Archives For Backup

Veeam 6.5 Released

October 26, 2012 — Leave a comment

During VMworld Barcelona Veeam announced the latest iteration of their Backup and Recovery product. For the first time we are seeing Veeam break from a major release each year to be be a dot release with the latest version being 6.5. Although with the work to ensure the product is amongst the first backup products to not only support vSphere 5.1 but also Windows Server 2012 & Hyper-V 3.0 you can see why. 

But threat not Veeam have still managed to jam pack new features into this release. For a full and extensive list check out the whats new document on Veeam website here >>

Amongst the stand out features for me were

  • Exchange E-Discovery >> Allowing you to instantly browse, search and selectively restore, emails, notes, contacts etc from any Veeam backup or Exchange EDB file. Since the beta that I wrote about here >> http://virtualisedreality.com/2012/07/26/veeam-exchange-explorer-beta/ they have now included the option to restore to original location which I think rounds of the feature nicely. 
  • Chain Execution of jobs >> This feature has always been possible but you had to run a post script from each backup, with the new feature you can use the new scheduler to start a job automatically once the job it depends upon finishes. 
  • Configuration Backup >> Veeam is now automatically and periodically able to backup its configuration to a specified backup repository. Particularly useful if you have a physical Veeam server and want to backup your configuration.
  • Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots >> Utilise Veeam to recover any item from a HP Lefthand based SAN Snapshot with all the usual Veeam based features. I can’t wait for this functionality to support other SAN manufactures. 
  • Global Data DeDuplication with Windows Server 2012 >> You can utilise the power of Windows Server 2012 DeDuplication to reduce your repository size, you are also able to do file level recovery from a deduplicated volume inside a VM as long as you are running Veeam on a Windows Server 2012 sever. 

These are just a handful of the new features but it is great to see Veeam keeping ahead of the curve as usual and if this is just a dot release I can’t want to see what Veeam Backup and Recovery 7 will have in-store whenever that will be released. 6.5 was released yesterday and can now be downloaded from Veeam’s site  >> http://vee.am/65isGA

In Backup, Hyper-V, VMware
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Veeam Exchange Explorer Beta

July 26, 2012 — 2 Comments

Veeam recently introduced the beta of their new and improved Exchange Recovery tool, whilst they have had the ability to be able to restore granular items from Exchange for some time with Surebackup in real life scenarios it could take longer than you may wish with typical recoveries taking 30 minutes plus to boot the needed servers to complete the Surebackup recovery. With the introduction or Exchange Explorer you are able to simply recover individual items using an Explorer style interface that interacts with the backup of the edb file. 

Veeam have stated in their press release that this tool will work with both the free and paid for versions of Veeam backup which is fantastic news. 

I have been lucky enough to be able to give Exchange explorer a go and you will see the steps below. 

First we start by conducting a file level recovery of our Exchange server (Note that Veeam only support Exchange 2010 and there are no plans to support older versions however I understand they are working on an Exchange 2013 version already)

Veeam

Once we have select Windows Guest File we choose which backup we wish to restore from

Veeam

We choose the recovery point either a full or incremental / reverse incremental

Veeam

After entering a restore reason and clicking finish we are able to use the backup browser to browse to our edb file, once we have found the edb file (Read Update at the bottom) we can select Explore to view the edb file in Windows Explorer.

Veeam

We now copy the path ready to use Veeam Exchange Explorer

Veeam

We are now going to select Add Store and browse to our edb file location that we noted in the previous step, Veeam notes that a log replay will be needed and in my case has automatically filled in the log file location.

Veeam

Once complete we are able browse the edb file instantly and choose which granular items we wish to recover by sending back to the user or by exporting to a pst.

Veeam

 

Thoughts and Conclusions 

This is certainly a lot quicker and easier way of recovering granular items within Exchange, if you were to buy tools such as OnTrack to do this previously you would have been charged a heavy sum. As ever I have been left wanting more and hope in a final version we will see the Exchange Explorer recovery item listed in the initial recovery options to cut down on the steps required and I would really love to see the ability to recover the item directly back to the users mailbox as we do with SureBackup today. 

This is a fantastic leap forward by Veeam though and I hope they are able to bring technology like this to other applications, if they were able to do it for Sharepoint they would certainly be onto a winner. 

