Blogs and Podcasts

Here I am talking about backup encryption, which is performed by Veeam. Not by a hacker. It is a good idea to enable this feature.Why to monitor this? A attacker could enable backup encryption or change existing encryption key without being noticed. If so, backup jobs continue to run without any problem. But you are not able to use them for restore because you simple cannot decrypt them! For monitoring encryption password changes reports Backup Objects Change Tracking and Backup Infrastructure Audit

This week I had the opportunity to do a presentation at a nice executive briefing with a number of our key partners and customers. I love hearing from the field and it is nice to have those authentic conversations.I also like to know what is the latest from other brands in the industry. I live and breathe backup, but like all technology. One of the presentations today was around networking hardware solutions. The first 15 minutes of the presentation were focused on explaining the delays in confirming part availability, lead times with products, supply chain challenges with various materials and components. I’m sure some of these challenges exist across the board in enterprise and consumer IT devices.Right at that moment it dawned on my how awesome Veeam is in this current conditions. Software-Defined, Hardware Agnostic and Cloud-Ready. This is more valuable than ever as it dawned on me that Veeam has from the start taken Data Portability very seriously. Consider some o

I know, this topic does not fit that well here, but today is Pi day!  As I once studied mathematics, I am still very interested in these topics. Because this day is celebrated all over the world with funny activities and jokes, I hope some of you can get some fun out of it. At least it is a interesting topic at some cocktail parties See some jokes here:https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/g35447831/pi-day-jokes/?slide=1Direct examples:

Hello,In this article I will tell you about the Veeam Instant VM Recovery feature.We follow our backup processes, we send our backups to different locations, we take backups to tape cassettes, right?We must apply the 3-2-1 rule in our infrastructure. We can return our backups; Well, can we provide service with performance and working as soon as possible in times of crisis?What is Instant VM Recovery?Instant VM Recovery restores your virtualization platform by running the virtual machine directly from backed up files rather than keeping users waiting for hours. Thus;Short recovery times (RTOs) are achieved.Downtime is minimized.Downtime of critical virtual machines is minimized.How does it work?Instant VM Recovery uses vPower

 Since we launched Veeam Community Hub one year ago, 11,199 members joined and we are very happy to see new members engaging, sharing the knowledge and helping each other.Community is rapidly growing, and I thought it would make sense to create a guide with the best practices on how to use community: what category to choose, what type of content to go with, what to do and what not to do.Let’s look into that!Veeam Community Hub is owned by Veeam Legends and Veeam Community. It’s community driven property. If you would like to talk to Veeam PM or submit a support ticket, please reach out to Veeam Support or Veeam R&D Forums All content in all categories apart from User Groups is in English. If you feel more comfortable with your

"Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication 11" is now in publication (since February 2022) and is ready to order either the book or e-book/kindle.Well, since writing my first book on v10, I debated to myself about writing the update of the book to v11.  It took me some time to process and think about if I wanted to do it, which I then took the plunge.  This time, the process was much smoother as I had already done the first book and understood the templates, formatting, etc.  The team at Packt worked with me again and my busy schedule to create something I think that everyone will enjoy reading.  Whether you are a newbie with Veeam or a seasoned expert, you can learn something I think from this book.Protect your cloud, virtual, and on-premises environments by implementing Veeam's powerful backup and replication technologyKey FeaturesGain in-depth knowledge of CDP and Hardened Repositories to use in your virtual environment

Cloud adoption continues to increase as organisations are either taking their first steps into the cloud, or progressing their IT strategies, whether it’s a full cloud migration, multi-cloud or delivering a hybrid architecture.A great workload to leverage the cloud has been as a backup repository. By using the cloud, we can meet multiple improvements to our 3-2-1-1-0 minimum strategy for backups. In case you aren’t familiar with the 3-2-1-1-0 strategy, it is:3 copies of data, across 2 different backup media types, 1 of which must be off-site to the production environment, 1 backup at least must be offline or “immutable”, with 0 backup validation errors. Security BoundariesOne threat that the 3-2-1-1-0 strategy doesn’t cover explicitly is the concept of security boundaries. It is entirely possible to achieve all 3-2-1-1-0 objectives purely

