Blogs and Podcasts

With v12 you can add VMs to a global exclusion list. These VMs will not be backed up. Even if explicitly added to a job.  Nice new feature for all those VMs that aren't worth backing up.

IntroductionIn a previous post, I covered the SOBR Capacity tier Calculations and Considerations. Today, I will be exploring the Archive tier and discuss how to estimate Archive storage requirements, expected API calls and Proxy Appliance uptime. Before we jump into more details, remember that the Archive tier only works with “Amazon S3 Glacier”, “Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive” and “Microsoft Azure Archive Storage” in Veeam v11. In the SOBR configuration, under Archive Tier, you define after how many days (1) you want to free up space from your more expensive capacity tier by offloading to the typically** less expensive Archive Tier.**Keep in mind that the Archive tier is meant to store data for a long time (i.e. more than 1 year, up to 7 or more years). It is not meant for active day-to-day restore operations.You will find that storing data in the Archive Tier for less than 1 year won’t make much economic sense (at least at the time of this write-up!). It is also very important to re

I would like to revive my old “what else is new” series I did for VBR v11 some time ago. This time, it is about v12 - what else?First part is about the new integration of Linux Hardened Repository. This was one of the greatest new features in v11. To bring the repository to VBR it was necessary to create a Linux repository and enable immutability. With v12, Hardened Repository is added by a new option: But there is more! With this, you can just add the repository with single-use credential. That was highly recommended in v11 recommended. Furthermore, after adding a Hardened Repository, immutability is enabled and cannot be disabled.  … even with PowerShell. I like it! Also because this increases security. If a hacker enters the VBR server, it is not possible to disable immutability any more. Check my post about how to monitor these settings with Veeam ONE.

Microsoft have recently released SQL Server 2019 CU16, and in this blog post I’m calling out a very specific bug that Microsoft have addressed, and the implications this has to business-as-usual operations. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) & Compressed BackupsMicrosoft have been tracking a bug related to using TDE and compressing backups, impacting both database, and log backup types. Should you attempt to restore a compressed backup of a TDE database, you’ll likely receive a message similar to the below:Msg 3241, Level 16, State 18, LineThe media family on device 'BackupFileName' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family.Oh dear. This isn’t good! Prior to CU16, Microsoft’s workaround was to simply not compress your backups. Before we proceed any further, I also want to call out that I’ve not yet heard of any examples of Microsoft retrospectively fixing these backups, so if you’re currently in this dangerous scenario, mitigate ASAP. SQL Server 2019 CU16 Re

Yesterday I saw the error a second time, so I thought it would be helpful to others to share.Error happens when VBR tries to read vSphere information for the VM to back up. Error says "Error in the application" like you see in the screenshot.After some troubleshooting we found the reason for this. It was because TCP-port 902 was not allowed (in all firewalls) from the Veeam proxy server to the ESXi host that was hosting the VM to back up. After the port was enabled in the firewall(s), backup ran without further issues. Notes:Used ports for VBR see here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/used_ports.html?ver=110 Vanguard @Cragdoo also shared this error some time ago. In his case the error was caused by a name-resolution problem on a new Linux Veeam proxy server.I hope this post safe others some time when this error appears.  

By default, VBR does a configuration backup every day at 10:00.It is obvious that this backup should also follow the 3-2-1(-1-0) rule. A easy way to do this is to copy these restore points to a machine that is already backed up be Veeam and therefore covered by the 3-2-1(-1-0) rule. This can be done with a Veeam File Copy job. This job can copy files between systems part of Managed Servers.Lets do it and create a File Copy job:and select the path to the configuration backup as sourceFor destination select the server system you want to copy files to. As mentioned, this system should be part of backup job. Finally select your preferred time schedule. I would recommend to run this job just after the configuration backup.Done? Almost! It is important to know, File Copy job copies files respectively a directory, but is does not synchronize. Therefore the amount of files at the destination will increase. So they should also get deleted after some time otherwise partition runs full. A easy wa

Opening up CDP for DRaaS…enabling tenants to replicate Tier 1 workloads at ultra low RPOs from on premises locations to one of thousands of Service Provider Clouds efficiently and cost effectively.Veeam is bringing #DRaaS to the masses in v12 and here is a preview of what is in store when it is released.