If you would like to join the beta be sure to register your interest here >> http://www.veeam.com/veeam-explorer-features.html

 

Update

As Anton from Veeam comments below you can actually double click the edb file in the backup browser to open it directly in the Exchange Explorer, this certainly saves a few steps.

In Backup , , , , ,
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Unable to mount new NFS storage on vSphere 5, Unable to resolve hostname error

July 3, 2012 — Leave a comment

When setting up a new Veeam demo I was presented with a problem where I was unable to mount the new Veeam NFS store, upon inspection I was unable to mount any NFS store to my host.

The error I was receiving was as follows

Error performing operation: Unable to resolve hostname ‘demo-veeam.Demo.local’

My new VM wasn’t however called demo-veeam and I got the same error when trying to mount any NFS store. Looking in datastores there were no NFS datastores showing and from the command line when using the esxcfg-nas -l option I received the same error

# esxcfg-nas -lError performing operation: Unable to resolve hostname ‘demo-veeam.Demo.local’

To resolve this I added a dummy host name entry for demo-veeam.demo.local into the \etc\hosts file

I was then able to run

# esxcfg-nas -lVeeamBackup_DEMO-VEEAM is /VeeamBackup_DEMO-VEEAM from demo-veeam.Demo.local unmounted unavailable

I was then able to delete this old NFS mount with

# esxcfg-nas -d VeeamBackup_DEMO-VEEAM

After cleaning up my hosts file I then retried adding the NFS datastore through the GUI and it worked correctly.

 

In Backup, vSphere , ,
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Veeam Backup Free Edition! Veeam Backup 6.1

June 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

Veeam Fast SCP has been part of many virtualisation engineers / administrators toolkits for quite some time, however updates on it have been a little scarce in recent times. On Monday Veeam announced Veeam Backup Free Edition replacing the Veeam Fast SCP Product.

awesome

With a typical Veeam countdown clock Veeam announced the free edition of their backup product with a new feature called Veeam ZIP. Veeam ZIP allows administrators to be able to select a VM from the vCenter tree view inside Veeam Backup Free Edition and choose to ZIP it up to their local machine using Veeam’s compression algorithms into a .VBK file.  Of course the free version is limited to allow only one time backups of VM’s using Veeam ZIP and doesn’t include a scheduling engine of any of the other advanced feature seen in the full product.

FreeVeeamBackup

Veeam Backup Free Edition wasn’t the only release on Monday with the new GUI used with the free product also appearing in Veeam Backup and Replication 6.1. Veeam have used Microsoft UX (User Experience) Guidelines to clean up the view and split of the sections of the product with a new ribbon and tabbed menu to the right.

 

Also for any Microsoft Hyper-V users out there Veeam have taken the much loved Instant Recovery Feature previously only available for VMware to now also be available for Hyper-V backups.

HyperVInstantRecovery

To download Veeam Backup Free edition please head over to Veeam’s site here >> http://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I’m really liking the new Veeam ZIP feature in both the new free and paid for versions as being able to take a one time backup of a VM without needing to create a dedicated job can be useful for many reasons, such as prior to upgrading a VM or prior to retiring and deleting a VM. I hope in the future we may see a vCenter plugin that either a. allows us to Veeam ZIP the VM to our local machine or more interestingly for me b. Allowing you to directly Veeam ZIP a VM to you Backup Repository.

In Backup, Hyper-V, VMware
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Dell Acquires AppAssure

February 26, 2012 — Leave a comment

Friday Dell announced that they were to acquire backup vendor AppAssure, more information for the Acquasition can be found here >> http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/02/24/dell-acquires-appassure.aspx

AppAssure

In the announcement above Dell gave some clues to their intentions for AppAssure with tight integration with the Dell storage portfolio to further assist with the fluid data vision.

Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio. Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.

Other than a base understanding of the AppAssure product I haven’t got any previous experience with using the product so I will leave those thoughts for another day, but you can see why Dell would want to have a backup product in the fold, the likes of HP, EMC and NetApp are all able to offer a backup product with their storage solutions and quite commonly I am asked what is the best way to backup VM’s from a replica or snapshot which isn’t easily done without a third party product at present.

