Blogs and Podcasts

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 $VBRJobNow, build an array of backup-VM with the correct object-type (CObjectInJob):$VSBVMs = @()$VBRVMs | foreach {$VSBVMs += New-VBRSureBackupVM -VM $_ -StartupOptions $Startup}Note: Backup job must have run at least once. Otherwise you the the error:New-VBRSureBackupVM : Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Finally, create your a

This is a small-scale amateur emulation of a hacker’s website defacing followed by a Kasten restore.I have created a small static website with Nginx deployed in Kubernetes. The Geoff Burke Propaganda website is designed to boast a positive image of the individual, hard working and healthy living and to inspire Management to make the right decision at salary review time.A group of malicious hackers gained access to the website and replaced the content with completely false information and quite obviously fake photos. However, Kasten was backing up the Website so in no time at all and before company management had a chance to view, truth and integrity were restored.Here is my website: Malicious hackers however replaced the page and photos with this vicious slander: Luckily, I chose Kasten to backup my website so I was able to quickly restore from backup: My Policy backups every hour and exports to an Offsite S3 as well allowing me to abide by the 3-2-1 rule of backup.  I will pick the l

As part of my virtual VMUG tour, I submitted a session to the VMUG call for papers covering the subject of Data Protection for Tanzu Kubernetes workloads. (Most of this will apply for any Kubernetes environments).This was picked up by Erik at the Belgium VMUG for their UserCon in June 2021. After the session the videos remain available on demand for a short time, but there were no plans to upload this for everyone. So thank you to Michael Cade, whom offered to host this session for all on the Cloud Native Data Management – YouTube Channel.In the below session I cover the following areas;​What kind of data protection do you need? ​Velero The open source data protection project from VMware ​Tanzu Mission Control The Kubernetes fleet management platform that utilizes Velero from VMware. ​3rd Party Options A nod to the 3rd party ecosystem that offer enterprise Data Protection and Management software such as; Kasten by Veeam There is even a quick technical demo in there, with a little

I had the pleasure of presenting this Kubernetes 101 session to the Veeam Community thanks to my work as part of their Veeam Vanguards program, and a special thank you to Michael Cade who co-presented with me!In this session we cover the following with technical details included:How have we got here? Kubernetes – The Building Blocks Policies Wrap-up I’ve also a number of Kubernetes related content on my blog. And I’m slowly completing 100 Days of Kubernetes tracked here on my GitHub.

If you missed the first part of this 3-part series, you can read it here. In this post, I’ll be discussing the Backup Copy Job Short-Term Retention Policy. The main purpose of Short-Term Retention is to create additional copies of your Backups, whether on- or off-site, meeting at least the “3” part of the “3-2-1 Rule”.In previous Veeam versions, the Short-Term Retention Policy was referred to as the Simple Retention Policy. As with previous Veeam versions, the Short-Term Policy will retain using the Forever Forward Incremental method to copy the data to target, as long as Long-Term Retention (GFS) Policy is not enabled. What this means is this: during the initial run of the Copy job, a Full backup restore point (.vbk ) will be created, either 1 file or multiple files. For per-VM, a Full file will be created of every VM copied. If not enabled, one Full is created containing all VM data in a single file. Subsequent Copy Job runs will consist of Incremental restore point files ( .vib ) co

Hi all,As a Veeam partner I often get the question from customers and colleagues : why choose VBO365 and not one of the so many SaaS competitors?That question is not so easy to answer, but there are a lot of reasons.I’ll try to give some reasons why I find that VBO365 has advantages relative to other SaaS competitors. Flexible : You can install VBO365 on a VM or physical server on-premises.You can use regular storage or an object-storage appliance.Also you can install it on a VM in the public cloud and using object storage as the best choice (costs and quantity of storage). Proximity : Because you can install it on-premises or as a partner on your own hardware in a datacenter, you can deliver proximity instead of used storage of a competitor in a region far away from your location.In Belgium the proximity is an important reason for a lot of customers. Several flexible restore options : With VBO365 you have many, many restore options, not only to existing O365 resources (mailbox, onedri