Hi Folks I decided to take a fork in the road and discuss Veeam 12 briefly in Kasten Konnekt so putting this in the general area :)   

Some kind of funny: A new kind of ransomware was found in India. It does not demand a ransom but donations like: new clothes to homeless, feed kids in branded pizza outlets and provide financial help to anyone who needs urgent medical attention but cannot afford it. If victims can proof good actions, they receive decryption kid. Please don't misunderstand, I am still against cyber attacks like Ransomware, but at least the needy here have something out of it.https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/goodwill-ransomware-detected-in-india-makes-victim-donate-to-poor-provides-financial-help-to-needy-patients/articleshow/91736850.cms

Hi everyone, Did you know it’s possible to access the full desktop editor from a mobile device? I don’t know why all the options are hidden by default but it’s really easy to get them back. All you need to do is change your zoom settings on your web browser. I’ve only tested this in iOS but check my GIF below and you’ll see all the cool options appear when I hit 50% zoom.Want to return to the mobile optimised editor? Just increase your zoom level back to default and everything will return to normal! You can do this dynamically whilst making your post, no need to refresh the page each time!

  Today Veeam have launched the new Veeam Backup for Office Microsoft 365 v6! That’s right, it’s had a slight name change to align with Microsoft’s rebrand of Office 365 to Microsoft 365. Excited and want to check it out? Download it here. Veeam have also updated their Helpcenter ready to explain all the new features. As always, Veeam have accompanied this release with a set of release notes, available here.In this blog post I’ll be going over the key new features and also any key insights to be aware of as part of deploying Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 or upgrading to v6 from an earlier version. Key Information Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Server:Straight away, I want to highlight that the CPU requirements have changed. Veeam are now recommending 8 cores as the minimum for v6, up from 4 cores in v5.It’s the same story for RAM, v6 now requires 16GB as a minimum, up from 8GB. There is a discrepancy between the release notes and the Helpcenter documentation with regards to VMs wit

Veeam storage functionsIs Veeam the most significant storage company that no one knows about? One of the essential features of any Veeam Backup and Replication architecture is the storage hardware that the backup target or backup repository will sit on.  The repository performance, features, and scalability are critical to ensuring that the Veeam deployment will meet customers' needs for quite a while.  Unfortunately, this is the component that many customers tend to make bad decisions, usually due to VARs and storage vendors trying to make the backup decisions for the customer.  This is easy for the partner and storage vendor community to do because, as we all know - we at Veeam pride ourselves on the fact that the Veeam Backup and Replication suite is a software-defined and hardware agnostic backup storage platform.  The partners, storage vendors, and even customers don't realize that Veeam also has another tag ling used internally - "Veeam is the largest storage company that no one

The Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP products supplies an effortless way to protect workloads running in one of the hyperscale public clouds. Workload protection is done by taking native snapshots and copying snapshots to object storage for a defined period. A full instance recovery and file-level recoveries can be performed from the backup. But this only scratches the surface of what Veeam can do with a cloud-based backup.  To use advanced storage functions like Instant VM recovery directly to an on-premises hypervisor, full instance recovery into another hyperscale cloud, or copying backup files to an on-premises harden repository will require Veeam Backup and Replication to be integrated with Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP through what’s called an “external repository”.  The Veeam Backup and Replication external repository is a read-only connection to the Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and GCP object-based storage repository. It allows Veeam Backup and Replication to perform

IntroductionObject storage vendors all have configuration considerations that must be accounted for as part of the process of designing Veeam backup repositories. Some of these considerations can be limiting, while others simply help dictate architecture decisions. In this post, I discuss on-premises vendor considerations, and how Veeam job settings can make an impact.To accommodate for vendor specific on-premises Object Storage Device limitations, it is sometimes necessary to adjust Veeam’s storage optimization settings. Every on-premises Object Storage vendor may express these limitations differently, but it usually boils down to the ability to handle large amounts of object metadata (and therefore number of objects) per bucket and/or device.In our experience, using larger storage optimization settings (job block size) with on-premises Object Storage devices typically works best. The bigger the storage optimization settings, the bigger the average object size which means less objects

