed since then, but there has been some enhancements you might not’ve known about, or some behavior you either didn’t know about or forgot. Below, I will be sharing some tidbits & behaviors I feel you should be aware of when making design decisions when implementing Veeam Replication.Before getting into the “Don’t Know/Forgot” items, let me briefly review how Replication works from a high-level. First, they are a job-driven task. You’ll need to set up a job and configure various settings. Next, depending on the source data you’re wanting to replicate, you can either replicate data directly from your production environment, or from other locations. I’ll touch more on this later. Lastly, the first run of Replication creates a fully functional VM on the target, an

Hi Everyone,I went quiet for a few days which had some people wondering whether I had fallen into one of my Burke “everything is depressing moods” that come gleefully with middle age, but in fact I was feverishly torturing myself with learning monitoring. Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool and can be leveraged in my many circumstances, including of course Kubernetes. I knew this certification was going to be a challenge as monitoring loves precision whereas I am by nature more of an “on the spot, off campus” type of personality thriving when it comes to figuring out fixes or trying to think out of the box which I think in my cases according to my early grade school teachers, there was never any box present in the first place.Forcing yourself to study things that are not necessarily in your natural skillset is always very useful as it stretches your mind which can only make you stronger in the end. Like brushing your teeth with the wrong hand. Yes at first it will be messy and unp

Hi Everyone, The Linux Foundation is having a fast sale 40% until July 12. The LF certifications are some of the best in the business and some of the toughest so if you want to test your knowledge now is the time to get them. I don’t really recommend their training though, I personally did not find it very helpful towards the CKA exam. Remember these are not just Kubernetes exams but Linux and other systems as well. Take a look at the catalog.Speaking of which I have to renew my CKA so I took advantage of this deal myself!! https://training.linuxfoundation.org/july-prime-day-2023-promo/?creative=665260864709&keyword=linux%20foundation%20training&matchtype=p&network=g&device=c&pi_ad_id=665260864709&utm_term=linux%20foundation%20training&utm_campaign=EMEA:+Search:+June+21+-+Sitewide+Discount&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=8666746580&hsa_cam=13435710405&hsa_grp=149869974173&hsa_ad=665260864709&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-147

One of the products I spend a lot of time working with is Veeam ONE. If you are unfamiliar, Veeam ONE provides data protection monitoring for all Veeam operations. After implementing Veeam ONE, customers gain real-time monitoring, issue resolution and reporting capabilities that help with analysis and decision making. As companies drive innovation, they are transforming their data center, not only running applications traditionally, but also utilizing the cloud to take advantage of the many benefits it has to offer. I have been working more and more in the public cloud, whether it be utilizing object storage to store my backup data or getting more familiar with running workloads and resources there. Veeam ONE is essential for any installation because you gain visibility into your backups, the infrastructure and how machines are running. Veeam ONE was built for Veeam Backup & Replication, so as businesses are moving workloads to the cloud, or storing data in object storage, ONE is g

Hi! I wrote a post describing the main stages of a ransomware attack, from exploiting a user's endpoint (client-side attack) to the three possible extortion demands: ransom for decryption keys, ransom for recovering exfiltrated data, and ransom to avoid DDoS attacks. I also present a complete list of countermeasures based on the NIST Ransomware Framework Profile, derived from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. I hope this can be helpful!https://cloudnroll.com/2023/07/10/client-side-ransomware-attacks-and-a-defensive-framework-for-your-organization/

Inspired by @Geoff Burke‘s post about immutability for Kasten with Wasabi, I decided to post the same for Veeam Backup & Replication. If you want to check out Geoff’s post, then follow this link:What/who is Wasabi?Probably Wasabi doesn’t need to be introduced. But if you can only think about the paste you get with Sushi, then you should check out their cloud object storage. Besides AWS and Microsoft, Wasabi is one of the Vendors, who often gets recommended for usage with Veeam Backup. The reason for that is their really competitive pricing, combined with great functionality/quality and low complexity.How to create an immutable bucketAfter registering an account with Wasabi, the creation of an immutable bucket isn’t complicated at all.Just make sure that you select the right region for your location, and also enable bucket versioning and object locking.Afterwards you need to create an access key. For testing purposes you can use the root account key, but for production you should cr

Hi allFinally previous week I took the time to perform the new VMCA 2022 exam, this to extend my Veeam Architect certificate (VMCA-1) to an up-to-date status. This just before the summer holidays 😎.Previously (7 months ago) I wrote another post regarding my personal experience for the VMCE 2021 exam (VMCE exam personal experience | Veeam Community Resource Hub).I know that @Michael Melter already wrote a great post about his VMCA 2022 exam review, but next to that nice post, I want to add my own personal experience and recommendations 😉. I will use the same content as I used before in my VMCE post 🤗. Requirement : Taking an official 2-days VMCA course is a requirement before taking the VMCA exam.Before (in Version 1 of VMCA) you had to be VMCE-certified before you could take the exam of VMCA.That requirement is no longer valid.BUT, I strongly recommend being VMCE of the same version first before taking the VMCA exam.In my opinion, the requirement of being a VMCE should still exist.I

In this article I will explain how to configure the AWS SSM on EC2 Instances to Veeam Backup for AWS be able to create VSS Snapshots for those instances.Veeam Backup for AWS depends on AWS SSM to create the VSS Snapshots, so before enable the Application-Aware option in the policy we need to configure the instances correctly with all the necessary components. Let’s start creating a IAM policy with all permissiona that we need: { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "VisualEditor0", "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ec2:DescribeInstances", "ec2:CreateTags", "ec2:CreateSnapshot", "ec2messages:AcknowledgeMessage", "ec2messages:DeleteMessage", "ec2messages:FailMessage", "ec2messages:GetEndpoint", "ec2messages:GetMessages", "ec2messages:SendReply", "ssm:DescribeAssociation",

