Transport mode is a property of each proxy (with version 6 of Veeam Backup & Replication), as shown below:

During a recent convergence of Veeam technical staff members, three situations were listed when Network Mode may be the best choice for a proxy and its associated job(s), including:

1. VM change-rate awareness. If you happen to be in tune with the change rate behavior of your VMs, taking a look at that behavior will help you determine how much change has incurred. For example, a system that simply takes on new log messages for the day and does not run a database may have a very low change rate. This low change rate may be best suited for Network mode, which would omit the API steps required to hot-add, and subsequently hot-remove the virtual disk(s) to an additional VM.

2. Direct SAN mode is not available. In all situations, although this mode is the best, it isn't always available for all environments. With NFS-based storage systems, for instance, it may be best to save the step of checking for Direct SAN mode availability in favor of Network mode. The per-job and per-iteration check can be omitted by explicitly selecting Network Mode.

3. A large amount of VMs per job. There are a lot of good reasons to have a large number of VMs per job, such as to increase deduplication within that backup job. Virtual appliance hot-add requires a few steps to be run within the job from the proxy that are repeated for each VM. These steps, multiplied across a number of VMs can add time to the overall job. Couple this with the low change rate that may occur, and the overall proxy efficiency can increase. You may see the “reconfigure virtual machine” event occur on both the VM being backed up as well as the proxy VM. Below is a proxy which has a series of these events occur during a backup job using virtual appliance hot-add:

As a general rule, the Automatic option is the best selection to make. However, awareness of your environment and the ability to access the "knobs and dials" will allow more granular configuration options that in some situations—even with Network mode—allow you to run quicker vSphere backups.

Have you ever explicitly chosen Network mode for a proxy configuration? If so, what were some of the factors that influenced you? Share your comments below.

■ The virtual machine guest-operating system

■ The Veeam Backup & Replication console

■ The backup repository

■ The virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V and vSphere)

Let’s walk through an example of creating a very basic security group and provisioning the permission to perform the 1-Click File Restore. The requirement for an (Active Directory or Built-in) account using the feature is provisioning it for use in the Enterprise Manager Web UI roles section. Figure A shows an Active Directory group being added to the File Restore Operator Role.

Figure A

The SSA-Users-Helpdesk group has no membership to any other security groups and is in the \Users organizational unit, which in this domain has no user permissions assigned to the location. The configuration of the group is very straightforward and is shown in Figure B.

Figure B

This group has one user, SSA\Helpdesk, which has no rights in the domain except “Domain Users.” When this user logs into the Enterprise Manager Web UI, the interface is restricted to show only the file-restore operation. The role, if enabled, permits restores using 1-Click-File Restore functionality to limit by file type. The default-file types include:

• Text documents
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
• All common Microsoft Word documents

File types can be added or removed to this list with the Enterprise Manager Web UI “Site Settings” option. In addition, the option to download the file as part of the restore process is removed. This is shown in Figure C.

Figure C

The restore capability uses the Application-aware processing credentials during the backup job; this is for both vSphere and Hyper-V virtual machines.

Have you experienced the new 1-Click File Restore capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication v6? Does this configuration appeal to you? Share your comments below.

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On Feb. 1, 2012 Veeam Backup & Replication will have new pricing. This is timed loosely with the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v6, which brings 72 new and improved features to our flagship product. The big areas of new features are enterprise scalability, enhanced replication, and support for Hyper-V and 1-Click file restore capabilities, among other things, in the new Enterprise Manager web interface. Did you catch the series of four webinars about the new features of version 6? These webinars as well as their slides are available from our v6 launch page: Extending the lead in VM backup.

Currently the list pricing for Veeam Backup & Replication is $599 and $899 per socket for Standard and Enterprise Editions, respectively (USD). The new pricing effective Feb. 1 will see the Standard Edition at $699 and Enterprise Edition at $1099 (USD). Now is the time to take advantage of the features of Veeam Backup & Replication v6—before the price increase. To get started, contact your sales team or click here for more information.