Hi, I realised that nobody has ever mentioned the Veeam Custom Search tool on the community hub, and I wanted to make sure everyone knows that this tool exists. http://vee.am/VeeamCustomSearchFirstly, what is it?It’s a custom search engine powered by Google that focuses on delivering results from the various Veeam resources.The primary page of that link is deceptively simple, to the point you might think the page hasn’t loaded, you’ll just get a search bar that will present search predictions based on Veeam searches.Once you’ve searched is where the magic happens, you’ll see results from a variety of Veeam focused sites. Such as the R&D forums, the Helpcenter, whitepapers, KB articles, news room, blogs, videos, GitHub, and success stories.You can use this to filter down what type of content you’re after, and easily find what you’re looking for across the various sources of information that Veeam have available. Give it a try the next time you can’t find what you’re looking for, it

Just read the announcement of Anand Eswaran: Veeam Is Now The Tied #1 Data Replication & Protection Provider Worldwide! https://www.veeam.com/blog/number-one-data-replication-protection-provider-worldwide.html Veeam has reached the status of being tied as the #1 provider worldwide during 2H’21 in IDC’s data replication and protection market.Nice global data:#1 in EMEA #1 in LATAM #3 in APJA part for this great success is certainly also the strong community 

 Hi everyone I'm sharing this kind of configuration aimed to strengthen the security of immutable data backup against ransomeware attacks or possible 0 day \vul of the O.S. Linux used to deploy a Hardened Repository.Thanks to Veeam, it is now possible to perform immutable backups via Hardened Repository.This technique aims to safeguard the databackups saved on Raw LUN Volumes of a storage in “Locked Volume” mode on Hardenend Linux based repositories.The combo is to use the Hardened Repository to which present a RAW LUN Volume formatted in XFS to support block cloning, in this case Infinidat + the functionality/utility Snaprotator, allows to schedule a snapshot of one or more Volumes in "Locked Volume" mode.Tested also the restore, re-presented the Snapshot Volume on the Hardened Repository, the only trick is to force the change of the UUID of the Raw Lun, if not it is not mountable by the O.S. because of duplicate UUID.InfiniBox SnapRotator User Guide – INFINIDAT Support Find out if yo

Morning, Just a quick one from me today I wanted to share.I was playing with VDRO, and scratching my head as I was playing with restore plans, but I couldn’t find a very crucial step. ‘Prepare DC for DataLab’. It’s documented here: Prepare DC for DataLab - Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator User GuideI’ll quote the key text as to why we need this:This step is required for a domain controller to be started in a test lab environment. This must always be the first step for the domain controller in a lab group.This step ensures the VM will reboot to exit DSRM (Directory Services Restore Mode) and therefore will function correctly as a domain controller in the lab. Seems pretty important right?Well, when I went to create my restore plan, I couldn’t find it, even the Veeam documentation doesn’t show it within the list:After a lot of head scratching, turns out, I was missing something that is a bit light on helpcenter documentation! You need to define this at the DataLabs level:Once added,

Today I’ve noticed that Veeam have released the full upcoming agenda for their premier data protection event: VeeamON 2022!I just want to talk through some of the personal highlights I spotted from the agenda.Hands on Labs (Virtual & In-person) Veeam Backup & Replication v12That is not a typo, Veeam must be feeling pretty confident about the shape of v12 by now as next month they’ll be allowing hands on labs of this unreleased product. Check out the description below:In this lab, you will be working with a Veeam Backup & Replication V12 environment where you will learn the basics of Veeam Backup & Replication, test out some of our upcoming new features, and perform typical Veeam backup operator tasks though an interactive step-by-step lab guide.I can only speculate as to what upcoming features will be available to test, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Veeam have been cooking up since v11 launched last year. Veeam Backup & Replication with Immutable Linux Hard

