Blogs and Podcasts

Hi,Today I’m excited to finally share my blog series that I’ve been working on for some time, a deep dive into the object storage solutions available from the “big three” public cloud hyperscalers (Azure/AWS/GCP). Part one is available now over at the Veeam Blog and I’ll be updating this post as the other sections become available over the coming days! I won’t spoil the reading but part one focuses on a review of these three services, where they are similar or differentiate so you can start to align yourself with a suitable cloud!UPDATE 25/08/2021: Part two is now available!UPDATE 04/10/2021: Part three is now available!Cloud Object Storage Deep Dive - Part One, ComparisonCloud Object Storage Deep Dive - Part Two, ImplementationCloud Object Storage Deep Dive - Part Three, Benchmarks Any questions? Did it help? Please feel free to give feedback!

Microsoft dropped a surprise on us today by releasing Windows Server 2022 to no fanfare at all. It’s been released today 18th August 2021, it will have mainstream support until the 13th October 2026 and will be considered end of life on the 14th October 2031 (how are we talking about the 2030’s already?!). This is evidenced in Microsoft’s updated Windows Server Release Information document.If you’re looking to grab an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2022 you can do so here. Alternatively if you have a suitable agreement with Microsoft you can also download a copy from VLSC or MSDN.Interested to learn what’s new in Windows Server 2022? You can check out Microsoft’s post on the subject here. IMPORTANT: Microsoft are making TPM 2.0 support mandatory, if you’re looking to install onto existing hardware, be sure you meet the hardware requirements. Supported Platforms Realistically it’s going to be premature to start migrating your entire environment to Windows Server 2022, but in the inte

Greetings everyone, Veeam Backup for Azure v3 is finally GA, meaning that you can go ahead and download it directly from the Azure Marketplace.Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure can now back up and restore SQL databases running either on a SQL Server or as an Azure SQL Managed Instance. A flexible policy-based schedule allows Azure users to perform database-consistent backups via pre-configure staging servers. The resulted backup file (BACPAC) can be used as a backup or an opportunity to test out any changes to SQL databases avoiding the interaction with the production servers.Veeam Backup for Azure v3 - Video Deep-Dive including What's new, Deployment, Configuration, and Veeam Backup and Replication v11a IntegrationIf same as me, you like the video tutorials, with a description of what's new, a deep-dive, and now even with the sections on the video to move between them, look no further, I have prepared for you a 30 minutes video with everything you need to know: Veeam Backup for Azure v

Greetings everyone, Veeam Backup for AWS v4 is GA! It can be found on the AWS Marketplace, on the Official Veeam Website, and Helpcenter.Veeam Backup for AWS v4 delivers native, fully automated AWS backup and disaster recovery to effortlessly protect and manage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic File Systems (Amazon EFS) data. Built with cost-effectiveness, security, and scalability in mind, you can eliminate the risk of data loss for all your AWS data while saving big!Note: Veeam Backup for AWS v4 as a standalone offering is officially GA as of now. It is also integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication v11a which is currently in Early Availability, with General Availability scheduled for later this month. Veeam Backup for AWS v4 - Video Deep-Dive including What's new, Deployment, Configuration, and Veeam Backup and Replication v11a IntegrationIf you like video tutorials, with a description of what's new,

I guess a lot of the community members know this piece of IT-history:Other will even know this guy: Its a floppy disk! First of these were able to safe 0,24MB (!) And these first ones came out 1971! Is such a disk still in use? Yes it is! Here are a few examples:MS Office Older Boeing 747-400 planes still gets their software update on disksDEF CON 28 Aerospace Village: 747-400 Walk through From a Hacker’s Perspective at about 7:53 Some industry machines still uses disk  You can still buy new disk? Of course, but at a rather high price.For those not knowing disks, you can listen here how they sound.Want to use them to make music?! Yes you can!