Hi all, I’ve been using an app called “ripgrep” for a while now and wanted to share it with the community. https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep“ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern.”ripgrep is written in Rust which is “blazingly fast” for this type of operation. I found this article very interesting on the subject of benchmarking https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/Finding the specific file or files where something occurred can be tricky, but ripgrep makes it easy with a simple regex pattern.rg "^.*?\b13.02.2023\b.*?\bError\b.*?$"It provides each instance that matches the expression under the file's name. It also allows you to use flags to alter the output; the most useful I’ve found are the -A, -B and -C flags. -A Provides a number of lines before the match-B Provides a number of lines after the match-C Provide a number of lines before and after the matchMany other flags can be used, including a flag that recursive

For those of you who don’t spend much time or have much experience with SQL Server, Brent Ozar is a well-known and respected Microsoft SQL consultant. In addition to consultancy and training services, Brent Ozar offers tools such as the First Responder Kit, and a SQL Server monitoring service called SQL ConstantCare.SQL ConstantCare is a paid for monitoring service, designed to provide a daily report of what’s going on within your SQL Server platform, collecting data and notifying you if it sees genuine room for improvement, when things are good, it stays quiet.It’s the content of these alerts that I want to discuss today. Brent Ozar did a blog post recently discussing the alerts that most people muted, and I found it really interesting to see the elements of data protection in there. So, let’s take a look: SQL ConstantCare – Sample Size and Quality of Samples Some background information on this data set that Brent Ozar has worked with firstly to provide context. At the time of writing

Storpool Storage logoAt the beginning of 2023, I was selected to be part of the Tech Field Day Delegate list, which was an honour. You can find my profile here – https://techfieldday.com/people/chris-childerhose/.After this, I signed up for my first field day, which was Storage Field Day 25 #SFD25. More information can be found here – https://techfieldday.com/event/sfd25/It was a different experience being part of such a great event by @GestaltIT and @TechFieldDay, along with Steven Foskett. After the event, attendees are contacted regarding writing a blog spot for the GestaltIT website from the event you attended.I decided to write a blog about Storpool Storage, and the blog can be found here –https://gestaltit.com/sponsored/storpool/chris-childerhose/storpool-storage-delivery-with-commodity-hardware-the-right-way/I hope you enjoy reading it!

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

Looking to build your own chatbot but don’t want to break the bank on hardware and keen on some privacy ? I’ve created 2 blogposts on how you can create your own AI LLM powered chatbot.The first post is live and tells you how to get to your source data. I gave it a little twist and used the transcripts of several YouTube instructional videos to train the model.Interested, remarks, comments ?Read it all here: https://integriservices.blogspot.com/2023/06/create-your-own-private-offline-ai-q.html My second post will become available later this week. Then I’ll take you on the tour how to deploy your own private chatbot and train it with the data we’ve collected before. 100% private free and local AI LLM powered Q&A chatbot at your disposal. 

DemoLet's rip the band-aid off, as I know most of you really just want to see it right?!  My ObjectivesBuild a Chatbot interface, nothing new here, but it's a hot topic right now Use the Veeam KB data as the primary data source,(the clean data didn't exist, but i built my own API for it as well as the scraping engine... you can use it too) Learn about embeddings, using the OpenAI models because they're super easy (and certainly at the time) to interact with Learn about Vector databases, I used Pinecone but there are like 20 more since Feb... lots of funding for startups in this space already Learn, have fun along the way, share the knowledgeI really just wanted to share the project with y’all, the techy-details about the various bits are over on my blog if you were interested!Let me know what you think, good idea? would you use it? How would you improve it?

Hello guys 😄Hope everyone are well ! In my side I'm in vacation 🤙. I wanted to share with you some tests done with the beta of Veeam v12 (build 12.0.0.817) and the incredible new feature backup directly to Object Storage.Object StorageFor my test I used Wasabi as cloud object storage. You can find really great posts about Wasabi:Wasabi is now available in the list of providers when you want to add an object storage repositoryWe have less information to enter, it's appreciable You will find your repository with Wasabi Cloud Storage Type. Backup JobThe advantages of this kind of backup are multiple:Financial: you can use on-prem object storage, object storage can be cheaper than SAN Built-in durability & reliability Reduce hardware to manageLet's take a look at the setup, because there are technical side effects.As usual you select your repository, the GFS part still available and you could configure a backup copy job if necessaryIn the advanced options, it’s simplified ! Bye backu

Hi everyone,some days ago I posted about TailscaleBetter than Just VPN for the Home LabNow, I will show a couple cases Im using it for:RDP to my lab Now, from my laptop and anywhere with internet access, I can connect to my “JumpStation” to get into my HomeLab, exactly! and it has a great feature called “Magic DNS” that it does call the remote machine from the Tailscale name, so no IP address needed. Remote access to my Lab Network Yes, you read it right it has a feature that enables the bypass / routing of the networks you have in the Tailscale host, so you can access that network from the remote connected device, in case you need to access a device that has not capability to install Tailscale in it, I use it to access my router, my center and my storage appliance. Proxy form outside routing my internet traffic. Exactly, now I can activate the “Exit node” feature that allows me to route all the client traffic to the “Tailscale” selected host to get to the internet, very useful when we