 Hi all, I share the lab I created to test the CDP feature.HW List:VmwareServer: 4 UCSC-C220-M5SX - VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 15256549 VCSA 6.7.0 15129973 Storage: Dell Storage SC 5020 VBR+CDP-Proxy Source 1x4 vCPU – 16 Gb RAM CDP-Proxy Target 1x4 vCPU – 16 GB RAM System Requirements - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com) Requirements and Limitations - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com) Backup Infrastructure for CDP - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)Deploy & Configure  CDP proxy VBR on source & target Vmware datacenterDeploy & Configure  CDP proxy on Target DCInstalling I/O FilterInstalling I/O Filter - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)KB4096: VeeamCDP I/O filter installation fails with “The agent’s workflow is blocked” erroresxcli software acceptance set --level CommunitySupported on all your Esxi.07/10/2021 10:53:39 Error    Installing CDP components on cluster: CDP-Source... Error: The operation is not allowed in the current state.The operation is

Most of you probably already know or have heard this statement: Snapshots are not backups! Just last week a German hosting provider did lose 1500 snapshots because of failing hardware. And who hasn’t experienced some horror stories about (forgotten) VMware snapshots. Because of that I wanted to highlight this with a dedicated blog post. What is a snapshot? In general a snapshot is a frozen point in time state of a certain system or data. While we're often referring to snapshots in case of virtual machines, there are other variations like storage or file snapshots. For virtual machines, snapshots set the virtual disks to read only state and redirect all changes to a different disk file(the details may differ depending on the hypervisor). They can be used for quick rollbacks or during VM backups. Normally those are only created temporarily(or at least the should). Storage or file snapshots can be used for versioning and can also be replicated to different systems; those tend to have a lo

You can think what you want about Facebook, but they operate a massive amount of compute and storage unites. And it seems, they have some scientist investigating interesting phenomenon like this. To be honest, it is not primary backup related but in the second instance it is restore related 😀Briefly summarized:They found out, CPU can perform computations incorrectly. So it comes to silent data corruption by CPU. According to their observations these failures are reproducible and not transient. When you think about data-reduction technologies like compression this really can cause problems. As the following article describes, these corruptions occur at scale. Interesting is also how they test their hardware.Read more details here:https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/03/18/facebook-investigates-silent-data-corruption/

I have been a Veeam Vanguard for five years now and was fortunate enough to have attended the VeeamON 2017 event in New Orleans, and it was fantastic.  Great sessions, lots of networking and meeting more of the Veeam folks as well as Vanguards.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 event is back in Las Vegas in the hybrid mode with in-person and virtual attendees.  It will be the first event since 2019 in Miami that will be back to live attendance which is a great thing.  In the last couple of years, with the COVID pandemic, the switch to all virtual has left many people feeling disconnected, including me, so getting back to being able to speak to people and share technology stories will be great.One other great benefi

​It's been almost a month since the release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6. If you're looking for all the details of v6, then check out @MicoolPaul’s post: Until now no bigger problems were discovered or reported. There's only a known issue, that the CPU load in idle is higher then usual; no big issue, but if you want to solve that, there's a hotfix available: https://www.veeam.com/kb4294 One change, which didn’t get much attention so far, is the newly designed setup: I really like the new fresh look, compared to the old setup. It’s clean, modern and good looking. And it also updates the Veeam Explorers during the setup/upgrade process; in previous versions, those had to be manually installed. Want a comparison to the old setup? Here’s how it looked in v5. What do you think? Which setup is the better one?​

Hello to share a new vulnerabilitySpringShell attacks target about one in six vulnerable orgs (bleepingcomputer.com)(1) New Messages! (checkpoint.com)Spring4Shell: Detect and mitigate vulnerabilities in Java Spring | Dynatrace | Dynatrace newsWhat is Spring4Shell?Spring4Shell is a critical vulnerability in the Spring Framework, an open source platform for Java-based application development. Because 60% of developers use Spring for their main Java applications, many applications are potentially affected.Spring is popular because it enables software engineers to more easily write and test code to maintain modular applications. Other libraries enable developers to become less dependent on enterprise web servers and, therefore, reduce configuration complexity and cost.Spring4Shell is one of three vulnerabilities published on March 30:Spring Core RCE (critical): CVE-2022-22965 a.k.a. Spring4Shell or SpringShell Affected library: org.springframework:spring-bean Information exposure in Spring