Listen as I talk through what’s new and enhanced in Veeam Service Provider Console v6https://anchor.fm/virtualization-is-life/episodes/Veeam-Service-Provider-Console-v6-Release-e181pu3/a-a6jub86This is sourced from the sister podcast to the blog, Virtualization if Life! by Anthony Spiteri https://anthonyspiteri.net/console-v6-service-providers/ 

Listen as I talk through what’s new and enhanced in Veeam Backup & Replication v11a.https://anchor.fm/virtualization-is-life/episodes/Veeam-Backup--Replication-v11a-Release-e181pln/a-a6jua5bThis is sourced from the sister podcast to the blog, Virtualization if Life! by Anthony Spiteri https://anthonyspiteri.net/backup-replication-v11a-release/

Veeam ONE is a comprehensive solution developed by Veeam Software and it enables real-time monitoring, business documentation, and management reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Director, and Microsoft Hyper-V. Veeam ONE is designed to give IT administrators peace of mind to manage every aspect of the modern virtual environment.Do not turn your eyes away from unknown issues lurking in your environment. Mitigate potential issues even before they occur (threats) with 340+ preset alarms and 150+ prebuilt reports available in Veeam One.Veeam ONE brings deep visibility that helps you prevent common backup problems, stay informed about your storage trends and cut costs through better storage usage and planning, thanks to new insights for NAS data.In the typical deployment scenario, all Veeam ONE components are installed on a single machine, and this comprises of the Veeam ONE Client and Veeam ONE Web Client.– Veeam ONE Client is the primary tool used f

Testing this great tool that he left us @jorge.delacruz , it occurred to me to do in a single photo what would be the scenario for a 3 2 1 rule in VMware Cloud on AWS with Veeam     

I thought it would be good to share this here, although this is already covered on many news sites.Yesterday VMware did publish a Security Advisory regarding multiple vulnerabilities in vCenter Server. The most critical one "CVE-2021-22005” did receive a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 (of 10) and an attacker could take over the control just be uploading a file via port 443. Although vCenter shouldn’t be reachable from the WAN/internet, the vulnerabilities should still be seen as very critical; an inside attacker could already be waiting.All together there were 19 CVEs published and fixed by VMware. All currently supported vCenter Server releases are more or less affected:vCenter 7: <7.0 U2c: affected by all vulnerabilities → Patch to 7.0 U2d 7.0 U2c: “only affected” by the minor vulnerabilities → Patch to 7.0 U2d vCenter 6.7: all 6.7 releases are affected → patch to 6.7 U3o vCenter 6.5: “only affected” by the minor vulnerabilities → Patch to 6.5 U3q → the minior vulnerabilities are still cr

Today I want to talk about backups, and the importance of encrypting them, everywhere. When people think of encrypted backups, the usual first thoughts are around portable backups such as tape and USB or backups outside of your trust domain such as cloud storage.This is a great starting point, and if you’re not currently encrypting these I urge you to do so as these are normally your highest risk backups. But here’s a an emerging scenario to consider.Security is a constant battle of escalations, attempting to out-do the efforts of each other. Whilst we’re seeing an industry reacting to ransomware threats with immutability, these malicious actors have also moved on from just encrypting your data. Now these bad actors are attempting to steal your data and extort a ransom to prevent leaking the data.Scary stuff right? It’s for this reason and more that backups are being targeted for data exfiltration. Consider the positives a good backup meets. Storage and Bandwidth Efficiency Now malicio

HiIn the 2 days during VEEAMON 2021, there was often the question from new members why to choose Veeam over other competitors…Therefore my own top-15. There will be more reasons, but I think it will cover a lot of the reasons and I don’t think someone has to hesitate anymore ;-) PortabilitySomething I like very hard! All necessary information is built into the backup-file.You are not dependent of your backup-server to restore something. In case of emergency of disaster it’s just sufficient to install VBR Community Edition (free), import your backup-file and restore. You can even extract your backup-file (without VBR) to the .VMDK or .VHDX files.Next to that : the format is interchangeable : you can for example restore a VM (backup taken from vSphere on-premises) to Azure or to HyperV, or restore a backup taken with a Veeam Agent to Amazon EC2 or HyperV, … and so on, the list is very long!  Not always possible with other backup vendors in my experience. Universal licensesIf you use univ

Greetings everyone, for years we all have been configuring our SMTP notifications on Veeam Backup and Replication to start receiving emails about the jobs, etc. Probably is the second or third thing we do after installing VBR.Now, that is great, but at the same time is true that Veeam Backup for AWS/Azure/Office 365 SMTP Notifications are not the same as what we are used in VBR, until today!I am pleased to share here with you, some Community work I have built using the comprehensive, feature-rich, RESTful API these products include, keen to hear your feedback. The how-to of every script it is something similar to this:We have our products which exposes RESTful API We have a bash shell script to collect data from the API The bash shell script sends the data to the specified address, or addressesThis post might be a bit long, so keep scrolling to the HTML Report you need.Enhanced HTML Report for Veeam Backup for AWSThis Script will query the Veeam Backup for AWS API and save the job sess

