Blogs and Podcasts

In this week's episode of #HomelabWednesdays, I show how to see if any updates are available for your VMware vCenter Server and how to install the updates using the vSphere Appliance Management Interface (VAMI).Don’t forget to subscribe to get automatic notifications whenever a new video is released. 

This is going to be a quick post on how to backup a single OneDrive folder with Veeam Backup for Office 365.One of my customers developed an internal policy regarding the usage of OneDrive for Business.The policy is, that each user has a specific “Work” folder (root folder) which gets backed up with Veeam Backup for Office 365. All other folders are not backed up and the users do know that. So in this scenario we needed a OneDrive backup job, which backs up the whole organization with the OneDrive object and only includes that work folder.By the way, you are also able to exclude specific OneDrive folders by using the “-ExcludedOneDriveFolders” variable.However, in my case here it makes more sense to only include that specific folder.The scenarioI recreated that scenario with my own Office 365 Tenant, whereby I selected to only backup my webhosting folder. If you didn’t know it already, the ability to exclude or include specific folders for OneDrive backups is only available by using Po

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Have you been in a legal situation that demanded an export of a specific point in time of your backups to ensure data is not compromised or lost? How did you handle it? 

Did you know you can easily schedule your disaster recovery tests to run with Veeam Availability Orchestrator?Orchestrator’s Lab Calendar makes it simple to run a DR test on a scheduled basis whenever you want - like on #DRTestTuesday.The best part of course, is being able to provide a copy of a production environment to your application owners when after the test has run.Just think of what you can do with a copy of your data - test patches and application upgrades, train new staff members, and do all of the testing you would never want to do in a live environment.Be sure to check out how easy it is to do right in the Orchestrator documentation.If you’re looking for the ultimate deep dive on everything testing (including running a DR test on demand and scheduling one in the Lab Calendar) in Orchestrator, don’t miss this great webinar which is nearly 100% demo (no boring PowerPoints from me!) and tackles Orchestrator’s amazing dynamic documentation as well.  As part of every DR test you

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Are you protecting transaction logs? Do you push out the runtime from your backup server or a guest interaction proxy? Do you make copies of your transaction logs to a secondary location? 

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Are you making backup copies? How did you determine what your operational restore window is/should be? What is the oldest backup you had to restore from? 

Register here: https://go.veeam.com/veeamlive-enThe agenda looks amazing, but you definitely do not want to miss out on these sessions:Customer panel — Your Journey to the Cloud & Data Strategy (I personally love hearing real stories from real customers) Veeam v11: Top 11 hottest NEW features Can recommend signing up for v11 news here Some hints of what may be presented in this thread by @MicoolPaul  Cybersecurity Strategies for the Modern Era (presented by the always amazing @Rick Vanover and Europes #1 ethical hacker: Jamie WoodruffDo note, at the top there are different languages available which contain some variances in which sessions are available. The languages available are : English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian. One of the classic presentations by Jamie Woodruff: 

Give some thoughts to the interval of a report. Current week vs. Past week, here’s a view of how the interval can make a difference for the results.   I have the Veeam ONE Catch of the Day (#VeeamONECOTD) on Twitter, a nice way to get small nuggets of Veeam ONE stuff: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23VeeamONECOTD&src=typeahead_click  The Veeam reports are incredible visibility and it is a great way to get all the details you may need in another way!

Today’s #VMCE2020 #DailyQuiz walkthrough is ready. Do you use SureBackup today? If no, why not? Too complicated? Did you try the backup validator tool to check for silent corruption of your backup files? 

Best Practices  In my opinion it is very important to keep this best practice in mind  If the integration API is unavailable due to licensing restrictions, or if any other deduplication appliance is used, the appliance should be considered non-integrated.In order to optimize throughput for deduplication appliances, please use the following configuration guidelines: Job configurationThe following settings are configured in the backup job “Edit” wizard under Storage > Advanced. Options not defined in this table are optional and not related to backup repositories using deduplication storage.Setting Value Tab: Backup   Backup mode Incremental Create synthetic full backups periodically Enabled - if integrated Transform previous backup chains into rollbacks Disabled Create active full backups periodically Enabled - if non-integrated Tab: Maintenance   Perform backup file health check Disabled Defragment and compact full backup file Disabled Tab: Storage   Ena

What can I do, if the storage volume on which my Office 365 backups reside is corrupted, deleted or somehow lost ? That was the question I faced myself with. So I went into the lab to try out a few things ! In this blog post I’m going to show you how to recover a failed Veeam Backup for Office 356 repository. In addition to recover a failed repository, I’m also going to show you how to properly back up VBO repositories. Within this blog post, I will abbreviate Veeam Backup for Office 365 with VBO. Veeam Backup & Replication is abbreviated with VBR. However, lets jump into the lab and the scenario.The lab setupDue to the fact, that I still don’t have a “proper” homelab, I’m using VMware Workstation for this scenario.My lab environment for testing this case, consists of 2 virtual machines. One virtual machine is hosting VBR and the other one is hosting VBO.The VBO server itself, has an additional partition on which all backup repositories reside. All my backup jobs go into separate f

HPE and Veeam are connected by a long history. HPE VSA and 3PAR were the first storages support integrated hardware snapshots. Nimble and Primera are supported as well.See this Veeam Customer Reference Book to read about 7 customer stories. Involved Industries are: Fintech, Retail, Non-Profit, Manufacturing and Healthcare. Quite impressive stories with real-world values!

