Blogs and Podcasts

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.Virtual machines and virtualization is probably still the most used asset with the veeam products.Versatile. It’s more than clear that Veeam tries to have a solution for every demand, so it has definitely versatile products.Vision. Veeam has a great vision : To be the most trusted provider of Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management! EEliminate Data Loss. VBR brings balance to you

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 only see updates on certain machines? Or maybe only certain backup serve

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 Data Mover when you add a Microsoft Windows server to the backup infrastructure.For Linux servers, Veeam Data Movers can be persistent or non-persistent. Non-persistent Veeam Data Mover is uploaded and removed each time Veeam Backup & Replication addresses a server.For Veeam Data Mover to be persistent, you must specify an account with root or equivalent to root permissions when adding a Linux server. Persistent Veeam Data Movers are required for the following backup infrastructure components:Hardened (immutable) repositorie

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 > Add new. Alternatively, right-click the Jobs node and select Add view. In the Add View window, specify a filter name. The name must be up to 200 characters long. If you want to show this filter as a subnode of the Jobs node in the inventory pane, select the Add this view to the job management tree check box. In the Workload section, select workloads which jobs must process:Application — Veeam Backup & Replication will show Veeam Plug-in jobs and jobs in which SQL transaction log backup or Oracle archive log backup is enabled. Cloud VM — Veeam Backup & Replication will show jobs that process

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.030-datenrettung.de%2Fapple-airport-time-capsule-aufall-droht.htmlHere is the original (in german) article. Here you also see good pictures for illustrating the possible damage:https://www.030-datenrettung.de/apple-airport-time-capsule-aufall-droht.html Hope this helps to avoid backup data loss!

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 filesystem? Veeam is using immutable flag. So every filesystem supporting this flag can be used. These are pretty much all. Veeam supports refli

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:The result was this: and with that our Kasten backup setup was history!!! Luckily the KubeMaster Genius Geoff had previously setup the Kasten DR policy which was backing up Kasten and its settings to an offsite S3 location. After Junior Joe timidly confessed to his transgressions Genius Geoff went to work:First he re created the kaste

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