Afternoon everyone! I just found out that Veeam have released the VMCA 2022 course and exam. We’ve had a few discussions around this exam within the community as originally Veeam were intending for everyone to take the VMCA 2022 course prior to sitting the exam, however between then and now they’ve changed it. I checked my portal this morning and it showed the “Step 1. Attend a training course” as ticked. I checked with my account manager that this was intentional and they confirmed it’s no longer mandatory to redo the course if you’ve already got a VMCA v1.To find out more simply go to: Get Veeam Certified Now! and then click on the “Veeam Certified Architect” tab. FAQs:I took the VMCA v1 training course but never took the exam, what should I do? The VMCA v1 is expected to retire on 31st December 2021, either sit the exam or take the VMCA 2022 training course and work on that instead. Should I take the training course? Of course, it’s not always cost-effective for some people to take

"Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication 10" was released earlier this year in February 2021.  The book can be seen at the following link and ordered:Version 10 Book is here - Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication 10I have since been approached to write an update to the book for Version 11 and have accepted the challenge.  The current book will get updates, some things removed and definitely all the new goodies that are in the latest release of @Veeam. Mastering Veeam Backup & Replication v11 -- Coming Soon I will update my blog as my journey progresses with the new version.  I hope to create an updated book that was as good as the first one which everyone enjoyed that gave me feedback.  It will be fun writing about the newest features of Veeam v11 and updating existing stuff to make it current.Keep an eye out for further updates and other blog posts.

HPE announced their launch of LTO-9 Ultrium data cartridges.Could not find much more information about it. No release-dates of LTO-9 drives. As discussed earlier here with LTO-9 drives does not provide double-capacity compared to previous version. 

VBO Calculator Community Edition V2 First we want to thank you for the great feedback and your input for Version 1 of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Calculator Community Edition! We already added some new features and bugfixes which we want to share with you.Click here to download the new version:Download(If you missed the first post where you can find all instructions, please follow: https://www.backupbros.com/2020/09/22/veeam-backup-for-microsoft-office-365-calculator/)To keep this short let me introduce the new features:Price ComparisonWe are now able to do a price comparision with on-premise-storage (where the compression is a bit lower) and your preferred object storage. As well as a second object storage vendor.You can enter your on-premise-storage costs (local object storage and local direct storage) in the input sheet:If you want to compare your preferred cloud object storage vendor with another one, just select the second vendor in the dropdown above the chart.VM eg

Veeam launched the veeamazing new v11 last week and with it, some amazing new features. In this blog post I’ll be highlighting the licensing requirements for these new features and a few other pre-requisites to use them. Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP)Veeam CDP enables organisations to achieve aggressively low RPO whilst still retaining the flexibility required by organisations for their retention needs. To utilise Veeam CDP your environment needs to be:VMware Environment using vSphere 6.5 or newer. Veeam needs to have either a Veeam Universal License or Enterprise Plus when using a socket-based license. Replication target can’t be a Veeam Cloud Connect Replica. Veeam Hardened RepositoryThe Veeam hardened repository is designed to help keep backups safe and data integrity assured. It’s great to see this feature requires no specific licensing from Veeam, however there are some pre-requisites to be considered:Only Linux repositories currently provide immutability Only certain task

As probably everyone at this awesome community knows : instant recovery of Veeam is great!!! This is one of the many reasons why Veeam has to be chosen over the competitors : you can read this in a previous sticky post of mine : Recap : 15 reasons to choose Veeam over competitors | Veeam Community Resource Hub Well I have a true time story showing that this functionality can save a company big time!!! At the service-desk of my company (an MSP), a priority 1 incident case came in of one of our customers, so SD First Line created an P1 incident case.By chance that day I was planned at third line of SD and was not planned for projects at customers...Regarding the urgency and the fact that our companies Veeam backup-expert  was present that day at SD, the case came directly to me...Who is the customer : the customer is a secondary school Used infrastructure : they are using standalone Hyper-V hosts with local storage (don’t ask me why they are not using shared storage, but that’s another

