Blogs and Podcasts

The VMCA2022 exam is officially available since August 2nd 2021. So time to refresh my good old VMCAv1 certification as of 2016 which I did today. In the following I will give you an overview of what to expect and how to prepare.I registered with PearsonVUE through the VMCE certification website. Make sure to read the VMCA 2022 Exam Specification Guide provided there. There were significant changes to the requirements for the VMCA exam. It is not just the new version of the VMCAv1 exam. You will be entitled to sit the exam if you either:attend the Veeam Backup & Replication v11: Architecture and Design training course through a Veeam Authorized Educational Center (VMAEC) attended the “old” Veeam Certified Architect v1 course without sitting the exam within the last 12 months hold the Veeam Certified Architect v1 certification alreadySo there’s no need to be VMCE certified any more which is a major change in comparison to VMCAv1. I’ll come back to that point in my preparation hints

Let's take a look at the new restore endpoints in the Veeam Backup and Replication API - For clarity, I am not talking about the Enterprise Manager API but the new  api attached directly to your VBR install - This is future of automating VBR and I could not be more excited about having this decouple from Enterprise Manager. So, what is a first class disk? Essentially its bunch of capabilities that VMware have opened up in the vSphere API allowing for vendors (or you..) to create block devices independently of a virtual machine. Veeam have hooked into this allowing for you to restore individual disks from a restore point, they create a new datastore over their vPower NFS magic and make this disk available for consumption. High level steps we need to take programatically to make this work Perform the FCD restore using the Veeam B&R API  Find the attached/restored file via the vSphere API (vStorageObjectManager) Reconfigure our target VM to attach the restored VMDK file sitting mounte

Another bug in vSphere 7 U3, I just read about. The backup function in the VCSA does not work in U3 any more when DB health check is enabled. Then each backup fails! Fortunately there is a simple solution for this: run /usr/bin/dbcc -fbss embedded in a shell-session in VCSA.More information:official VMware KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/86084 Blog post by Andrew Mauro: https://vinfrastructure.it/2021/10/file-level-backup-issue-with-vcenter-7-0-3/This is important because you normally do not see failed backup. So when you never checks them, you would not find out the broken functionality. 

Hi! Sometimes I receive Twitter Direct Messages asking how I can receive the latest Veeam News that fresh. It is actually very simple, on this quick tip we are going to learn how to keep up to date with everything that happens in the Veeam Knowledge Base, starting with new articles into the KB to updates or revisions of them, following those simple steps, we will be updated of any change or new support for X, or Y.In a perfect world, these steps we would have to make them for all the manufacturers that compose our Datacenter, as good practice, but for today I show you how to add the KB of Veeam How to add the Veeam Knowledge Base to FeedlyThe first thing I want to tell you is how to add it to your Feedly, which is probably your favorite RSS reader, at least mine, from the main Feedly website, we will click on the + icon on the left:We will introduce the URL of the RSS of Veeam Knowledge Base – https://www.veeam.com/services/open/kb/rss-feed and the following will appear:Once we subscr

It’s the special time of the year again...where you can win great prices from Veeam Just register on the following page till December 31th 2021 and you’re in.https://www.veeam.com/holiday-giveaway-2021.htmlAfter registering you can also create your own christmas postcard. Here’s my greeting to the community (click link below):→ https://www.veeam.com/holiday-giveaway-2021-postcard.html?card=3P14HE7OF02GMQX 

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure is purpose-built for simplicity, scale, savings, and security for your Azure environment. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure is available as a virtual machine (VM) offer exclusively through the Azure Marketplace in both Free and BYOL editions.Here are some guides that may interest you: How to set up Veeam ONE 11 Server, What’s new in Veeam Backup and replication v11?, how to install and configure Veeam Backup and Replication 11 Community Edition with its default SQL Server Express Edition, how to migrate Veeam MsSQL Database to a new MsSQL Server, and how to install Veeam Backup and Replication 11 Community Edition with a dedicated SQL Server.Due to the Shared Responsibility Model by Cloud providers, it is evident that it is still your data and that you retain the responsibility to secure and protect it. You may want to take a look at Veeam Backup & Replication which can also enable you to centrally manage Azure backup with another cloud, virtual, phy