A Veeam storage plugin needs to control your storage device in a way. Therefore you need a user account inside your storage system. The same of course is true for the DataCore plugin.From a security standpoint one always wants to have only the least amount of permissions to be allowed to the user. Avoid using a global admin here to minimize your attack surface!Here I will describe how to achieve that with the Veeam storage plugin for DataCore:First create a new role inside your DataCore console. In the screenshot the permissions to attach to the role are shown:Veeam storage plugin for DataCore - Role permissionsOnce the role is setup, you

Recently, I had to create a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan for my organization. It’s actually quite surprising none had ever been created. Part of that is on me since I’ve been here long enough to have done so, and am responsible for most of the systems we would need to recover in the event of a disaster. But let’s be honest, creating DR Plans isn’t one of those “exotic” tasks a Systems Architect likes to do. Working with and playing with the tech we manage is what we get excited about! Regardless, it still *needs* to be done. One may ask why does creating a DR Plan need to be done? It may seem obvious to most, but some it may not. I thought I’d answer that question here, as well as provide a “skeleton” list of items to consider when building out your own DR Plan.First, having a DR Plan brings a sense of “calm” for the IT staff. In the event of a disaster of any sort - site outage; mal-intent via ransomware, disgruntled employee, or major hardware outage; etc - chaos can

An attacker can not immediately delete or change backup files located on Hardened Repositories. But with more time the attacker can do some damage. So it is important to keep a regular eye on it. A efficient way is to monitor Hardened Repository with Veeam ONE v11a. In this version some enhancements have been added which we will now take a look at. Monitoring immutability enabledWhen Veeam hardened repository is setup correctly, immutability is enabled and a appropriate number of days is chosen. When an attacker has access to the backup server, he could try to disable immutability. After some time all backups would be free to delete or modify. Therefore it is important to keep it enabled.In Veeam ONE v11a there is a new alarm for checking the state of immutability: Immutabil

Are you backing up your Office 365? And… why not?I’m not going into the lengthy and exhausting discussion of why you should take care of your data, even if it’s stored in something unbreakable like “the cloud”, at least not in this post. I would like to focus on one of the features of the new Veeam Backup for Office 365 v4, which was released just the other day. This feature is “object storage support“, as you may have guessed it already from the title of this fine post!So, this means that you can take Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage or even 

For some reason and to come to speed with all the Veeam components, I decided to revive my Veeam Lab and during the process, I encountered the following error “Error 1064 - An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request : No connection can be made because the active machine rejected it “. Before I proceed to fix this issue, I would love to discuss the capabilities of Veeam for anyone that may stumble on this article. Veeam Backup & Replication is comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution that provides a centralized console for administering backup, restore, replication operations in all supported platforms (virtual, physical, cloud). Regardless of what your needs are ranging from flexible hybrid cloud capabilities from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, or the most robust ransomware protection and recovery options. Veeam brings hardened immutable storage options, dependable cloud-native backup options

I had some – in review stupid – error with an backup of a single private computer with the free version of the Veeam Agent for Windows.I had told the owner of this machine to use the Veeam Agent for backup, because it is free and reliable. That I am using the products of this company professionally and didn’t have much problems with them and that they are very easy to use.So this poor little owner downloaded the agent, installed it and configured a backup job according to the procedure and recommendations I have given to him.The he tried to run the backup and after a short time – BANG Error.He called me and told me that there is a problem. I asked him to send the error message to me and I will have a look at it.19.02.2022 14:29:59 :: Error: Shared memory connection was closed. Failed to upload disk. Agent fai

This post is about a not working application backup that does not show any errors. I share this because it could easily happen without notice. It is about a backup of a MS Exchange VM. Backup worked fine but Exchange wasn’t backed up as application and therefore logs wasn't truncated too. Exchange was a single system, configured without cluster feature. After the job run, there was no option to restore Exchange Application Item, like you see here with SQL Server.  Essential with application backup in Windows VMs is a triggered VSS snapshot. This can be done by Veeam Guest Processing or VMware tools quiescence. But when there is no VSS writer registered for a specific application, no application backup will be performed. Don't get me wrong: whole VM - all files within - will be backed up, but application itself will not. Therefore it is not possible to restore application by right-click appropriate restore point. Which can be overcome by starting the appropriate