(Note: for Russia and CIS, the new pricing went into effect December 1, 2011. Other pricing may vary by region)

This is important because today we have released Veeam Backup & Replication v6 after over a year of R&D effort. What makes this release so significant in my view is that it’s your release. When I say it’s your release I mean that if you take a look at all the new features and enhancements, they were almost all driven by direct customer and partner feedback.

Better Scalability? You got it!
Our new proxy/repository architecture allows you to scale out a single Backup & Replication server to thousands of VMs. You can still go with a single server and let it be the proxy and repository but as your environment grows you can now grow with it.

Enhanced Replication? Yep!
If you take a look at the What’s New around replication alone you’ll see that this is one of the areas we focused most of our attention on. Re-IP? Check. Failback? Check. Traffic Throttling? Check. Better seeding? Check.

Support for multiple hypervisors? Yes!
Now I know not everyone asked us to support Windows Server Hyper-V but a fair number of customers and partners did, as well as a lot of Hyper-V shops that wanted the functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication. The fact that you get support for VMware and Microsoft virtualization all from a single install and interface is huge news.

I'd like to give a big Thank You to all of our customers, partners and prospects who had so much to do with this release. We get our best feedback through our forums so please continue to post great feedback there. We're already working on the next release and we'll have some BIG news to share early next year (again, from YOUR input) so watch for the countdown clock.

For a comprehensive overview of v6, please check out the webinar series that includes product demos: http://vee.am/v6webinars

Although that earlier list is now public in the What’s New document, we wanted to show this in another way. We decided to create a numbered list for a better look at v6 features and enhancements: a 30,000-ft. view from the top. 

WOW! What a list!

Here is the list of Veeam Backup & Replication v6 new and improved features (drum roll….):

1. Scalability: Dedicated proxy to run backup and replication jobs
2. Scalability: Repository to hold backups and replication metadata
3. Scalability: Dynamic job assignment
4. Scalability: Intelligent load balancing
5. Scalability: Windows target support
6. Scalability: Multiple vPower repositories
7. Scalability: Multiple user Veeam console connections
8. Scalability: Log collection wizard
9. Replication: Leverage hot-add for disk writes
10. Replication: Replication can target a cluster object
11. Replication: Proxy to proxy compression (up to 10x improvement)
12. Replication: Multi-select operations for multiple VM failover
13. Replication: Enhanced job configuration
14. Multi-hypervisor support: Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere
15. Multi-hypervisor support: Easy license exchange for different hypervisors
16. Multi-hypervisor support: Dedicated Hyper-V off host proxy
17. Enterprise Manager: Job editing
18. Enterprise Manager: Job cloning
19. Enterprise Manager: FIPS compliance
20. Enterprise Manager: Improved interface design
21. 1-Click File Restore
22. File restore operator role
23. Traffic throttling
24. Improved domain controller handling
25. More efficient CPU usage for backup jobs
26. Multiple TCP/IP connections per job
27. Optimization for WAN transfers
28. Source data retrieval optimizations
29. Exclude virtual machine swap file
30. Enforceable backup window
31. Simultaneous backup and replication jobs now permitted
32. Backup mapping from existing backup file
33. Backup metadata file for quick foreign imports
34. Enhanced backup format file
35. Backup data file alignment to 4K on writes
36. Write enhancement for deduplication targets
37. 2-proxy replication architecture
38. Replication state protection
39. Improved job reports
40. Wizard navigation improvements
41. 1-Click automated failback for replication jobs
42. 1-Click permanent failover for replication jobs
43. Active rollbacks of replication jobs
44. Improved replica seeding
45. Replica mapping
46. Re-IP for replicated VMs
47. Full support for distributed virtual switches with backup and replication
48. Automatic replication job update on failover or failback
49. Additional replication job options
50. Veeam Quick Migration
51. SmartSwitch migration cutover
52. Instant VM Recovery migration
53. Individual file copy
54. 1-Click full VM restore
55. Virtual disk restore option to inventory on existing VM
56. Thin disk support for VM file level restore
57. Hot-Add restore
58. Hot-Add replication
59. Multiple VM restore
60. Network mapping on restore wizard
61. VM managed object reference preservation on restore
62. User profile indexing
63. Support for GPT and simple dynamic disks
64. NTFS permission preservation on guest file restores
65. Optional search server for less than ~100 VMs
66. Smaller guest index catalog size
67. Real-time statistics improvements
68. Job bottleneck monitor
69. Loss of VM warning for removed VMs
70. Support for unmanaged VMware Tools installations
71. PowerShell extended to support new v6 functionality and objects
72. 1-Click automatic upgrade for proxies and repositories