Played around with the new version 5 of Veeam's Disaster Recovery Orchestrator (VDRO). I had some troubles with licenses and wanted to share my outcomes.There are a few components that should be taken into account for licensing:Production VBR server VDRO server Embedded VBR server within VDRO serverSome facts here:Production VBR server Can be added to VDRO server. Which will be normally the case for production installations. For PoC, it is not necessary to do so. When adding to VDRO (an agent will be installed), consider the following: You are not allowed to mix trial and NFR keys! So, when your VDRO server runs a trial (or paid) license, a NFR licensed VBR server cannot be added.   https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vdro/userguide/licensed_objects.html?ver=50#licensing-for-standalone-veeam-backup---replication-servers-with-orchestrator-agents VBR server must have Enterprise or Enterprise PLUS edition licensed. VDRO server There are a few licensing types here: https://helpcent

With version 10 and 11 of the Veeam plugin for Oracle RMAN was a new backup metadata format introduced.But what is the benefit of the new metadata format?In the older versions all metadata was written to one file – the “Veaam backup chain metadata file” (Extension of this file is .vbm).This file gets rather big over time and it takes some time to read and write the metadata for a single backup session from or to this file. Because of this the amount of time needed for a plugin backup session gets longer and longer.The new metadata format writes the metadata of a backup session in an own file (Extension of these files is .vasm). Now you have many small metadata files. If a backup file expires, the metadata has not to be searched in the big file and deleted from it. Now the metadata file can simply be deleted with the backup file. This is much faster than the former procedure. Additionally a new small file is written for the backup chain with some general metadata information (Extension

I had a scenario in the lab where some partitions were not optimal for use but I wanted to keep the installation of Windows. In just 15 minutes, I was able to do a bare metal recovery with the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and resize the partitions. This was best set with a video, enjoy! 

If you didn't read it in the R&D digest, Anton Gostev has started a Ask Me Anything subreddit.http://askgostev.wtf/If you always wanted to ask Anton anything special and didn't find the right place, this could be your chance. Just keep on mind, that it's not meant for support requests and similar:This is NOT a good place to ask me about tactical stuff such as an advice about your particular environment, help with a support case or with a sales quote. However, if you have more of a global/strategic/tough question and you want my opinion specifically – now you have an opportunity to ask me directly

 VeeamONE allows you fire a script when alarms are triggered so given the time of year for the last Veeam User Group of the year I have created a Christmas themed dashboard and api to push alerts too and display them in real time.When an alert is received the dashboard which is subscribed to a websocket has the alarm detail pushed down to it and in turn has the alarm formatted and injected onto the page.Note there is a new experimental VeeamONE API I will look to show and provide an alternate dashboard where we are pulling the alarms directly.Here's an example of the dashboard running with one alarm having been pushed through.Ways you can use this yourselfRun the docker image I have already built For the time limited, use my demo endpoint at https://veeamonereceiver.benyoung.dev Clone the source code, modify if required and publish (built in aspnet core)There is a Get Started page that has links to the powershell script/alarm config, or a more detailed version is below.1. Run the docke

Default behavior in VBR (incl. v11!): When a VM gets application-aware backed up, runtime components gets installed at start of job and are removed at the end. With v11 we have the option to install them persistent!  This increases security! No Admin-Share and VIX-access is necessary any more. But it is required to deploy the Veeam Installer Service on the VMs you want to use persistent components.  This can be done by manual installation, Group policy roll-out, or by adding the VM to managed Servers. When everything works fine, components are installed persistently:  If you enable this feature and something does not work (as installer is not deployed, ..), VBR tries to run non-persistent components.