  BR v.11 - Step by step Install & Configure (Best Practice) | Veeam Community Resource Hub#########################################################   CREATE NEW JOB add multiple VM 15 restore point Incr Weekly sinth full Saturday  ######################################################### #Create new Job:$test2 = Find-VBRViEntity -Name "spc*"$repository = Get-VBRBackupRepository -ScaleOut -Name *****-SOBRAdd-VBRViBackupJob -Name "D002-TEST2" -Entity $test2 -BackupRepository $repository #Set 15 restore point:$retention = New-VBRJobOptions -ForBackupJob$retention.BackupStorageOptions.RetainCycles = 15$job = Get-VBRJob -Name "D002-TEST2"Set-VBRJobOptions -Job $job -Options $retention#Configure job schedule and enable it:Get-VBRJob -Name "D002-TEST2" | Set-VBRJobSchedule -Daily -At "23:30" -DailyKind Everyday | Enable-VBRJobSchedule#Set Forever Incremental:Get-VBRJob -Name "D002-TEST2" | Set-VBRJobAdvancedBackupOptions -Algorithm Incremental -TransformFullToSyntethic $true -TransformIn

The virtual machines I use for the deployment are generated from a Template (Golden Image) through a configuration file unattend.xml Answer files (unattend.xml)https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/update-windows-settings-and-scripts-create-your-own-answer-file-sxs What is Windows System Image Manager?https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-vista/cc766347(v=ws.10) Useful links for sizingVeeam Architects Site https://www.veeambp.com/ Veeam Size Estimation Tool (VSE)https://vse.veeambp.com/#/ The Restore Point Simulatorhttp://rps.dewin.me/ Veeam Ports Calculatorhttps://www.veeambp.com/ports/ REFS Calculatorhttp://dewin.me/calculator/ Bandwidth Calculatorhttp://rps.dewin.me/bandwidth/ Pricing calculator for small businesshttps://www.veeam.com/pricing-calculator NAS Calculatorhttps://cloudoasis.com.au/nas-calculator/ Veeam Clikable Demoshttps://veeamclick.be/ Prerequisite: System Requirements - Veeam Backup Guide for vSphere

I see one more change in VBR V11 Beta - the handling of exported backups and of backups with no associated backup job. Exported Backups:Up to V10 exported (disk) backups were put in the section “Disk (imported)”In V11 the exported backups are put in another section - “Disk (VeeamZIP)”. Up to V10 I have seen this section when creating a VeeamZip archive intentionally only. Backups from deleted backup jobs:Backups which were created from deleted backup jobs were put in the section “Disk (Imported)”, too. In V11 there is a new section: “Disk (Orphaned)” I think this describes the status of these backups much better than before.

Because backup of a vSphere VM almost always involves taking a vSphere snapshot, this VMware blog post will be interesting for every backup administrator. https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2021/06/performance-best-practices-for-vmware-snapshots.htmlVMware has tested the performance impact of snapshots. Baseline performance is a VM without a snapshot. After that, performance testing is done with 1, 2 and more snapshots. Tested was default IO-tests and java application performance (SPECjbb). Tests included: vVOL, VMFS and vSAN.Test Results:Impact on vVOL depends on the storage system, because snapshots are taken there. VMs on VMFS have a huge performance penalty even with one snapshot. To be more exact: the first snapshot has the greatest impact! vSAN does not suffer much from snapshot with sequential workload. To be honest I think this is interesting to know but has no meaning in reality. SPECjbb does not show worse performance at all.Recommendations:Let snapshots exist as short as p

It is being found that the official app used in installing SteelSeries devices on Windows 10 can be exploited to grant Admin rights as discovered by some security research “Lawrence Amer“. As stated by BleepingComputers, the bug can be leveraged during the device startup process using a link in the License Agreement screen that is opened with SYSTEM privileges. A real SteelSeries device is not necessary to exploit the bug. Also, a bug was discovered in the Razer Synapse software that granted unauthorised admin access. Now, a similar bug was found in SteelSeries software that gives anyone who plugs in a device complete control over a Windows 10 PC with admin rights. Emulating a device also works: This discovery became known after news broke out about the Razer Synapse software as it was able to grant administrative privileges when connecting a Razer mouse or keyboard. This motivated the research from Jorhat, offensive security researcher Lawrence Amer (research team leader at 0xsp) foun

Another video from the quick and nerdy series. This video is half how-to half showcase of the true flexibility of Veeam and cloud data protection. It starts with taking a backup of an EC2 instance with VBAWS, using a VBR server to backup copy job to a SOBR with Wasabi and finally using that Wasabi bucket to Natively restore to Azure. This one had a lot of moving parts so it went a little over the 10-15 minute structure but it’s worth a watch!