Joining and contributing to Veeam User Groups can a daunting experience, and cause some apprehension in participants. This post attempts to alleviate that apprehension and address some of those unasked questions you may have, around contributing to this Community and/or Veeam User Groups I need to be a VMCE/VMCA/Veeam Employee etc to be able to contribute.Well if you insist, we’ll see you after you have gained your qualifications. Anyone with any* level of experience or qualifications can contribute. Remember it’s your story/experience you are sharing. Sure there might be existing blog posts or presentations about the same subject, but everyone will have a unique take on how they approached and resolved an issue. Now that* is worth sharing.I need to talk about cutting-edge products/featuresIf your day to day job involves working with the latest technologies, then sure go ahead, but not everyone is a Anthony Spiteri, Michael Cade or the content King..Jorge De La Cruz. Do try to remember

 Backups of VMware vSphere VMs can be done with one of three transport modes. Each of these modes also provide the possibility to restore data. This post is about 3 reasons why direct SAN restore failover to NBD. Incorrect VMDK typeVeeam can only perform direct SAN restore with thick provisioned VMDKs. If any disk of a VM is thin provisioned, restore will not leverage SAN directly. Both, thick eager and lazy zeroed are supported. In my experience, eager zeroed is much faster from a restore point of view! So I recommend, to use this format.Note: you should not rely on the provisioning type you chose at VMDK creation: Thick provisioned disk can become thin if it is expanded.Fortunately, Veeam provides the possibility to change disk type in restore wizard. So you can be sure to use thick VMDKs when you enter this within the wizard. See here in Full VM Restore wizard:And in Virtual Disk Restore wizard:  Disk is logically locked in Veeam proxyIf your Veeam proxy server is Windows based, it

Hello Community!This will be a non-Veeam post today, but I thought it would be worthwhile to share about a vSphere network issue I encountered recently, and the steps I took to resolve it, in case any of you experience a similar occurrence. PROBLEMI had 1 ESXi Host in a Cluster which, when VMs in a certain subnet were connected to a segregated vSS and PG, there would be no network connectivity. No pings. No network connection of any kind. I use vSS and not vDS, so one might think there could be a configuration issue, rightfully so. But, I use PowerCLI to configure my Hosts, and all of them were configured using this same PCLI script, so the chances of that being the case was virtually zero. And, the other Hosts in this Cluster, when VMs were connected to the same subnet (vSS & PG), connectivity was fine. The following are some troubleshooting steps I took to try and narrow the cause down:Viewed first to see if the vmnic Teaming Policy in the vSS was set to ‘active’. Believe it or n

We continue exploring this powerfull  site   "Veeam Architects Site"In this topic, I will show you how use this tool  Veeam Networking Port Tool for VBR v10   DisclaimerThis tool uses the latest data from the Veeam User Guide. We encourage users to check the results with the user guide, consult a Veeam System Engineer or Solutions Architect..Ports numbers change, we cannot be held responisble for any changes within the Veeam Software which were made after the date shown below.This port designation is correct as of August 2020This tool was developed to simplify the identification of ports required by Veeam software. These need to be operational on your firewall between each component of Veeam Backup and Replication infrastructure when you choose to use them How to use this tool Prepare. Know what servers you plan to use in the design and what you want to do with them, for example have a list of server names, IP addresses, and what Veeam roles you would like to use on each server. From a

