Blogs and Podcasts

These days I had to troubleshoot poor VMware vSphere SAN transport mode performance during backup with Veeam. Before SAN mode, NDB transport mode was used. NBD outperformed SAN mode totally!Here are some facts about the environment.EnvironmentVMFS volume are hosted by two HPE 3PAR arrays in a synchronous replication configuration (Remote Copy) with Peer Persistence. ESXi hosts are running on different versions. Backup (here: Veeam Backup and Replication) is installed on a dedicated physical host. This host is connected with 10G LAN and a single FC uplink to one out of two fabrics.Backup performanceThe used backup mode in this environment was NDB transport mode. This was because the physical host wasn’t equipped with a FC HBA. To improve backup performance a HBA was installed. To run direct SAN backup, a few configuration steps are necessary:Add MPIO feature to backup server, Configure MPIO for 3PAR by running: mpclaim -r -I -d "3PARdataVV" FC switch zoning, Exporting all LUNs to backu

After watching last week’s Community Recap, I realized that I missed a great blog posting from @regnor about setting up Wasabi Immutable Storage for VBR.  After reading this information, I realized that I, as a smaller service provider and MSP, require a more complex configuration to host multiple tenants in Wasabi and was inspired to share my configuration for setting up Wasabi when you have multiple tenants under one account that you don’t have to have accessing each others buckets.The magic lies in some S3 IAM policy work in place to prevent buckets from being visible and accessible to the wrong tenants.  When I was setting this up, there wasn’t much information for doing exactly and S3 policies were completely new to me.  Using Wasabi’s and Veeam’s instructions in the links and the end of this post didn’t work for me out of the box, so after asking around in the Veeam Community, R&D Forums and Veeam Subreddit and some experimentation, I was lead to the answers I needed.  I hope

As I posted some time back my third book came out and thank you to all that are buying it.  Packt conducted an Author interview with me regarding the book which was very interesting.  If you want to read the interview you can find it in the link below and if anyone is interested in writing a book or have thoughts on it just reach out.  I am debating a fourth book but might see about a co-author(s) for it this time around, but we will see.Packt Interview - Chris Childerhose - Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication (Third Edition)

Requirements and Limitations CDP has a set of requirements and limitations. RequirementsThe following requirements apply to CDP:CDP is included in the Veeam Universal License. When using a legacy socket-based license, the Enterprise Plus edition is required.For supported platforms, see Platform Support. For supported source and target datastores, see Veeam CDP Source and Target. All hosts in a cluster must be of the same major version: 7.x or 6.x (6.5, or 6.7, or a combination of 6.5 and 6.7 is supported). In turn, all clusters managed by the same vCenter Server must also be of the same major version. VMs on the same cluster must be protected with CDP only by one backup server. The machine where the backup server resides must have at least 16 GB RAM. VMs that you plan to protect must not have snapshots at the moment when the CDP policy starts for the first time. Network between infrastructure components required for CDP must be 1 Gbps or faster. For high loaded systems, 10 Gbps and MTU

Greetings, today I wanted to share with you some amazing news. I am talking about an unofficial Veeam icon library for Excalidraw.Excalidraw is a tool that helps you draw technical diagrams with a great hand-made look, made every diagram much more user-friendly, as it really looks like if somebody has drawn it with their own hands.After a few months, and many nights on this, I have finished adding around 60+ Veeam unofficial shapes in total that have been carefully created inspired by the official shapes. Sorry to repeat myself, but again, these shapes are unofficial and not linked in any way to Veeam Software, use them, edit them, change them as you like.How do the Veeam unofficial shapes for Excalidraw look like?These are all the icons I made manually, they are ready to use, and I hope they are enough for your diagrams:How to Import the Veeam unofficial Excalidraw Icon LibraryThe process could not be simpler, open Excalidraw on the browser of your choice, remember that Excalidraw doe

I have been a Veeam Vanguard for six years and Veeam Legend for just over a year and was fortunate enough to have attended the VeeamON 2017 event in New Orleans and VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas, which was fantastic.  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 VeeamON 2023 event was in Miami, which I attended in person, and it was amazing.  Besides the great weather and hotel, there were many sessions, networking, a VeeamON playground with the Veeam Community Booth, Lab Warz, Hands-on-Labs and the legendary swag shop.Fontainebleau Miami Beach - Pool with VeeamON logo  VeeamON 2023 Digital Display in the lobbyAttending VeeamON is one of the best events if you want to learn more about backup and what Veeam is all about. From use