Hi all!!!  I’m here to let you know that the Veeam Cookbook is here and available for all of you in https://veeamcookbook.com/. This cookbook is a collection of recipes to accomplish one task each, the idea is based on a recipe that you read for instructions not for explanations.This book is intended for many people: New to Veeam and just want a simple next, next, next, approach, not to learn about Veeam but how to do something. People who already know Veeam well but sometimes we only do tasks once on an odd occasion, we know the technology just cannot remeber the how! People who just want a quick refresh These recipes for now are based in Veeam Backup & Replication operations Version 11.  The cookbook is the creation of the EMEA Veeam Solutions Architects, and we’d really appreciate your feedback for future releases. More to come soon!!!

I had some special situation in the last weeks.A customer had two VBR server with one IBM TS4500 tape library connected to each sever. Now he wanted to consolidate to one VBR server, but he had to keep both libraries with all the data on the tapes.The Veeam helpcenter and the forum describe several tape library moving scenarios, but none with moving a library with data to another VBR server which has already data on it, too. I will call this server which is deinstalled in the process and whose repositories and library will be moved “source server” and the server which gets the repositories and library from the other server “target server” in the following text The target VBR server has data, a configuration backup restore of the source server is not suitable. With this all data on the target server is lost.VBR is at V11 P20210507 at both servers, so this is ok. It is ok to lose the History from one server, this is a huge advantage, too.After some planning we did the following procedure

Some weeks ago the backup monitoring team of my company had an issue with the backups of one of our customers…Where it started and where did it end...If you want to know, keep on reading  The infrastructure of the customer : The customer was having a Hyper-V infrastructure with a couple of Hyper-V hosts and +/- 30 VMs running on shared storage (several CSV volumes) divided on those hostsThe customer is using backup-jobs in Veeam Backup & Replication and is using replication-jobs in Veeam Backup & Replication The backup issue : The backups were running fine, except for 1 VM.I don’t know anymore the exact error in Veeam…The engineers tried several things trying to resolve this issue, but nothing helped.At least they contacted me if I had an idea for this issue.I quickly noted the error and mentioned that the cause of this error is not related to the backup, but that there is a Hyper-V issue for this particular VM.I suggested two things : try at first a live migration of that part

In my job as a system consultant specialised in Backup and Disaster Recovery (covered by Veeam products of course  ) at a MSP, I’m also responsable for the Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure and offering. This article is regarding recovering data from Veeam Cloud Connect where I ran into a shortcoming… We are offering BaaS using Veeam Cloud Connect. Most of those tenants are sending a copy job to our infrastructure so they are having an offsite copy and optional insider protection as an ‘airgapped’ copy : see more info on my post regarding the golden rule 3-2-1-1-0 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource Hub.We are optionally offering a yearly restore test of the backups we are having at our cloud connect repositories.For this I have implemented a seperate Veeam Backup & Replication server that has access to the Veeam Cloud Connect Repositories.We are using Azure implementing Direct Restore to Azure for those restore tests.In this restore test we just restore the wa

Hi all, Today I received two packages from TNT , being curious I opened them of course.The two packages are from VEEAM regarding the VEEAMON 2021 event. The first one is the Remote Racer, yeah we can play now .The second one is a sweatshirt from the VEEAMON 2021 event as a gift from Alfred, @Kseniya and @Rick Vanover for participating in the community during the event.BTW, a very nice and beautiful sweatshirt including the link to the awesome community and of course Alfred is present  What an honour to receive this, I big thank you to Veeam, Alfred, @Kseniya and @Rick Vanover .Very nice receiving packages from Veeam...So for the people still waiting for a VEEAMON 2021 gift, no worries it will be delivered, just be patient  . The longer it takes, the bigger the surprise is! regardsNico

One of my favorite new little thinks in v11: Veeam provides a PowerShell module instead of a PowerShell Snapin. Modules are the more modern way compared to Snapins. See here some details about the differences.Here is the list of available Veeam modules in v11: New in v11 are Veeam.Backup.PowerShell and Veeam.Teams.PowerShell. The first one replaces the PowerShell Snapin VeeamPSSnapin in v10. At least in theory, scripts should perform as before. PowerShell should import the new module as soon as one of it's commands is started. Existing scripts will show an error when they try to add the missing Snapin to the session.In the course of this, attention was also paid to the user experience. So there are now defined default fields shown in different commands. See here the output of get-vbrbackup for exampleIn v10 all data fields were shown. This was not very useful at first.The range of functions also increases with v11. We see 213 more commands than in v10. Most of them are for operating fe

