Blogs and Podcasts

Big News compliance Junkies have taken over NKGG’s and JuniorJoe’s company!!NKGG’s and JuniorJoe’s company was grabbed in a hostile takeover. A group of venture compliance junkies are now at the helm. The firm is now call Drdisasters.com. They specialize in taking DR testing to the limit so that it conforms completely with a compliance junkie’s dream, that is, Drdisasters.com will test your DR Plan by creating real life DR situations for your company. The next time an auditor asks, “how sure are you that the DR plan will work?” you can answer well we burned down our server room and implemented our DR plan and it worked wonderfully!!Now more than ever NKGG had to finalize his Kasten authorization setup. Come audit time the compliance gang would surely drill him on every aspect and he needed full control. Time to ditch the external authentication service and create his own.After some research he decided on using keycloak and the bitnami helm chart:

Good day everyone !In November 2020 I created a PowerCLI script which creates a vSphere role with cumulative permissions for Veeam Backup & Replication version 10.In the meantime VBR v11 was released and I needed to update that script and wanted to create “new awareness” of it. The fact that I see A LOT of Administrator@vsphere.local users being used with adding the vCenter to Veeam makes me nervous, that’s why I wanted to fight against this with a simple script so no one needs to manually go through the privileges. Now there is no excuse to use highly privileged user accounts !This PowerShell / PowerCLI script lets you create a new vCenter server role with all the cumulative privileges and permissions to use them wi

This is a short story I recently experienced with a customer of mine…Some months ago we got a request from Veeam 😉 with an opportunity for a new customer. This customer was using a lot of standalone Hyper-V hosts in combination with Oracle databases and was using a competitor software as their backup solution.They were not happy about the stability of the product and neither about the delivered support of the backup-vendor. Therefore they were searching for other backup-vendors and of course they ended up at Veeam.They contacted Veeam because they wanted more information about the product and if Veeam could deliver a design that perfectly matches the requirements of the customer. Veeam transferred this opportunity to my company (being a gold MSP).The accountmanager of my company and myself had a meeting with this customer to know what their requirements were. Afterwards I created a d

Recently on July 21st, there was a new storage plugin release by @Veeam for the Hitachi storage arrays.  It can be found here - Veeam - Hitachi Plugin.  This plugin allows you to connect Veeam to your Hitachi storage arrays to leverage the SAN-based snapshots for your backups.  Hitachi has also released documentation which can be found here - Hitachi - Veeam Plugin.Hitachi Plug-In for Veeam Backup & Replication supports integration with the following storage systems:VSP E590, E790, E990 (93-03-01-60/00 or later), VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 (88-

A few days ago @Link State posted how to migrate MS AD-controllers using Veeam Replication. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to get to know the new vSphere Advanced Cross vCenter Server vMotion (XVM).What is Cross vMotion about?First, there is a difference between Cross vCenter Server vMotion (xvMotion) and  Advanced xvMotion. xvMotion was already introduced (and supported) for migration of VMs between vCenters within the same Single-SignOn (SSO) Domain in vSphere 6.0. With Advanced xvMotion it is possible to migrate VMs between vCenters in different SSO Domains!Advanced xvMotion is not completely new. Actually it exists for about 5 years

This quick and nerdy video is 10 mins long and shows you how to add a wasabi bucket to VBO365 and use powershell to migrate the backups from on-prem to the cloud.  

This is a recent research by security specialists of the Dolos Group to determine if an attacker can access the organisation network from a stolen device and also perform lateral network movement.They were handed a Levovo Laptop preconfigured with the standard security stack for this organization. No prior information about the laptop, test credentials, configuration details, etc were given. They stated it was a 100% blackbox test.Once the got hold of the device, they headed straight to work and performed some reconnaissance of the laptop (BIOS settings, normal boot operation, hardware details, etc) and noted a lot of best practices were being followed, negating many common attacks. For example:Pcileech/DMA attacks were blocked because Intel’s VT-d BIOS setting was enabled. All BIOS settings were locked with a password. The BIOS boot order was locked to prevent booting from USB or CD. Secureboot was fully enabled and prevented any