When it comes to protecting your business against Ransomware, there are three critical components of a successful strategy. Any solution that you're going to rely upon must have all three of these attributes: Simple Immutable Fast The combo of Veeam Backup and Replication alongside SafeMode snapshots on Pure Storage FlashArray//C is uniquely capable of delivering on all three of these critical requirements. SimpleWhen it comes to data protection, it's easy to let your guard down. The best solutions are the ones that don't require constant care and feeding. They are simple to set up and simple to maintain. Veeam and Pure have each built a solid reputation on designing products that are intuitive and easy to use. Veeam backups made immutable by FlashArray SafeMode are "set and forget" simple. This simplicity comes in part due to the fact that you don't have to change a thing about your Veeam deployment to enable SafeMode protected backups. SafeMode protects the entire Veeam Backup Re

Hi all Since yesterday there is a new patch available for VBO365.A couple of smaller issues that has been resolved with installing this patch.KB4158: Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 5b cumulative patch KB4158  regardsNico

The CIS Benchmarks are essential for finding security issues in IT. CIS-CAT is a tool that can evaluate your systems and provide information on remediating security issues. For Kubernetes you must purchase CIS-CAT PRO.However, there is an open-source alternative KUBE BENCH. There are various ways to run KUBE BENCH but the simplest is to download the package for your OS and run it in on your controlplane node.https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench#running-in-a-kubernetes-cluster Download the latest version:Install the binaries: Run the defined benchmarks, in our case cis-1.5: The results will come out with a convenient colour scheme:  For each section a count of pass, warn, and fail is provided with a concrete actions to remediate the problems: After taking the necessary corrective measures you can run the tests again.Now your cluster is lean and mean, next step you need to back it up :)

Back to the basics with a fundamentals video on VBR. High level Deployment, security, backup settings, restore options, and more. Great for new customers/partners setting up Veeam for the 1st time.  

For this post I planed to share some time and bandwidth comparison for backups in my lab. But it is some kind of difficult to get representative data in a fully virtualized demo environment.So I am very happy @Gostev pointed out this topic in his last Words from Gostev (Veeam R&D Forums Digest) from 8.2.2021. If you are not subscribed to this newsletter: do so! https://forums.veeam.com/I want to summarize important facts here:Backup performance per appliance (all-in-one box) doubles in v11. Revise and optimize basics: How are backup files written to disk. Shared memory transport engine, when source- and target-datamover on same box. Implemented full NUMA awareness Enhance the data movers placement logic to ensure they never end up on different CPUs. All this, and I assume much more, leads to an incredible performance. Veeam tested with an HPE Apollo 4510 Gen 10 Server – which is really a perfect backup target – as a all-in-one appliance. Veeam was able to peak at 11.4 GB/s (!) b

Not long ago we setup a single node test Kubernetes cluster on our laptop using Minikube.Now let’s install the next generation of backup technology! Kasten.Kasten means box or container in German just in case you were wondering about the funny name :)We have already installed Chocolatey on our Windows laptop so we can go ahead and use it to install Helm. Helm is like a Linux software package manager but for Kubernetes: choco install Kubernetes-helm We will now use Helm to install the Kasten Helm Chart. You can find out more about Helm here: https://helm.sh/First, we must create a kasten-io namespace:kubectl create ns kasten-ioA namespace is a segregated area where only the pods for this setup will run. Next we need to add the Kasten repository to Helm so that it knows where to get our Kasten images: helm repo add kasten https://charts.kasten.io/ We are all set and ready to go.The install command is pretty straight forward but if you will remember we setup local storage in Minikube usin

Update: Patch 20210525 brings CDP support for 7.0 U2The long-awaited patch for Veeam Backup&Replication v11, which brings support for vSphere 7.0 U2, has been released.https://www.veeam.com/kb4126It's important to note that CDP won't work with 7.0 U2 as there's a driver signing issue. So if you're working with Veeam CDP then you still should wait before updating.Added VMware vSphere 7.0 U2 support including new vSphere API version awareness and virtual hardware version 19 compatibility. Note: CDP functionality is not yet supported with vSphere 7.0 U2 due to the I/O filter drivers signing infrastructure issue at VMware, support will be added in the next cumulative patch.More information on the vSphere 7.0U2 support can be found in the forums: https://forums.veeam.com/vmware-vsphere-f24/vsphere-7-0-u2-support-t72668.html