However Dell have always been pretty good with their relationship with backup vendors particularly Symantec and increasingly Commvault, personally if it was Commvault that had been acquired I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

Dell and Commvault

Dell and Symantec

My personal hope is that with the acquisition of AppAssure it doesn’t cause Dell to put their guard up against other backup vendors on the market, as a hardware vendor I believe it is important for them to be able to maintain the flexibility to allow end users to use their choice of backup products. I look forward into seeing how AppAssure is integrated into the storage family and also personally learning what AppAssure has to offer.

In Backup, Dell
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Free Gift from Veeam for Christmas

December 22, 2011 — Leave a comment

veeamgift

Similar to last years offer from Veeam they are offering all VMware vExpert, VCP, VCI, VMUG member, Microsoft MVP or MCP a free two-CPU socket Not for Resale license of Veeam Backup & Replication™ v6 for evaluation and demonstration use. So if you have a home lab or a lab at work and want to play with Veeam or use it to your advantage in a non production environment here is your chance.

My VM’s have been backing up nicely with Veeam Backup and Replication V6 since it’s release a few weeks ago, although my poor little NAS is now feeling the strain and I need something with some more grunt, so if there are any friendly vendors out there who would like to sponsor some new storage for my home lab let me know :D

To grab you free licenses visit here >> http://www.veeam.com/news/holiday-gift-from-veeam-free-veeam-backup-and-replication-v6-licenses-for-your-lab155.html

 

 

In Backup
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Veeam Backup and Replication V6 Released

November 30, 2011 — 2 Comments

The much anticipated release of Veeam Backup and Replication V6 was released yesterday bringing a wealth of new features and many improvements for existing users.

v6

Some of the biggest new features and improvements are as follows

  • New distributed architecture
  • Hyper-V Support
  • One Click File Restore
  • Massive Replication Enhancements

To get the full low down on what is new in V6 check of this PDF >> Click Here

Distributed Architecture

With the new distributed architecture their are new roles that can be split away from the backup server to help you distribute the various tasks of the backup, they then use intelligent load balancing to help ensure you get the most out of your available resource.

The roles are as follows

Proxy Servers – The proxy server acts as a data mover unlike the full backup server they don’t require a dedicated SQL database and only a few light wait components need to be installed

Backup Repositories – The backup repositories decouple the backup target information from the backup jobs

Windows Smart Target – A windows target agent can be installed to Windows based target to provide the most efficient backup across networks with added traffic compression and updating of synthetic backups locally on the backup target

All the relevant components can be installed remotely from the Veeam server and also all future updates can be managed and installed from the Veeam server.

Hyper-V Support

With the new Hyper-V support Veeam is now able to offer multi hypervisor support from a single management console

MultiHypervisor

Replication Enhancements

One of the most popular features of Veeam Backup and Replication has been the replication feature but if you were replicating over a high speed link some found the performance wasn’t as good as they were expecting. With the new V6 release Veeam are now seeing up to a 10x performance increase. Not only this but there are also numerous new features such as seeding from a backup job and the ability to Re-IP a VM when you failover functionality that we have only ever seen in products such as VMware SRM previously.

Conclusion

This latest version of Veeam Backup and Replication not only see’s the usual new features but a complete design change in the way we can use Veeam in larger organisation while still being able to work in the traditional non distributed manner for smaller customer. With the new features available Veeam has further secured it’s place as the must have backup solution for your virtualised environment. Unfortunately we will need to continue to use other legacy products for our physical servers but maybe that is the reason on it own we need to be pushing towards 100% virtualisation. I will be digging deeper into the product over the coming weeks and hope to do some more in-depth blog posts soon. V6 is already running in my home lab at the moment and I have been really impressed by what I have seen so far.

Installer

Installing in my home lab

BackupJobFull

Highlighted is the new bottleneck detection within the job information screen, as you can see in my home lab the bottleneck is my target storage (Maybe thats an excuse for an upgrade!)