The Notorious Kube Genius Geoff had a problem.After saving the company's Kasten setup by doing a DR restore he was told that Junior Joe’s full access to the cluster would be removed but he still needed access to Kasten to perform his duties which involved only certain functions with policies.  NKGG referenced the Kasten documentation concerning Authentication and decided it was time to leverage Open ID connect to do this and in that manner limit Junior Joe’s access.https://docs.kasten.io/latest/access/authentication.html#openid-connect-authenticationThis was going to be no walk in the park. NKGG had never ventured into this area of IT before so he decided to read up on the protocol itself and found a great free resource:

Veeam Backup and Replication is comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution which is capable of creating image-level backups of virtual, physical servers, cloud machines, and restoration as well. The technology used in the product optimizes data transfer and resource consumption, which helps to minimize storage costs and the recovery time in case of a disaster. Veeam Backup and Replication provides a centralized console for administering backup, restore, and replication operations in all supported platforms (virtual, physical, and cloud environments).  The prerequisite requires you to have a SQL Server already running in your environment. Please see "how to download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2019

Recently, Lionel Gilles, a French-based Offensive Computer Security researcher based in Paris, France published a PoC tool on NTLM Relay Attack known as PetitPotam that exploits the MS-EFSRPC (Encrypting File Services Remote Protocol). PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect users. Here is an example of such documents: NT LAN Manager: How to prevent NTLM credentials from being sent to remote servers. Below are some related guides: Active Directory Authentication methods:

Windows 11 enables security by design from the chip to the cloud. Recently, Windows 11 was announced to raise security baselines with new built-in hardware security requirements that will give customers the confidence that they are even more protected from the chip to the cloud on certified devices. Windows 11 is redesigned for hybrid work and security with built-in hardware-based isolation, proven encryption, and our strongest protection against malware. Also, Windows 11 makes it easier for customers to get the most protection from these advanced attacks out of the box with the requirement of a TPM 2.0 chip to help ensure they benefit from security backed by a hardware root-of-trust. You may want to see 

Much has been said about backup and data protection. However, little is said about Backup Policy. In today's post I decided to address what are the aspects that surround a backup policy and why it is important to have one. What is Backup Policy?The backup policy is nothing more than a document that gathers all aspects related to the workload that the backup exerts on an IT environment. On this document we can gather all the information that is considered useful during the backup process or even during a moment of disaster that involves the failure of one or more IT services to operate. So I decided to talk about some topics that I consider important to include in any backup policy. Forget TemplatesA backup policy is a document about your backup routine. So, forget about any kind o

Hi all,a new 0Day vulnerability for Windows 10 clients has been released, the article also recommends deleting all the vss restore points and recreating themSecurity Update Guide - Loading - Microsoft

This video is part of a series to help MSPs get their veeam service offerings up and running. 10-15 minute videos. This one is on Cloud Connect deployment. What to deploy and where, basic sizing, and some tips and tricks.  

Yes, it is no backup topic. But because we discussed a reason for my testing here already:I thought it could be interesting. In this post I investigate what happens when a VMware vSphere ESXi host loses its boot device. This device is meant to be a persistent device. For non-persistent devices like USB- and SD-card, behavior is quite clear: whole ESXi OS runs in memory, no mass-write operations should be directed to the device. When it breaks, ESXi isn’t missing it and keeps running.With a persistent device I was convinced that ESXi would die when it broke. BUT: ESXi survives. Not such a clean behavior like with non-persistent devices, but it survived. Reason for testingThere is a concrete reason for this testing. I want to answer the question, if it is safe to boot a ESXi host from a si

Hi all,We all love VEEAM .But why is it called like that?Originally Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov founded Veeam in 2006.They called their company from the phonetic pronunciation of the letters VM (stands for Virtual Machine)!In the meanwhile everybody knows that the company is owned by US Insight Partners and has it’s headquarters in Baar (Switzerland) and in Columbus, Ohio (US). I think that this is too simple, the name V.E.E.A.M. stands for much more... VVirtual Machines / Virtualization. Yes correct, it all started at the beginning with monitoring and reporting for a virtual infrastructure.

