Blogs and Podcasts

Hey everyone,I wanted to share this recent blog post I made with yourselves as whilst it’s not directly related to Veeam, I was helping someone that had locked themselves out of a Veeam database and needed to take a native backup for a support case with Veeam.  I was recently helping a customer create a SQL database backup for a support ticket and noticed that they had an interesting SQL Server configuration. There was only a single account with sysadmin rights, the sa account, but this account wasn’t allowed to sign in. The SQL Server was domain joined but there was just a single group allowed with Windows Authentication and that had the “public” server role only.There are a few reasons this could happen, accidental permission changes, or groups and/or user accounts being deleted from the domain that had been assigned the sysadmin role

Hello There, I just wanted to share an issue I had on one of my customer to avoid others the problem:We setup a standard Veeam Backup & replication Server on a W2019 VM and a Std SQL 2019 on another one to host the DBs from VBR and Enterprise Manager.The DBA from the customer insisted to setup an alias for the DB server when pointing Veeam to its Database server as it’s their best practice to facilitate migration (He was obviously not aware how easy it is to move Veeam Database). So he setup a CNAME that pointed to the real SQL server.The setup went well using the CNAME. We created a “management job” to save Veeam by itself, VBR+SQL servers. The job detected the roles and proceeded as normal but failed on SQL VSS processing. We spent a lot of time to validate that permissions were right (the DBA didn't gave us the sysadmin rights on the backup service account, wise guy) and that the service account on the SQL

Today’s topic will be regarding Cloud Native workloads within Azure & AWS and how best to adhere to Veeam’s 3-2-1-1-0 best practices and how concepts can differ from traditional on-premises data protection. Remember the 3-2-1-1-0 best practice is a minimum desired standard and going above and beyond these minimums will help your data availability and recoverability objectives.The public cloud has provided a huge transformation opportunity for organisations, the pay as you go model enables organisations to deploy quickly and without the overheads of infrastructure management. But these platforms are still part of a shared-responsibility model, with a key risk that you retain being, the protection of your data.3 - Copies of Your DataLets start with the easiest one. Three copies of your data, including your production data. P

I took the time to create in Draw.io a client scenario., with the 3 cores components Backup Server - Proxies - Repositories would look as follows   Only one with Windows ….      

So, today I’m gonna show you a simple comparison with 1 VM per job versus 2 or more VM per jobs. On my scenario I have 2 VM for my Active Directory environment with 40GB size each.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------So, in first example I create 1 job per VM: In this shape it consume exactly 40GB on my repository: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In the second example a create a unique job for the same 2 VM’s:

Probably the following is widely known. But I did not know up to now and found out today. Maybe it is new for others too.After the Upgrade to v10, suddenly Linux VMs are not getting backed up any more, because defined guest interaction user was domain-based and could therefore not login into Linux VM. So solution would simply be to disable guest processing for this VM. Problem was, VMs were selected by vSphere Tags for this job. Fortunately solution is quite simple:Edit the job and got to Guest Processing and  click Application Here you can see the selected vSphere Tag. When you edit this line, options are set for all VMs this Tag was assigned to. Press Add → VMs and Tags → expand Tag of choice → select exception VM  

If you haven’t heard, Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator v4 (formerly known as Veeam Availability Orchestrator) is now available, and better than ever.Now VDRO can orchestrate recovery for 4 types of your protected data:Veeam CDP Replicas - NEW in v4 Veeam Replicas Veeam Backups Replicated Storage Snapshots (NetApp ONTAP and Lenovo ThinkSystem DM)This means you have the ultimate in flexibility and choice when it comes to protecting all of the data in your environment.  From mission critical apps, to those dev environments that would be nice to recover easily but are usually ignored for DR planning purposes, you can do it all with the same tool, the same way.It couldn’t be simpler to create a DR plan in Orchestrator.  Check out this video where I create a CDP Replica orchestration plan, run a readiness check, and launch a failover in less than 10 minutes.