Add Server

The new add server screen for the virtualisation hosts and the smart targets

Console

The updated backup and replication console

 

 

 

In Backup, Hyper-V, VMware, Windows Servers
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The 2nd HandsonVirtualization.com Podcast with Special Guest Doug Hazelman of Veeam

June 1, 2011 — Leave a comment

We have just finished recording, editing and uploading the second HandsonVirtualization.com podcast with special guest Doug Hazelman of Veeam. Expect more of the usual virtualisation news and discussion, the latest from Dell Storage and Doug Hazelman from Veeam joined us to discuss the recent announcement regarding Hyper-V support in Veeam,

If you are an iTunes user the podcast can be downloaded from here >> http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/hands-on-virtualization-podcast/id431718920

If you aren’t an iTunes user you can download it from our Feedburner page here >> http://feeds.feedburner.com/handsonvirtualization

A big thanks to Anton Le Char who has given us the first review on iTunes! It’s really good to get feedback and I would love to hear more about what people think and what they would like to hear about in future episodes. Also if you would like to be our special guest please ping me us on Twitter @VirtualisedReal or @S1xth or alternatively email me at barry(at) virtualisedreality(dot)com

Itunesreview

Show Notes

Jonathan catch up

Dell Storage Forum 2011 in Orlando 1 week away
Dell Storage Forum 2011 – My Session – Virtualisation Case Study

Barry catch up

London VMUG (Cloud Day)
VMware HIT Kit ME

News

Topics of Discussion

1. Reminder of the Dell Storage Forum 2011
2. VMware purchase of Shavlik, SlideRocket, Mozy
3. Veeam announcement of HyperV support (What we would like to see in Veeam 6)
4. VMware Patch releases (May)
5. EQL Mem 1.0.1
6. EQL Firmware 5.0.5 release
7. VMware Horizon App Manager release
8. EMC World Iomega PX6-300D SSD – 100VMs Boot

Special Guest

Doug Hazelman – Veeam

 

 

In Backup, VMware
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Veeam’s Next Big Thing Announcement

May 16, 2011 — 2 Comments

This morning at Tech-Ed North America Veeam have announced their next big thing, as reported at the beginning of May Veeam had put a ticker on their website to their next big thing. What may surprise some of you is that the announcement has come at Tech-Ed, Microsofts annual event. When you hear the announcement it all makes sense.

 

Screen shot 2011 05 16 at 07 42 45

That’s right Veeam are extending the functionality of Veeam Backup and Recovery 6 to include Hyper-V backup. It seems a number of people including myself predicted that this maybe the case >> http://virtualisedreality.com/2011/05/03/veeams-next-big-thing/

Veeam are bringing image-based backup and replication, de-duplication and compression and changed block tracking to Hyper-V. In my view this is going to be a major win for Microsoft in the Hyper-V stakes, a number of customers I have spoken to using Hyper-V have always had problems with their backups most customers I have dealt with have used Microsoft DPM. The fact that Veeam have added changed block tracking that VMware made available to us in vSphere to Hyper-V is a big bonus for Hyper-V users, this functionality has had to be implemented by Veeam in the case of Hyper-V. Veeam Backup and Recovery will also have the replication technology that is available for VMware today. I understand that the Hyper-V integration isn’t going to feature the U-AIR recovery, SureBackup or Instant Recovery in this first release.

The real bonus to all this is that this product is available for any version of Hyper-V whether it is managed by SCVMM or not, this is going to further enhance Hyper-V as an offering for small businesses and non-profit users. By being able to have a couple of small hosts, some shared storage in the form of an Iomega PX4 or similar and Veeam, small business will be able to have enterprise class features for small business prices. Maybe it was time VMware opened the API’s in ESXi again to allow backups from it’s free version like we used to have in the past?

From my point of view there are still significant benefits and reasons why to choose VMware vSphere over Hyper-V but for the right size customers and those that have already made their choice this is going to make a big difference.

Veeam will be announcing more features later in the year and promised is more features for us in the VMware camp as well, we should start hearing more at VMworld with the product expecting to be released in Q4.

In Backup, Hyper-V
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Veeam Backup SureBackup Verification Demo

June 28, 2010 — 2 Comments

Just found this demonstration video of Veeam’s new feature coming in version 5 of their software.

I really can’t wait to start using this technology, Veeam is already my favourite backup software due to its ease of use and reliability and they continue to push the boundaries and improve the functionality they offer. With the introduction of this technology it will allow you to verify your backups every time on every VM and not just the odd one or two a month.

For more information about SureBackup please visit their website

http://www.veeam.com/surebackup/

In Backup, ESX
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