Disaster’s happen and businesses need to be ready for them. If 2020 taught us anything, it might be to expect the unexpected. Sometimes we can’t plan for the unexpected, but when it comes to data and applications businesses depend on, planning for the unknown is critical. Whether it be a natural disaster, a data outage or a ransomware attack, businesses need to remain online, and by creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan now, it can save us later. One technology that is included in this type of plan is failover. Utilizing replica failover can help achieve the best Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) by having a copy of your VM in a ready to start state.  If your new to Veeam, you might be unsure of the different failover capabilities it has to offer. Throughout this post, I will walk through Veeam’s failover capabilities and describe their meanings and benefits of each. Introduction to Failover Failover is a process in which you seamlessly switch operations from the sour

IntroductionPure Storage released the FlashArray//C (FA//C) as tier 2 storage back in 2019.  The FA//C uses QLC NAND flash drives to deliver flash performance near the price of spinning disk.  The FA//C reduces costs further by applying several data reduction technologies including compression and variable block data deduplication.  Pure Storage FlashArray//C should be considered as backup storage for Veeam Backup & Replication due to its high performance, and immutable SafeMode snapshots to protect the Veeam backup repository data.Veeam Backup Repository Decompress settingI recently had several conversations about whether the Veeam backup repository Advanced settings -> Decompress backup file data blocks before storing (Figure 1) should be turned on or off. Pure Storage is advocating that Decompress be turned on to allow the FA//C to apply its full range of data reduction capabilities to Veeam backup data.  This is how backup repositories are configured when they are backed by

 I had to share this - I really enjoyed watching it, @Julia F Morgado ! It got me back to that moment! And many of the V100 members are included in the story! Great job! 👏

Alt Text: Veeam Backup & Replication + Oracle - RMAN Plugin Unexpected ThrottlingI’ve just resolved a case with Veeam Support that I wanted to share.I was working on a project that was protecting Oracle RMAN databases on an IBM AIX platform, and the performance unexpectedly dropped.During testing, all had been fine, but when we came to the migration, the backups were taking a painfully long time. We backed out of the change and began to review.This blog post is a write-up of the troubleshooting steps we took, and what the root cause was.Firstly, we looked at Veeam’s statistics screen to review where Veeam perceived the bottleneck to be. Veeam reported an extremely high value for both the source and the network as the bottlenecks, with the target being idly waiting. We tested RMAN backing up to a local disk for comparison as the database team were saying that RMAN was awaiting further transmissions and found that it was backing up extremely fast to disk. A job that would take 30 min

I was able to solve this challenge in a project and would like to share the findings. The challengeConsider you want to restore Exchange items (e.g. mails, calendar objects, etc.) using Veeam Explorer for Exchange as well as Veeam Enterprise Manager.Consider also, that you have a larger multi-domain infrastructure with the VI and backup infrastructure in a sub-domain (infra.mydomain.com). For security reasons, we are not able to reach the GC of the root domain. The mail addresses are derived from the root domain though (myuser@mydomain.com).This might lead to the situation that neither Veeam Explorer for Exchange nor Veeam Enterprise Manager can determine the CAS server of your Exchange environment, as they want to contact the GC in charge first. This is even if they can easily reach the CAS itself. You can observe this in the corresponding logs (%programdata%\Veeam\Backup\ExchangeExplorer\Logs): 13.04.2023 15:35:39   15 (17156)  Looking for mailbox 'myuser@mydomain.com' in Global Cata

Title Image: ‘Veeam Backup & Replication - Linux Agent Deployment & Management with Active Directory’ against a colourful background.Veeam Backup & Replication has some nice out-of-the-box features for Veeam Agent management if you’re using Microsoft Windows or Linux Operating Systems. I don’t like talking about a possible solution though until I’ve tried it for myself. This way I can gauge the problems that’ll occur by how I’ve tripped up in testing.This brings me to the topic of today, Linux + Veeam Backup & Replication Agent Management.Nowhere within Veeam’s documentation could I find references to what was/wasn’t supported for creating an Agent Protection Group. I see this as a potential risk, without stating which operating systems you can target via the mechanisms such as Computers from CSV file or Microsoft Active Directory Objects etc, how do you know if it will actually work? I could add IBM AIX servers to a CSV file, but that won’t work in reality as I’d need

