Blogs and Podcasts

The walkthrough of the official #VMCA 2022 practice exam question 40 is ready.“The one with the final question”. Thank you so much for watching the series. 

This week again taking a break from Kubernetes but will be back next week. Today a quick word about the R&D Veeam Forums and the Hub too. Honorable mentions @Chris.Childerhose @Mildur @hinmeister416 just to name a few.   

What? The Kube Vanguard posts a non-Kubernetes post, it must have been that asteroid we hit yesterday with the Dart Probe!  

Microsoft has announced, that they are disabling basic auth on October 1st, 2022 for all tenants. It doesn‘t matter if you use it now or not. It gets disabled after October 1st, 2022. From the announcement post:Today, we are announcing that, effective October 1, 2022, we will begin to permanently disable Basic Auth in all tenants, regardless of usage (with the exception of SMTP Auth, which can still be re-enabled after that).Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-and-exchange-online-september-2021-update/ba-p/2772210 How is this relevant to our Veeam Backup Office 365 Installations?Today, Veeam can backup Office 365 data without basic auth (modern Auth Only).But this has some limitations. You can find them in this post:https://www.veeam.com/kb3146As soon basic auth is disabled from Microsoft, vbo servers with organizations and „modern authentification with legacy protocols“ or „basic authentication method“, backup jobs will most likely st

Modern business requires a Modern Data Protection solution that not only allows for the backup and recovery of core infrastructure, clouds, and applications but enables the lowest possible operational overhead through advanced automation, monitoring and orchestration. With Veeam Modern Data Protection, your critical data such as Microsoft 365 Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint online will be protected with just one integrated solution. However, Veeam also offers Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 as a standalone product to protect and restore Microsoft O365 data, including Office 365 mailboxes, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, and Teams. It allows you to timely back up your data weekly, daily, or as often as every five minutes.Here is a guide on why is it imperative to protect Microsoft Office 365.As of today, data is the most critical resource and valuable currency in the world. In Cyber Security, we refer to data as the New Oil. This Forbes link will highlight more on this

Wasabi recently released their Wasabi Cloud NAS offering and you may wonder, like some of the SEs I work with, if Veeam can protect its shares.The answer is: YES, of course!If that is all you need to know then you can stop reading, else keep scrolling down. IntroductionWasabi Cloud NAS is presented as the “Bottomless NAS file storage”.It installs as a service on a windows server and offers a nice and simple UI allowing you to configure your replication and offload policies.Based on these policies, the service will only keep small stub files on local disk. It is 100% transparent to the end user, extremely simple to use and with zero egress/ingress fees from Wasabi, makes for an attractive/interesting NAS solution.How can we protect it? That is what you are about to find out.In this post we will explore some basic backup and restore operations, list some caveats around offline extended file attribute, discuss what happens when you leverage Wasabi Cloud NAS’s file versioning and Complianc

Again, we have a cool opportunity to win some cool gadMicrosoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft.gets. Register with Veeam for a chance to win a Canon Camera or other great prizes, and a Free T-Shirt. Enter To Win Great Prizes with the following registration link: https://bit.ly/veeamplusmicrosoft After registering, do not forget to share on Social Media to gain extra entries, make sure to use the following hashtag #VeeamatMicrosoftIgnite2022. This piece was shared on the following link1 and link2.For some of us that are not so familiar with this event, Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. You can register via the  the following link: https://register.ignite.microsoft.com/.By registering any participating in the event, you will be able to explore the latest innovations, learn from product experts and partners, level up your skillset, and create connections from around the

If you had this on your 2022 IT bingo card, well done, you probably should try the lottery. If you’re less psychically gifted however, this announcement is slightly bizarre. Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re intending to retire their Basic SKU IP Addresses. Here’s everything we need to know. Basic SKU only, Standard SKU Unaffected It wouldn’t be much of a cloud if we couldn’t access it, so don’t worry, only Basic SKUs will be impacted by this change. Microsoft have announced that on the 30th September 2025, Basic SKU IP addresses will be retired.Further, from the 31st March 2025, you won’t be able to provision new Basic SKU IP addresses. How do these SKUs differ? Static/Dynamic IP AddressesAll IP Address allocations are static within the Standard SKU, whereas the Basic SKU offers Dynamic/Static for IPv4 and Dynamic is the only option for IPv6. Security ModelStandard SKU IP Addresses follow the ‘Secure-by-Default’ model. This means it’s mandatory to utilise a Network Security G

Alt Text: Header Image with the text “In the Lab With: Veeam”, subheading “Breaking the Consolidaiton/Merge Stalemate For VMware vSphere & Microsoft Hyper-V”Have you ever seen a snapshot/checkpoint fail to merge? Maybe VMware vSphere was telling you that a virtual machine required consolidation, or Microsoft Hyper-V reported that the checkpoint couldn’t be merged. Whatever the reason, it’s a painful situation.Or should I say, it’s a painful situation, ONCE you notice! And IF you don’t, you have a disaster approaching. Why Snapshots/Checkpoints are bad in the long-term If you need bringing up to speed as to why we don’t like snapshots/checkpoints sticking around, here’s the non-exhaustive, good to know key points:Snapshots/Checkpoints make the original virtual disk a read-only file, and all changes from the snapshot/checkpoint creation point forwards are saved to a ‘delta’ virtual disk. This will consume more storage space. Snapshots/Checkpoints cause increased IO penalties, reducin

