It was hard to miss the global IT outage on July 19th—it likely affected many of us in some form, whether services were unavailable or you were responsible for getting those systems up and running. In the face of an emergency, we sometimes look for the quickest way to get our systems back up and running, and it can be all too easy to miss some of the options available.

With that in mind, I wanted to provide some quick suggestions in addition to a list of recovery options available to Veeam customers.

Recovery Options

Before I dive into recovery options, I want to provide some high-level advice and takeaways:

• If a full VM restore is required, Quick Rollback is a feature you should consider. This will leverage Changed Block Tracking, restoring only the required data blocks, meaning a faster recovery time overall.
• Keep in mind that Veeam Backup & Replication can perform an Instant Recovery to a hypervisor different from the source, particularly to vSphere, Hyper-V, or to Nutanix AHV. This can be useful if your recovery plan requires that you move your systems to a new platform.
• Veeam can also perform recoveries to other platforms, including the Cloud. That is to say if you require restoring your workload to a new location, whether due to resource contention or otherwise, you can recover on-prem workloads to the public Cloud.
• Veeam Backup & Replication can take your Agent for Windows backups from physical workloads and restore them as VMs to many different platforms. This is extremely useful for cases where you may have remote systems that require manual intervention, but you may not be able to be present to remediate the issue physically. Be sure to review Crowdstrike’s recommended resolution so that you can ensure you find a recovery solution that best fits your needs.
• If you need to run a script as part of your recovery (whether for application validation or to perform OS-level tasks), a Staged Restore might be an option to consider.

Resources

Although Veeam supports five hypervisors today, the documentation below is focusing on vSphere, Hyper-V, AHV, and our major cloud offerings. For platforms that you may not see here, be sure to check out helpcenter.veeam.com.

• Quick Rollback for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hosts
• Instant VM Recovery for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV
• Restore entire VMs, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV
• Restore Veeam Agent Backup to vSphere, or to many other platforms (hypervisors and Clouds)
• Restore Amazon EC2 instances
• Restore Microsoft Azure VMs
• Restore Google Cloud Compute Engine VMs
• Staged Restore for vSphere and Hyper-V
• Veeam Recovery Orchestrator offers a multitude of recovery options
• The Veeam Support page provides access to product documentation, our knowledge base, and the ability to open a support request

Lastly, be sure to keep security front and center. Sadly, threat actors and criminals often see crises such as these as an opportunity. The US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning that they have been observing phishing attacks and other threats directly related to this incident.