Wonderful initiative for Community and Friends.You have probably heard Danny Allan announcing at Veeam ON: Veeam Software people believe in empowering and enhancing female talent and support a more diverse environment across our ENTIRE ecosystem that is why 150 women will participate to a FREE VMCE Training.If you are interested or if you know the perfect candidate this is the registration link! 💚https://go.veeam.com/women-in-it-empowerment

Hi Folks,I just wanted to share some of my experiences and thoughts after the trip, and sitting now and reflexing of them after a crazy week! (My Inbox was packed! as many of you I guess)Lucky me, I have the “privilege” to meet and flight with @jos.maliepaard  and @mkevenaar!We met in Madrid, and instantly starting chatting and discussing like we knew each other for some time! awesome!The flight was “looooong” and we made it to Miami evening, soo tired and hungry!Back to the hotel, we were not in the mood of having dinner, so we went for a couple of drinks after the check in! The days were great, the hotel had amazing pools, ambience, people around 24x7, and I started realizing were I was located at, Miami, Florida, USA!! OMG!Next day, getting ready for registration, I met @Scott , and instantly we connected and starting chatting and exchanging time, ideas and interests! amazing buddy!The only bad thing, I can highlight, I lost my voice, I gave my best effort to continue chatting and s

Hi Folks, One topic that I don’t think has been addressed or discussed is VeeamON in relation to all of our many duties and responsibilities. How do you fit it in? How do you deal with the extra stress levels? VeeamON was a success and thoroughly enjoyed by all who attended but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that it did not add extra pressures in our daily lives. First of all some of us might have to convince the  bosses of this world that a trip to VeeamON is not, as the British would say just a “Jolly” i.e. vacation have fun only party. Yes we have fun but there is a lot of intense activity and knowledge transfer back and forth. I personally come out of VeeamON with my head exploding with new ideas and initiatives that I have gained from the sessions but even more from simple in person one on one conversations. Then there is the fact that no one is taking away the day job. Some of the folks there were having to simultaneously work during the conference or after hours. I

Now we have a specific best practice for Veeam Backup Cloud Solutions: https://bp.veeam.com/vbcloud/

For all those that could not participate in the "VeeamOn2023", share with us your best moments in photos so that all can enjoy them visually.Pour tous ceux qu'il n’a pas pu participer au  "VeeamOn2023" , partager-nous vos meilleurs moments en photos afin que tous puis en profiter visuellement.  

At VEEAMON 2023 in Miami I had the opportunity to talk about a certain topic during a Tech Talk. At first I would like to thank @HunterLAFR and @JonahMay for joining my session and making it a interactive and informal talk!For those that have missed it, I will give you in this post a recap about the content of this session. As already said, the idea was to have an informal and interactive talk about a certain topic.The topic I have chosen was : Powering Off-Site backup a at Service Provider.The session had several elements :  IntroductionAt first we introduced ourselves.Who are we, from which country, working at a partner/service provider or at a customer. 3-2-1-1-0 golden backup ruleI explained the importance of implementing the 3-2-1-1-0 golden backup rule.It is very important to protect us against ransomware, disasters and other attacks.The topic of the day was the offsite backup copy. Different approaches for off-site backupThere are different possibilities to implement a off-site

One of the many features that Veeam Backup and Replication provide to ensure an organization can successfully recover their backups every day and in case of a malware emergency is the ability to scan your backup images for latent malware before they are restored.  This goes beyond the ability to scan for possible entropic encryption of a server during backup by scanning for the malware that has caused the encryption. If an infection is detected then the restore can be aborted, or the server can be restored but not get connected to a network.Secure Restore is the name of the Veeam Backup and Replication feature that does the malware scan before restoring. Secure restore can restore Windows servers fromVMs from any hypervisor  Physical servers that are protected with Veeam Agent for Windows. From backups stored on immutable block storage. From backups stored on immutable object storage. From backups stored on NFS/SMB shares Secure restore can be run before recovery is performed from the