Hey everyone!VMware released some unexpected news yesterday regarding the end of support for vSphere & vCenter 6.5 and vSAN 6.5 & 6.6. These were both originally intended to reach End of General Support (EoGS) this year, on the 15th November 2021. VMware are now extending this general support window to the 15th October 2022, no changes to the end of technical guidance have been announced.This date might seem familiar, vSphere 6.7 reaches EoGS on the 15th October 2022, meaning unless you have an extended support contract with VMware, this is the date you will need to migrate away from the vSphere 6.x platform by!VMware have kept things simple by extending the EoGS for vSAN 6.5 and 6.6 to this same date which also coincides with vSAN 6.7 EoGS.In summary, things are a lot more simple, on a vSphere/vCenter/vSAN 6.x release that isn’t already EOL? It will reach EoGS on the 15th October 2022 now.However, like so many freebies, there can be string

This is the second part of my SQL Instant Recovery posts. First part:I would like to list some of the software’s behaviors here.Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server is closed. One could gain the impression from the documentation Veeam Explorer does the whole work. This is not the case, if Explorer gets closed, just start it again. Mount Server, proxy or repository Server is offline. This is a problem, because these components are necessary for keeping your Instant Recovery database alive. Fortunately Veeam took this into account. So the system checks periodically (every 5 minutes) if needed components are online again and re-establish all connections.

One of the challenges that I have faced learning Kubernetes is persistent storage. It is a steep learning curve but one of the most essential areas elements necessary to make containers become a real force in the world of computing. There are many flavors of Kubernetes persistent storage and making the right choice for your workload and application s is no trivial matter.Would it not be nice if there was some helpful utility to test and validate my persistent storage setup?Well now there is thanks to Veeam Kasten’s Kubestr!As stated on its web page “Kubestr is a collection of tools to discover, validate and evaluate your kubernetes storage options.”Lets take a look at what this thing can do:You can download Kubestr here: https://github.com/kastenhq/kubestr/releases/tag/v0.4.13 I chose the Linux binary and downloade

Hello community,I don’t know if this is common knowledge (I guess all the hardcore Windows Admins hanging around here know this), but I think I share this, nevertheless.I have tried to back up a Windows 10 PC with a server managed VEEAM agent for the first time today (up to now there were Windows Server only). In this environment is no Windows Domain present, local users on all systems only.When I tried to connect to the Windows 10 PC from my VEEAM Server to create a managed server the connection was refused. No specific error message, it just failed… OK, I tried to ping the PC and to connect to it, all ok. Then I tried an administrative share and it failed, too. So, it seems not to be a VEEAM Problem, but a Windows problem…I did some internet research and found that the Windows administrative shares are not accessible by local accounts over the network since Windows Vista. OK, this is some time, but… when do you do such a thing?After s

This video goes through a simple deployment of Veeam Backup for AWS using a single IAM account with cloudformation. Includes backup policies, restore options and integration with VBR.  

Hi Team! For all of you have the same discussions with customers about security in Microsoft Office 365 i created a video to proof how easy it is to attack your Office 365 credentials and how to get access to your Data: Whenever im in discussions with customers about security of Microsoft Office 365 and why they should backup cloud-data, one of their “argument” is that Microsoft Office 365 is super secure. And to keep it short – yes thats true!But today i will not cover a backup focused topic! Lets concentrate on the customers argument.Have you ever asked yourself : What if someone got your login credentials (also with MFA!) and can access all of your Office 365 data?To be honest, my first mind was sure almost the same you are just thinking about : CMOOOOON thats a miracle ! That kind of hackers only exist in movies!What is better than tell customers how easy it is to hack their environment? Correct ! Show them how easy it is !So

This video is two-fold. For experienced VSPC users, we cover the new features in V5 and for new users, we will go through deployment, setup and a basic 101 walkthrough of the console! Keep in mind, end users who qualify, can use their own Cloud Connect Enterprise and the VSPC for their own internal environments for free!  

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 beh

As you probably have already noticed:VMware released vSphere 7.0 U2 recently This is currently not supported by Veeam. I want to share some important news for this new version that is relevant to backup. See this link for the complete list of core storage improvements:https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2021/03/09/vsphere-7-u2-core-storage VMFS SESparse Snapshot Improvements Read performance will be improved by redirecting reads to where data is located (chain or base-disk). Up to now, reads go through the whole snapshot chain and the base-disk. So when you read not-changed data, systems reads from base-disk directly, instead of checking snapshot chain as well.