In case you missed it, VMware is currently offering a FREE 12-month access to the VMware Customer Connect Learning Premium Package. The catch? You must sign up before October 31st, 2020 so don’t delay!While you will get access to all the content from the basic subscription which includes free access to for example:1.357 videos 67 eLearning courses Fundamental courses VMware Certified Associate training

Great news! The pre-registration for VeeamON 2022 is open!https://www.veeamon.comThis year VeeamON will be a hybrid event, which means you can either attend virtually (for free!) or in-person. If you go for the later you’ll have to hurry as the seats are limited (1500). Also there’s a bonus option to add VMCE/VMCA training for a very good price. If you need to justify the costs for attending the in-persion event and the training, there’s even a templat

Based on my original script from 2020 where I created a vCenter role for Veeam Backup & Replication with PowerCLI, I decided to do the same for Veeam ONE. You can find the other script for VBR here:As a result the blog post here with the new script was born !This PowerShell / PowerCLI script lets you create a new vCenter server role with all the cumulative privileges and permissions to use them with Veeam ONE V11.The privileges used are based on the recommendations out of the Veeam Help Center which you can find here: Connection to Virtualization ServersSimply execute the script and follow the steps to fill in the relevant data. Most importantl

Error message is about a missing restore point for a certain VM. Because of this catalog replication job fails.  Cause and solutionOne possible cause is the deactivation of VMs guest indexing in backup job during a period of time when Enterprise Manager did not have access to the VBR server. In a specific case the password of the user that was used by Enterprise Manager to communicate with VBR server was changed.Fortunately, the solution here is also quite simple. At least I found a quite simple way to solve the problem. You need enable guest indexing and run the backup job. After this run make sure catalog replication runs without an issue. Now you can disable indexing again. From now on catalog should be replicated without problems.

Hey everyone, ACG are offering some free training courses again this month, some of them are looking really good!Disclaimer, haven’t watched all of the courses yet, but wanted to share early enough in the month that everyone gets a chance to review! AWS: AWS EssentialsIntroduction to AWSIntroduction to the AWS MarketplaceHow to Properly Secure an S3 Bucket

As the headline suggests, Veeam recently released a “version 3a“ of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure.Whilst there are your usual mixture of security fixes and bugs resolved, it actually brings a new (and welcome) change to the licensing structure around protecting Azure SQL workloads (not to be confused with Azure virtual machines running SQL Server). Licensing Per Server, not Per Database It’s not unusual to see Veeam adapt their pricing models over time to provide better value for customers. We’ve seen this historically when, for example, Veeam adjusted their NAS licensing to increase the amount of storage protected

The following error can occur in Veeam Enterprise Manger during catalog replication. Catalog replication is needed to transfer guest indexing information from the VBR server to the Enterprise Manager server.By default, replication task runs automatically after each backup job. You can trigger it manually within Enterprise Manager GUI. Just enter the Configuration section, select Settings and press Update Now.Log files can be seen beneath Sessions.Meta-file errorThis error is about the meta-file that does not contain a certain attribute.

The walkthrough of the official #VMCA 2022 practice exam question 39 is ready.Are you starting to see a flow in how to answer the questions?The final video in this series will be available tomorrow :-)

I was recently made aware that Veeam have released the 2021 edition of the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) exam. If you’ve already got a VMCE 2020 certification, or have taken the VMCE 2020 training course within the past year, (or even been lucky enough to already take a seat on the VMCE 2021 training course) you’re eligible to take the exam.To take the exam simply head to the VMCE certification page, sign in with your company email address that was used for either your training course or previous exam and you should see the below.Description: An image showing the VMCE certification page with a button labelled “Manage VMCE 2021 Exam”Simply click on “Manage VMCE 2021 Exam” and you’ll be taken to the PearsonVUE website to organise eit

Hi Folks, I think I remember hearing that Veeam was coming out with their own Self Service Portal for O365. I can’t remember where I heard this (VeeamONUpdate?). Does anyone remember? And would this be based on the previous unofficial Portal that was on the VeeamGitHub site? cheers Geoff