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

Hi Folks, Next in my “Beware” series 😂.. Beware of podiums. Why? Because podiums are generally slanted. So if you have practiced your presentation over and over again at your desk, and your presentation involves CLI work (think Kubernetes Kubeclt or K if you using aliases) then you will be entering a world of fun since you fingers are used to typing on a keyboard that is flat and not slanted. I got used to it but I was nevertheless struck by shame. The typos were flowing and I could just hear the audience whispering, “wow this person can’t type, and he is too old too blame the cell phone thumb typing condition like all of the younger generation do”.  My poor High School Grade 10 typing teacher would be heart broken. She disliked me so much for goofing off in class that she would force me to stay after and finish the tasks which in turn massively improved my typing skills. However, when doing live presentations in front of people, no matter how badly you mess up (be it typing, or lousy

Hi Folks, I recently was lucky enough to be chosen as an Auth0 Ambassador. However, I am still very much on the initial learning curve when it comes to identity management so have signed up to a few udemy courses and pulled out the documentation. When starting a new path it is always nice to take your first steps in familiar territory so I decided to try out leveraging SAML2.0 for Veeam Enterprise Manager. First we need to create a free Okta developer account: Then we will create a new app integration: VEM (Veeam Enterprise Manager supports SAML 2.0 so that will be our choice here:We need to give it a name:Next we need to enter our SAML settings. I used a laptop where I have a test VBR setup:These two settings (Single Sign On URL and Audience URI can be found in VEM here after you have ticked the Enable SAML 2.0 radio box. Don’t worry about the other settings we will import them later. Save the SAML settings in Okta then open up the App page: Further down on the right hand side you wil

Hey Everyone,A big evening in Toronto IT yesterday and Veeam was there. First @michaelcade and I went to Okta to take part in their Devday23 event (got some nice swag too!), then we had dinner with @Julia F Morgadoand headed to the Pre Kubehuddle meetup where I met some Kubernetes royalty! Of course everyone knew Julia and MIchael so I just used the occasion to shamelessly introduce myself :) . Joking aside I have to note Veeam/Kasten is making its presence felt! I saw no other backup vendors anywhere near these two events. Kubehuddle has  literally a Veeam invasion happening with Julia Morgado, Cassandra Farris, Michael Cade and of course humbly representing the Vanguard/Legend community me :). I believe these efforts are well worth it and are going to pay off. When people need backup in the Kubernetes community there first thought will be Veeam/Kasten! 

Hi everyone.If you missed it, Microsoft just released H1 2023 for Exchange Server 2019. Included in this release is the ability to use Modern Authentication in an Exchange Server only environment. In Case You Missed it, What is Modern Authentication? There are numerous resources describing the functionality of Modern Authentication in technical detail, but my goal here is to provide a conceptual overview of Basic Authentication vs Modern Authentication. Basic AuthenticationBasic Authentication, as the name might suggest, is a simplistic form of authentication. A client attempts to communicate to a resource that is protected, and the resource requests a username & password, you supply a valid username & password, and you’re granted access to the resource. Every time you want to access this resource, you need to provide the username & password. This was actually one of the main driving forces behind security considerations such as mandating HTTPS on websites, to avoid credent

 I’m returning to the VeeamON (virtual) stage this year, and I wanted to catalogue my journey within the Veeam Community so far and give thanks to the people that have helped me get to where I am today.I’d been working with Veeam products for about 7-8 years at the time, and I’d seen the Veeam Forums, now known as the Veeam R&D forums. I’d asked a few questions in there, but it never really felt like a community. The relationship within the forums was that of a customer and business. Someone would seek advice with a problem, or request a feature, and a member of staff from the Veeam forums would reply. Very transactional.Then, during the infamous lockdowns of 2020, Veeam launched their “Veeam Live” Event. During this event, Veeam revealed their new “Community Hub”. I remember frantically writing down the URL “community.veeam.com”. And I had no idea at the time how much my career was about to elevate.As the event concluded, I opened the URL to see if this was a long-standing platfor