At the last days I had an issue with job notifications not sent from the VBR Console after modifying the users and roles within the console.One of my clients demanded that the access to the VBR console has to be restricted to some explicitly defined backup Admins and no one else.So, I removed the local Administrators group from the list in the users and roles and added the personalized accounts of the backup admins.Fine, the backup admins can start the console and work with it, and all other accounts have no access…The next morning the admins told me that no job notifications were sent in the night. My first thought was that the colleagues responsible for the mail server and/or the fir

Borg and Kubernetes Since the CKA Kubernetes certification is a practical exam with no multiple-choice questions you must wait a day or two until you find out your result. I was on sitting on my back porch when I checked my email and saw the ‘Congratulations” in the title and I literally shouted, “I have Kubernetes!!”. My neighbor who is not IT savvy and witnessed my strange behavior immediately thereafter began doubling his social distancing measures with me. This was the “Covid19 summer” of 2020, and I realized that many people had no idea of what Kubernetes was and to be fair it does sound like something that you can catch.So, what is Kubernetes and why is it being talked about so much?To try and explain why this has become such a hot topic I like to think back to the virtualization revolution. It used to be that when a company wanted to add a new application server the process was a very long and labor intensive one. You had

As we discussed here earlier, there are 3 transport modes to get data from vSphere for backup.These modes are also available for restore. By default, first mode (order: SAN, Hotadd, NBD) that meet requirements, is selected for restore. For SAN direct mode, a requirement is thick provisioned disk type. You can select each available type (thin, thick eager and lazy zeroed) in restore wizard.My recommendation: If you want to leverage SAN direct mode, choose Thick eager zeroed! This option is much faster than lazy zeroed!I tested these settings in different environments. For example, I saw differences of67 % (150MB/sec for eager vs. 100MB/sec for lazy), 93 % (226MB/sec for eager vs. 16MB/sec for lazy).

Understanding Kubernetes Networking can be a challenge. A couple of years ago I was tasked to setup a distributed Minio instance running in containers for use with a Veeam SOBR S3 compatible capacity tier. At first, I thought about doing it on Kubernetes but very quickly realized that I was in over my head. I had no previous experience with Kubernetes and I could not just “wing it”. Among other things the networking piece I found especially hard to understand.In the end I created a Docker Swarm cluster which had a much easier almost “plug and play” overlay network and while that did the trick, I understood that simplicity also meant rigidity.Kubernetes follows the age old *nix (Unix, Linux BSDs and so on) philosophy of creating small separate entities that when brought together can scale into something very complex. Networking is no exception.While a Kubernetes cluster does come with some default networking called kubenet it is very limited and not meant

It is new in v11, but I do not have much detailed information about it.When you create or edit a backup job, you can enable High priority.The idea is to use this option to make clear this is an important job. So it can be started before less important jobs are started. It is not about job performance, it is about start time. Makes perfect sense to me! Under certain circumstances this feature will make job scheduling easier.At first this seems to be available for Backup and Replication jobs.

 Hi Folks,I have written up some quick instructions on setting up Minikube a single node Kubernetes cluster on your laptop. If I have missed something or if anything is unclear please reach out to me. The great thing about Kubernetes is that you can take it anywhere. If just want to familiarize yourself with Kubernetes and do some testing, then Minikube is an easy to install nonproduction single node Kubernetes cluster that you can install on your laptop. I am using my windows 10 Lenovo Thinkpad. First, we need to enable the Hyper-V role (or install Oracle VirtualBox if your laptop OS will not run Hyper-V) on your laptop. Mac users can use brew https://gist.github.com/kevin-smets/b91a34cea662d0c523968472a81788f7 To enable the Hyper-V role, follow these instructions:

I was thinking about building a lab at home to play, test and learn certain topics. But as my free time is very limited and I didn't want to ruin our power costs, I came to the idea to run a lab in the cloud.Advantages:low entry costs: you pay what you use/need flexible/scalable: resources are only a few clicks away ability to create different scenarios: offsite, DR, ... new technologies = more knowledgeDisadvantages:long term costs: as long as you're using/reserving resources you need to pay for themBeing a VMware guy I've looked for ways to deploy a vSphere environment or at least an ESXi host, but unfortunately the costs were much to high. Either I would have to go with VMware Cloud or rent a bare-metal machine to install ESXi myself; both are very costly.Hyper-V on the other side is easier to deploy in the cloud, without spending too much; as long as the b

CDP - Retention Policies A retention policy defines for how long Veeam Backup & Replication must store restore points for VM replicas. Veeam Backup & Replication offers two retention policy schemes:Long-term retention Short-term retentionLong-term RetentionVeeam Backup & Replication retains long-term restore points for the number of days specified in 

Today I coming here for a simple post about compression Veeam B&R. So, I take a short VM Linux running an Active Directory for this.  Below you can see a full backup with a compression set up as Optional. And now you can see the same full backup with compression option on Extreme. How you can see the duration time was decrease in almost 20 minutes when I compress backup on extreme option. The target of backup on this example is an offsite repository. It has a low bandwidth if we compare with a local one. So, when we are planning our offsite backup policy,  the extreme compression can help to get better times on your