Blogs and Podcasts

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Is your company 3-2-1 compliant? What do you consider as two different media types? One could argue at lot of options is “disk” in the end, but is HDD one media type and SSD a different media type? What if it is two different physical servers running Windows, is that two different media types?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

In this week's episode of #HomelabWednesdays, I show you how to migrate your domain controller and VMware vCenter Server to a new network without issues.Don’t forget to subscribe to get automatic notifications whenever a new video is released. 

I wrote already a post about checking Microsoft ReFS space savings. Now I want to show some basics to check XFS savings too.To check space savings on repository layer go to the repository directory and run: ls -lhsYou can see the size of each file and the total size of all files. If there a way to much files, run ls -lhs | grep total Compare this to the size allocated on the volume. To show this, run df -h In this example you see space savings of: (86 - 35) = 51G Another way is the use the command xfs_bmap. It works on file-level and is very technical. I am still not sure to interpret all output correctly. At least it can show, reflink works!To show all extents of a file, this command can be used:  xfs_bmap -e -l -p -v -v -v filename. Here also additional information like a legend is displayed.I made a small script to show the size of all shared extents of all *.vbk-files. But do not overstrain it, its experimental.#!/bin/bashfor f in *.vbkdo echo "File $f size of shared extends:" xf

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. How do you handle consistency during backups? Do you enable application-aware processing for all VMs? What about pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts? Do you have VMs where crash-consistent backups are sufficient?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

Hello Community,Pretty much every week I have the same question, or comment, regarding how to create a Data Protection system that scales, it is flexible in terms of adding workloads, and dynamic so every business owner can add workloads without any difficulty.If we look at the diagram of what I just described, it could look like this, where a few Proxies are protecting an specific SLA, another three are protecting another a bit more aggressive SLA, and finally a physical Proxy is protecting the tier1 workloads using storage snapshots and SAN Backup Mode.We will make use of the flexibility and integration with VMware vSphere Tags, so we will need to create all of them under VMware, under one, or more categories, like this:On Veeam Backup & Replication they will look like this, so create a job with a name, then we add the desired tag:Selecting the Proxies we want, with the retention we want as well:And the schedule of course:Until you have something similar to this:Now, back to VMwa

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Do you have different subnets/networks on your disaster recovery site(s) than your production site(s)? How do you handle re-ip for restores from backups or replicas today? What about non-Windows?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

Recently I had problems by upgrading Veeam from 9.5U4 to v10. Upgrade process failed after a while. We found out, directory C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup lost its permissions. We had no change any more to enter this directory. Short answer: Antivirus software causes the problem. After disabling real-time scan, upgrade run without further issues. Antivirus software was configured according Veeam best practices.

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Do you have replication jobs leveraging a backup repository as a source? Which compression level do you use for off-site transfers?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. How are you monitoring if RPO is being acheived today? What about RTO? Regular restore tests?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

Applicability and efficiency of each transport mode primarily depends on the type of datastore used by the source host — local or shared, and on the backup proxy type — physical or virtual. The table below shows recommendations for installing the backup proxy, depending on the storage type and desired transport mode.which one do you use?                                                                                                             

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. How proficient are you with the replication process on Hyper-V or vSphere? What is done by the source and target data movers?Try this question and more at https://rasmushaslund.com/vmce-practice-exam/

In this week's episode of #HomelabWednesdays, I show how to see if any updates are available for your VMware vCenter Server and how to install the updates using the vSphere Appliance Management Interface (VAMI).Don’t forget to subscribe to get automatic notifications whenever a new video is released. 

Yesterday I got an error for two oracle databases which are backed up via the VEEAM RMAN plugin.Strange - there are several database instances on this system, all but the two are working fine. And these two had worked up to then, too…And… I did not change anything in the VEEAM and plugn configuraton  After some discussion and research with our Oracle admin - bingo.He had moved these two databases to another Home directory and did not change the corresponding entries in the /etc/oratab. So - as shown in the picture - the backup of the database and the recovery logs worked, but the creation of the AUTOBACKUP failed and the ORA-01012 error was given.After the entries were corrected all worked fine again.Perhaps some of you will face similar issues, too. I did not find anything for this problemin the forums with a quick search.

This is going to be a quick post on how to backup a single OneDrive folder with Veeam Backup for Office 365.One of my customers developed an internal policy regarding the usage of OneDrive for Business.The policy is, that each user has a specific “Work” folder (root folder) which gets backed up with Veeam Backup for Office 365. All other folders are not backed up and the users do know that. So in this scenario we needed a OneDrive backup job, which backs up the whole organization with the OneDrive object and only includes that work folder.By the way, you are also able to exclude specific OneDrive folders by using the “-ExcludedOneDriveFolders” variable.However, in my case here it makes more sense to only include that specific folder.The scenarioI recreated that scenario with my own Office 365 Tenant, whereby I selected to only backup my webhosting folder. If you didn’t know it already, the ability to exclude or include specific folders for OneDrive backups is only available by using Po

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Have you been in a legal situation that demanded an export of a specific point in time of your backups to ensure data is not compromised or lost? How did you handle it? 