Since majority of us use Windows for our day to day operations, in this guide, you will learn about Windows update expiration policy.By expiring older, redundant packages, you will get better performance, shorter scan times, a faster user experience, and a reduced risk of deploying older updates that have been superseded with newer, more secure ones.Note: This policy only applies to Windows updates. Updates for other Microsoft software or firmware may have different policies and should be considered separately.An expired package will not appear in Windows Update scan results thereby reducing internet data usage.Kindly visit this link to learn more. 

Recently, I have noticed on this platform that most of us work with Windows Server 2016, 2019, and now 2022. Also even Windows 10. In this guide, I will be showing you how to update the Windows installation image (install.wim) file with the latest security intelligence package available. I have successfully tested this on Windows 10 Enterprise, Pro und Home-Edition and Windows Server 2016 and 2019. Here is a detailed guide on "how to install ADK, MDT, and WDS: How to deploy Windows images via Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Windows Deployment Services".How do you provision your new servers? Regardless of how this is done, you may also find this guide useful.Microsoft Defender Antivirus, formerly known as Windows Defender, is an antivirus protection program that’s included with Windows 10. Unlike other antivirus programs like McAfee, Microsoft Defender is free and doesn’t require any additional installation. After the installation of Windows 10, the built-in version of Microsoft Defend

Listen to "Veeam Backup for AWS v4 and Azure v3" by Virtualization is Life!  

Listen to "Veeam Backup for Salesforce" by Virtualization is Life!.  

We all know Veeam as a great solution for Backup and Recovery. But besides that, Veeam can help us with many different Sysadmin tasks. Here are some for which I’ve used Veeam in the past. In most cases Veeam is just faster than any other way and, most important, it just works Test Updates & Troubleshoot problemsWith SureBackup and the Virtual Labs you can not only regularly check your backups, but also test certain updates before deploying them to production. If something fails, you can start debugging the problem without any hurry or restart the whole lab with just a few clicks.Also, when troubleshooting problems in your production environment, why not take a Quick Backup and start a lab? From there you can try any adjustments or workarounds, without fearing to cause (much worse) problems in your production. Or, if you already have a workaround for a problem, but want to find the root cause, then backup the faulty state.Migrate SystemsWe can’t use online migration in every environ

Greetings guys, a few months ago I already showed you an incredible, powerful, yet free and open source Grafana Dashboard for your Veeam Backup for AWS.As you know, Veeam has released Veeam Backup for AWS v4, here you can know more about it, plus take a look at a great video deploying it from scratch, creating policies, etc.So I have decided to take a look at the new RESTful API endpoints, or to check the ones where updated, and, of course, I have spend the Saturday updating the Grafana Dashboard, introducing Unofficial Grafana Dashboard for Veeam Backup for AWS v3How does the Dashboard look like for VBA AWS v4After you finish the configuration steps, which you can find on the other Community post linked at the top, you will see something as beautiful and useful like this:Grafana Dashboard - Summary of featuresSummary - Total number of Repositories, Policies, Protected VMs, VBA Appliance version. Unprotected VMs - Both, in one handy list with size, region and name. And with a great vis

Hey everyone,Starting the beginning of January 2021 we're going to see Veeam simplify the license offerings available to customers. Historically Veeam have always offered a "per socket" perpetual licensing model, which was great when we were just considering protecting our vSphere & Hyper-V infrastructure, but as Veeam has grown and produced additional feature capabilities such as NAS Backup, Cloud-native Backups for AWS and Azure and Physical server and workstation protection options, this licensing model hasn't suited them all. Then Veeam introduced the Veeam Universal License (VUL) subscription, streamlining the licensing experience for customers by offering a "per workload" backup model, allowing customers to mix and match different products as part of their overall Veeam licensing. This license becomes increasingly appealing as customers wish to test adoption of different clouds, they protect their workloads, regardless of whether they are physical, cloud or virtual. Earlier t