How many times has DNS been the problem? Well, Veeam Explorer for Active Directory’s Compare with Production capability may be a way to help you see if there have been changes in DNS. This is so easy to use, check out this video explaining how this works:You can also watch my Veeam Live session on Application recovery as well (have to register there however)​​​​

If you are not sure how much space you might need, then an excellent “unofficial” tool tool created by @Timothy Dewin is available at http://rps.dewin.me/ - The Restore Point Simulator.The tool can help you size for:Backup jobs Backup copy jobs Replication jobsWhile the tool appears straight forward, I have noticed on several occasions people misunderstood which data to input: Common mistakes include sizing a backup copy job and then inputting the size of the source VBK file as the used size GB. This would mean you are doubling up data reductions which will of course not happen. A very cool feature is the easy Export check box that will give you a URL to come back and review the estimate and how did you reach it: 

In this week's episode of #HomelabWednesdays, I show you how to easily configure the automatic startup of virtual machines in your home lab. This is very convenient if you don’t want to keep your physical host powered on 24/7 :-)Don’t forget to subscribe to get automatic notifications whenever a new video is released.

The #2MinTues series is aimed at showing something short and sharp in a video format to help the wider community.This will range across all Veeam products. If you would like to see something specific please leave a comment down below.This video will demonstrate how you can make sure that your backup tasks never affect your production workloads! 

 The Veeam Ready database provides a list of all partner solutions that have successfully passed Veeam’s testing criteria. Solutions are grouped by company name, Veeam Ready classification, and more.  So, you can select by Alliance Partner - Model Family - Category Example:  I chose by category  I think it is something very useful when it comes to having any questions about compatibility and Veeam Product Release Support . https://www.veeam.com/ready.html?x-clickref=1011lbSfagY2  

In another Topic, I wrote  about designing a Proxy In This Topic will see about the repository design.We need to consider The key recommendation is to follow the 3-2-1 rule. Calculate 1 core and 4GB RAM per repository task slot. The recommended minimum for a repository is 2 cores and 8GB RAM.Sizing  The recommended amount of CPU for a repository is 1 core per concurrent configured task slot on a repository server. Configure at minimum a 2 core and 8GB RAM repository server to allow the operating system to be more responsive. When sizing task slots on a repository you have to understand when and how many task slots are consumed. Any write process will consume a task slot. So backing up 10 VMs in one job using per-job backup chains will only write one file (VBK/VIB) in the end - so it consumes one task slot. Running the same backup job with per-VM backup files will create one file per VM and thus can leverage up to 10 tasks slots (when available). Backup Copy Jobs, Agent Backups and

Did you know you’re 30 minutes away from Orchestrated DR at any given moment?Veeam Availability Orchestrator takes just 20 minutes to configure, and it takes less than 10 minutes to create an Orchestration Plan, what we call your your fully documented and automated DR plan.Don’t believe me?  I have proof!  Those videos cover everything you need to get started after you have installed VAO, and run through the initial configuration wizard, which couldn’t be simpler.Here’s a few more tips I’ve discovered along the way and am sharing:Install the VAO agent on all of your Veeam Backup & Replication servers.  Once you install the agent, VAO understands the jobs you already have configured, and can orchestrate their recovery.  Simple! If you use NetApp storage, be sure to have your SnapMirrors configured ahead of time if they aren’t already.  Once you add your storage systems, you guessed it, VAO understands the relationships you have and can orchestrate their recovery! vSphere Tags make t

You may be aware of the Veeam ONE Restore Operator Activity Report, this one is my favorite. I recommend everyone set up this report for regular automatic generation, which is explained here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/one/reporter/schedule_reports.html?ver=100 See the video below on how to do it! 

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I recently started a YouTube video series on how to build your own home lab. New videos are posted each Wednesday so don’t forget to subscribe to get notifications when a new video goes live.

When creating or changing SureBackup settings using the Veeam PowerShell Snapin, not all options were provided by the Snapin. For example startup timeout could not be set by PowerShell. Fortunately this is now possible with v10-Snapin. See the picture for details: New Option in v10 Snapin        

I have started a new series on my personal YouTube channel. The #2MinTues series is aimed at showing something short and sharp in a video format to help the wider community. This will range across all Veeam products.