Did you know you can easily schedule your disaster recovery tests to run with Veeam Availability Orchestrator?Orchestrator’s Lab Calendar makes it simple to run a DR test on a scheduled basis whenever you want - like on #DRTestTuesday.The best part of course, is being able to provide a copy of a production environment to your application owners when after the test has run.Just think of what you can do with a copy of your data - test patches and application upgrades, train new staff members, and do all of the testing you would never want to do in a live environment.Be sure to check out how easy it is to do right in the Orchestrator documentation.If you’re looking for the ultimate deep dive on everything testing (including running a DR test on demand and scheduling one in the Lab Calendar) in Orchestrator, don’t miss this great webinar which is nearly 100% demo (no boring PowerPoints from me!) and tackles Orchestrator’s amazing dynamic documentation as well.  As part of every DR test you

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Are you protecting transaction logs? Do you push out the runtime from your backup server or a guest interaction proxy? Do you make copies of your transaction logs to a secondary location? 

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Are you making backup copies? How did you determine what your operational restore window is/should be? What is the oldest backup you had to restore from? 

Register here: https://go.veeam.com/veeamlive-enThe agenda looks amazing, but you definitely do not want to miss out on these sessions:Customer panel — Your Journey to the Cloud & Data Strategy (I personally love hearing real stories from real customers) Veeam v11: Top 11 hottest NEW features Can recommend signing up for v11 news here Some hints of what may be presented in this thread by @MicoolPaul  Cybersecurity Strategies for the Modern Era (presented by the always amazing @Rick Vanover and Europes #1 ethical hacker: Jamie WoodruffDo note, at the top there are different languages available which contain some variances in which sessions are available. The languages available are : English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian. One of the classic presentations by Jamie Woodruff: 

Give some thoughts to the interval of a report. Current week vs. Past week, here’s a view of how the interval can make a difference for the results.   I have the Veeam ONE Catch of the Day (#VeeamONECOTD) on Twitter, a nice way to get small nuggets of Veeam ONE stuff: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23VeeamONECOTD&src=typeahead_click  The Veeam reports are incredible visibility and it is a great way to get all the details you may need in another way!

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Do you use SureBackup today? If no, why not? Too complicated? Did you try the backup validator tool to check for silent corruption of your backup files? 

Best Practices  In my opinion it is very important to keep this best practice in mind  If the integration API is unavailable due to licensing restrictions, or if any other deduplication appliance is used, the appliance should be considered non-integrated.In order to optimize throughput for deduplication appliances, please use the following configuration guidelines: Job configurationThe following settings are configured in the backup job “Edit” wizard under Storage > Advanced. Options not defined in this table are optional and not related to backup repositories using deduplication storage.Setting Value Tab: Backup   Backup mode Incremental Create synthetic full backups periodically Enabled - if integrated Transform previous backup chains into rollbacks Disabled Create active full backups periodically Enabled - if non-integrated Tab: Maintenance   Perform backup file health check Disabled Defragment and compact full backup file Disabled Tab: Storage   Ena

What can I do, if the storage volume on which my Office 365 backups reside is corrupted, deleted or somehow lost ? That was the question I faced myself with. So I went into the lab to try out a few things ! In this blog post I’m going to show you how to recover a failed Veeam Backup for Office 356 repository. In addition to recover a failed repository, I’m also going to show you how to properly back up VBO repositories. Within this blog post, I will abbreviate Veeam Backup for Office 365 with VBO. Veeam Backup & Replication is abbreviated with VBR. However, lets jump into the lab and the scenario.The lab setupDue to the fact, that I still don’t have a “proper” homelab, I’m using VMware Workstation for this scenario.My lab environment for testing this case, consists of 2 virtual machines. One virtual machine is hosting VBR and the other one is hosting VBO.The VBO server itself, has an additional partition on which all backup repositories reside. All my backup jobs go into separate f

HPE and Veeam are connected by a long history. HPE VSA and 3PAR were the first storages support integrated hardware snapshots. Nimble and Primera are supported as well.See this Veeam Customer Reference Book to read about 7 customer stories. Involved Industries are: Fintech, Retail, Non-Profit, Manufacturing and Healthcare. Quite impressive stories with real-world values!

How many times has DNS been the problem? Well, Veeam Explorer for Active Directory’s Compare with Production capability may be a way to help you see if there have been changes in DNS. This is so easy to use, check out this video explaining how this works:You can also watch my Veeam Live session on Application recovery as well (have to register there however)​​​​