Veeam ONE provides visibility into data protection and virtual environments. Alarms, reports, and dashboards provide real-time monitoring, documentation, and at-a-glance views of your environment. Veeam ONE is known for its proactive alarms and detailed reports, but there are also valuable dashboards that can be used by every business. Dashboards visualize various aspects of your environment, including resource utilization, performance issues and top trends. Dashboards can be viewed in a web browser, delivered to your email, or even integrated into web portals.There are pre-defined dashboards available immediately at your fingertips, but you can create your own dashboard views within Veeam ONE as well. The aim of this blog post is to walk-through the steps taken to create customized dashboard views. Getting startedThe first step is to decide what you want to see in your environment. Do you want to get granular and onl

In this quick quicktip I show how it is easily possible to show all jobs, a specific login account is used in. This can be very useful if you want to change the password or permissions of an account - to check involved jobs - or if you just want to clean up your configuration.To do so, open the Manage CredentialsTo show all jobs, just mouseover the account name. You see all jobs in popup: If account is used for no job, you see similar popup: There is also a popup, when mouseover the selected credentials in job: 

The importance of Veeam Data Movers  Veeam Data Mover performs data processing tasks on behalf of Veeam Backup & Replication, such as retrieving source machine data, performing data deduplication and compression, and storing backed-up data on the target storage.For Microsoft Windows servers, Veeam Data Movers are persistent, that is, Veeam Data Mover is uploaded and installed on a server only once. Veeam Backup & Replication automatically installs Veeam D

New Feature v11 Job FilterCreating Job Filters Editing and Deleting Job FiltersA job filter allows you to filter jobs by different parameters. For example, you can create a filter that will show only VM backup copy jobs.Creating Job FiltersTo create a filter, do the following:Open the Home view. In the inventory pane, select the Jobs node. At the top of the working area, click All jobs > 

Just read a post about Apple Time Capsule. According to a german data-rescue company there seems to be a design-fault of used HDDs. This fault may lead to mass extinction because of hardware damage. Affected devices Time Capsule devices of the 5th generation:2TB ME177Z / A with Seagate Grenada ST2000Dm001 3TB ME182Z / A with Seagate Grenada ST3000DM001Recommendation: Safe your Time Capsule data Maybe switch to Veeam Mac Agent Here is the translated article:https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.03

I spent some time in testing a new great feature in v11: Hardened Repository. Read here about:What is immutability is about Requirements Setup How it works What is immutability is aboutImmutability in this context means, a backup file cannot be changed or deleted without having root access within hosing Linux OS. So, even the backup administrator is not able to delete backups on such a repository.Why is this important? Think about ransomware. This software is that smart these days, it is able to recognize backup systems. It can trigger tasks like deletion of backup files. But when they are immutable, this cannot be done! RequirementsWhat is needed to get immutable backups? First of all: Veeam Backup&Replication v11. This is the first version supporting hardened repositories. Secondly a Linux server hosting repository volumes.What about the fi

Kasten not only backs up your Kubernetes workloads, but it also backs up itself!Kasten DR can leverage an NFS or S3 remote location to backup its components in the event of something unfortunate happening.In our case that unfortunate event happened. Junior Joe had just been hired the week before. Junior demanded full access to the Kubernetes cluster “or else” and since his father was best friends with the CEO he soon was given admin user access on the cluster.On his first day working remotely (which is now every day thanks to covid19) Junior Joe was completely unsupervised so he decided to play around with helm and typed the following on the CLI: and then:Th

Hello!Melissa @vmiss33 and I have hijacked Veeam Community Podcast from @Rick Vanover and rebooted it!Now the two of us will be inviting people to talk about businesses and industries that everyone takes for granted, but nobody knows how they actually work.In the pilot episode Drew Como @dcomovanguard was telling us about his days at Take-Two Interactive and THQ. We discussed how videogames are created and what it takes to provide a seamless online experience for dozens of players simultaneously.  Please let us know what you think of this format and reach out to us if you have a few stories to tell about your industry!

Some time ago I posted a new feature in v10 PowerShell Plugin. With it it is possible to set - next to others - higher timeouts for boot and application initialization for SureBackup application groups. Here I want to show how to implement:Set your preferred option, see example here:$Startup = New-VBRSureBackupStartupOptions -AllocatedMemory 100 -EnableVMHeartbeatCheck:$true -EnableVMPingCheck:$false -MaximumBootTime 1000 -ApplicationInitializationTimeout 1000Select the job(s) you want add VM to SureBackup from. Sure this can be in one line, but this is to show each step:$VBRJob = Get-VBRJob -Name "Backup Job"$VBRVMs = Get-VBRJobObject -Job $VBRJobNow, build an array of backup-VM with the correct