I just want to share two tips for the VBR console that can make life simpler. Both of them are related to the live job protocol. I made two GIF files to illustrate them better.Historic viewFirst is to show not just the current running respectively last run, but also log of all previous runs. This can easily be done be using left and right courser keyswithin the log viewer. This looks like this: Last 5 minutes vs. all time performanceSecond is to simply switch performance graph between last 5 minutes and all time view. This can be done by just clicking into the graph. I hope you find this useful as me!

Finding Indexed JobsWhen many users start with Veeam, they turn indexing on for everything not understanding what it does or that it requires Enterprise Manager. The environment I inherited had this exact issue.  I have modified the jobs that the file servers are still indexed for quick search/restore but here is a handy little PS command to find all of the jobs using indexing on your Veeam Server. Script Get-VBRJob | where {$_.GetVSSOptions().WinGuestFSIndexingOptions.IsIndexingRequired -eq $True}   Listing all VM backup sizesAnother helpful PS script is to get the size of all of the VM backups. I often want to know which VM’s are taking up the most room, and having a total of the VBK’s and VIB’s without doing math on 30+ incrementals.This will gather all the required info and can be exported if needed. If you have multiple repositories the jobs may show up more than 1 time as there will be a separate entry for each repo.  It’s still a great way to charge back to the VM owners.    Scr

Hi everyone,  For a possible upcoming project on the Veeam Community Hub I am looking for someone who has a feeling with Automation. While I cannot share much about the project just yet, I am looking for someone that would have time to assist me and probably someone else in organizing events, blogs, content etc. Please reach out to me with an DM if you are interested

In other topics I have talked about how to make a Veeam On line design, but ... For those who continue to use visio, I leave here the Stencils where you can download them for free …https://www.veeam.com/es-lat/vmware-esx-stencils.html?ad=in-text-link   

In the past years, IT has changed dramatically. The pandemic accelerated Microsoft Teams and overall Microsoft 365 adoption, Office co-authoring surged, and organizational data found its way to all sorts of cloud apps.In this webinar, Jay Gundotra (from ENow Software, the fabulous Karinne Bessette (Technologist at Veeam) and I discuss how things have changed from their perspective.Working with organizations has offered us many insights in the way people think. While discussing our experiences, we found three common myths:We have a 99,99% SLA. Monitoring Microsoft 365 is unnecessary.Procurement is in charge of managing Microsoft 365 licenses. They’re in control.Microsoft takes care of backups as part of Microsoft 365. We don’t have to do anything in that area to ensure business continuity. Most organizations believe these myths to be true, but they are not. 😆In fact, it’s dangerous to assume these myths are true in this cloud age, as they may result in downtime and data loss at a highe

CT4 has a vision to create and distribute world-class software products that control and protect data while also translating data into meaningful insights, clear actions and measurable outcomes for their clients. Dan Pearson and I talk about how CT4 have evolved into a data centric company with three products in market.Dan and I also talk about their IoT offering Canopy and how data has become central to all offerings that CT4 do. 

During troubleshooting a backup environment, it’s common the necessity of test ports responsivity of our backup servers, like Veeam backup server, mount server, proxy or repositories.We normally do that with telnet. However, by default telnet client is not installed during Windows Server and the Veeam Backup Server often is our principal component our backup infrastructure.So, if you want to test some communication port without install telnet client, you can use PowerShell for it.Use the sintax below:Test-NetConnection -ComputerName <IP> -Port <port>Here is an example for the command:An interesting point is that if the communication port is not well succeeded, the utility make an aditional ping test: 

The sequel of part 3 and last part 😄  How it works with Linux or shared folder repositoriesAs example : we connect a USB disk to a USB3-port at a NAS-device that is shared as a SMB-shareIn that scenario it’s behaving differently (it uses a limited version) than when using a Windows Server repository.Why limited?VBR keeps only information about the latest backup chain.So how is this performed :VBR creates the first time of course a full backup file on the currently attached disk, afterwards it creates incrementals until you swap or the number of configured restore points! It checks if the current chain is consistent, if so it will create a new incremental restore pointIf you swapped the disk, the chain is not consistent and will create a new full. Even when there is already a previous backup chain present. If forgets all information about former backup chain. So as before, I configure the job again with 7 to 10 restore points.So what will happen in the scenario of 7 restore points and

I hope, this post safes you the time I spent to figure this out.Normally I do not install Veeam Enterprise Manager (EM) unless there is a use case - like indexed file search. With it, EM can search a index - created at backup time. So no mount of restore-points is necessary to find files in backups. For more information see here:https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/em/understanding_search.html?ver=110According to my knowledge, index search is able to lists all file-versions in selected time range. For this you have to filter your search:ProblemIn multiple VBR v11 + EM environments I had the situation that index search results shows just latest file version in result. I spent some time to troubleshoot, ask colleagues, recherche. Finally I get an answer in R&D forum:https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/search-not-behaving-like-i-would-expect-t72642.htmlShort answerIndexed search should show all file versions. This feature is broken in v11 and will be fixed. 