Download Here 🔥💯  🙌 Everything you need to know about protecting Teams data in one handy e-Book. Download Conversational Geek #MicrosoftTeams Backup by Brien Posey today. NEW in version 5: Microsoft Teams support   

Hello!! My post today is dedicated to everyone who needs to have a guide to perform sizing and understand good Veeam practices. All doubts are answered in this site. https://www.veeambp.com/       I await your comments and Likes !! See you soon in a new post!! 

Recently I’ve been testing and used Kasten K10 by Veeam. The container data management tool from Kasten. I must say I’ve been very impressed with the software and also the releases keep coming with more functionality.Below is the content I’ve posted on this over the past few months, and I’ve even been delighted to ask to present at a number of user groups for this, culminating at a Session for VeeamON! Below are the posts I’ve wrote up.Installing Kasten on; Red Hat OpenShift running ontop of vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Configuring Kasten backup policies, protecting data and restoring data How to upgrade your Kasten environment Kubestr – Open-Source Kubernetes Storage benchmarking tool  VMware User Group Recording - Protecting your Tanzu Kubernetes Workload with Kasten by Veeam I am more focused on the VMware Tanzu of the side of the house for what I’ve learned, but more than happy for feedback, and to answer any questions.

NEW Veeam Agent for Mac, included with Veeam Backup & Replication, delivers easy and scalable Mac backup and recovery for even the most demanding organizations.Veeam Backup & Replication introduces another new agent (Veeam Agent for MacOS). I wanted to go through a very quick look at the install of the Agent and what it looks like at the Backup & Replication end. My MacBook Air thought add this to the home Veeam Backup & Replication server v11. Veeam Agent for Mac Overview Veeam Agent for Mac New Features and Enhancements System Requirement Release Notes User Guide To install Veeam Agent for Mac and all the required components Preparing the Agent for MacOSDue to managed by VBR, a NEW Protection Group needs to be created under Physical Infrastructure of Type Computers with pre-installed agents. We need to add to NEW Protection group and get the package files to install locally on our MacBook Air. Give your protection group a name first.You have to choose a local path to

Are all my virtual machines being backed up correctly and within the required RPO? Of course!I think..., or not 😉? Do I implement best practices in creating jobs?If using vSphere, do I use folders or tags or use whole clusters to add virtual machines to the job?If using HyperV, do I use whole clusters or hosts or in case of using SCVMM do I use tags? Yes, OK, that ’s fine, did I not forget a new VM giving the correct tag or putting in the correct vSphere folder?Yes it can happen to everyone to forget a VM putting correctly to the backup job (automatically or manually). Especially if you are working with colleagues (1 person is creating a new VM but is not aware about the backup and forgets to tell a colleague...). It happens.Everyone is very busy so can forget to add the new VM at the backup job or vSphere folder or tag or... To be sure we have several options to verify :Using Veeam ONE If you are using already Veeam ONE : perfect!You can schedule the report Protected VMs so you can v

How to get started with Veeam  for a student?

In this post I’m going to show you how to do SAP DB2 databases backup on Linux with Veeam. I came across a SAP DB2 installation during one of my last projects and wanted to share with you how to backup these databases. Introduction on pre-freeze and post-thaw scriptsSince there is no native integration of SAP DB2 in Veeam, we need to use pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts within the guest processing options.Pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts are being used, when an application does not support VSS for example. The pre-freeze script is used to quiesce the VM file system or the application prior Veeam triggers a VMware snapshot. After the VMware snapshot is created, the post-thaw script triggers and brings the VM and the corresponding application back to the initial state. How do the scripts work ?Pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts are used on backup jobs, replication jobs and VM copy jobs.Furthermore, you need to create the scripts beforehand. When the specific job starts, Veeam uploads the s