As promised part 2 of a 2-part topic regarding rotating USB disks 😉.But after writing this topic I had to devide it 2 separate parts because of the limitation of 50.000 characters 🤣😏 You can read the first part in OFFLINE backup copy using rotating USB disks – part 1 | Veeam Community Resource Hub As already mentioned in part 1, using rotated USB disks is a possible and affordable way to have an offline or airgapped backup copy. If you keep them offsite, the two times 1 of the golden 3-2-1-1-0 has been completed!In this part I will go a bit deeper in this topic.I will split it into 4 sections : LimitationsWhen using a repository with the rotating drive option, you have some limitations you have to keep in mind. Those are :On one managed server, you must create only one repository with rotated drives It is NOT possible to store archive full backups (GFS) with backup or backup copy jobs It is NOT possible to use per-VM backup files It is NOT possible to rescan the backup repository NF

Today I received a great surprise in my email from Madalina Cristil (@MadiCristil), the manager of the Veeam Community Legends program, and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) that I was renewed into the 2022 second intake.You can find out about the Veeam Legends program on the Community Hub here - Veeam Community Hub.It has been a great first year in the Legends program, and I was happy to contribute to helping the community. I look forward to another year and meeting many of the Legends in person at the #Veeam100 event in October.There are some great benefits to being a Legend -As a part of Veeam Legends, you’ll be eligible for unique content, NFR licenses, private betas, prelaunch briefings, Veeam R&D insights and, of course, awesome Veeam Legends swag!But one of the most significant benefits is being part of a community to share knowledge, experience, tips, tricks, etc.  I know this from already being in the Veeam Vanguard program for the past five years.So if you are interested, check

One of the things that we have in all our projects and backup environments are Backups Jobs.After deploying all components and servers on our Veeam infrastructure, the first thing that we do is the creation of our backup jobs.Thinking of that, I write this post telling you what is the main nomenclatures that I’ve been used on my Veeam Backup & Replication. B2D - Backup to DiskBackup jobs that we use to send data to any disk repository. B2T - Backup to TapeBackup jobs that we use to send data to tape libraries. B2C - Backup to CloudBackup jobs that we use to send data to cloud. On V11 we need a SOBR to send data to public cloud like AWS, Azure and GCP. However, if we have a Veeam Cloud Connect repository, we can send data to this kind of 'cloud' and use B2C name on backup job. BC - Backup CopyBackup copy jobs we often use to make one or more copies of data between repositories or sites. LTR - Longe Term RetentionBackup copy jobs we can have to attend a long-term retention on data ar

As a system consultant I often implement solutions for customers in the SMB market.Working for the SMB market is often more challenging than working for the enterprise market because of the limited financial budget/investment. I always try to deliver a solution that is as good and secure as for customers of the enterprise market but of course with other and cheaper solutions 😉. Of course VEEAM is always being used as the software defined backup solution 😊. For me personally the golden 3-2-1-1-0 rule is one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating a good backup solution for the customer.More info about that you can read in one of my first posts : 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource Hub In this post (part 1 of 2 parts) I explain a bit more about implementing the second 1 in the rule – offline backup.One of the solutions is using rotating USB disks.This is specifically for backups of VMs and/or backups using agents of physical/cloud objects.In part

Just two weeks after the release of Veeam 365 version 6a, Veeam has released the first cumulative patch P20220825 (build 6.1.0.254). This patch fixes two issues which have been discovered in the 6a GA release. While, according to Veeam, those issues only affect less then 1% of the v6a users, it’s still recommended to install the patch. A backup of Security groups, Distribution groups, M365 groups, and specific users may complete with the warning: Nothing to process When this occurs no restore point is created for such objects.Note: Depending on the job configuration, the job may complete with a Success status, and the problem may occur unseen Under certain conditions, a backup job that includes SharePoint, OneDrive, or Microsoft Teams objects may run longer than expected, and the processing of lists may complete with the warning: Failed to analyze list changes. Value does not fall within the expected range. For more information and to download the patch, visit the following KB: https:

I case you haven’t seen. There are currently two ongoing surveys from Veeam; one about the Help Center and the documentations, the other one about the livestreams (Industry Insights, TechBytes). So in case you want to share some feedback on those topics, here’s your chance:Veeam Help Center: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JFBXD2HVeeam Livestreams: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VeeamStream22A Sources:https://forums.veeam.com/post461204.html#p461204  

50 Episodes of GTwGT celebrating with a great interview with David Friend, CTO of Wasabi... he is a very engaging and smart individual... really knows what he wants Wasabi to achieve. Learnt a lot about what makes them tick.