How cool is that! Are you curious about Veeam Backup & Replication v6? Check out Veeam’s series of webinars, with VMDoug and Gostev!

Which v6 features are you most excited about? Share your feedback below.

My favorite small Veeam Backup & Replication v6 feature is the ability to skip the page file within virtual machines during both backup and replication jobs. This option is an advanced setting for a job and is enabled by default, as shown in the figure below:

Take a moment and think about this incredible efficiency for a backup operation. Add in changed block tracking, and it becomes even more relevant! Changed block tracking is provided in vSphere environments for Data Protection from the vStorage APIs. We have also implemented a block change tracking mechanism for Hyper-V VM backups! This feature is not limited to Windows virtual machines using Veeam Backup & Replication v6. Keep in mind this is via agentless image-based backups, how cool is that!

While nobody will really want the dreaded Monster VM in their environment, having the ability to skip the swap file will certainly aid backup efficiency.

Veeam Backup & Replication v6 will be released this quarter (Q4 2011). Stay tuned for more information on the launch of this major release!

We released our hotfix on 20 October, 2011, that means it took us a full 57 days to release a hotfix for Veeam Backup & Replication to FULLY support vSphere 5. One of the main issues with Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.2 was that it didn’t work for all processing modes with VMSF5 (just like every other vendor at the time of this writing). A processing mode popular with our customers is direct SAN access utilizing the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP). In order to support direct SAN access for VMFS 5, we had to move to the latest version of the VDDK API which was only made available the same day as the GA release of vSphere 5.

57 days to incorporate a new version of a low-level API
1368 hours to fully test
82,080 minutes to fix things that worked previously

So, rather than trying to shout from the rooftops that we supported vSphere 5 the day it was released (or even weeks before), we wanted to make sure everything worked. We make backup and DR software after all, and we don’t want our customers getting into a mess with their production data based on claims by marketing. I think Anton did a good job of explaining our position in the forums, please take a moment to read his post.

Before you go checking our downloads page for the hotfix, please be advised that it’s only available through Veeam support. Since this isn’t a full release, and not all of our customers will need it, we are only making it available via support. Of course, Veeam Backup & Replication v6 will have full support of vSphere 5 when it’s released later this year, and that will be our official release vehicle for vSphere 5.

One of the things I like best about VMworld and other events is the constant interaction with the IT community. In doing so, I had one conversation with a Veeam customer that was a good story to share. Basically, his situation was this: an on-demand virtual lab was used to safely test and then adjust the permissions of a catch-all service account.

We’ve all done it, simply assigning too many permissions an account to “make it work” when it comes to provisioning a new system seems like a quick way out of a jam. But, when we have to come back and clean up any over-permissioned accounts; we may be a little weary when it comes to determining the impact of the service account. Before I explain how the virtual lab was used for correcting the service account, let me take a quick moment to explain what the virtual lab is. Veeam Backup & Replication version 5 introduced vPower, which, simply put, allows virtual machines to be run directly from the backup file. We can use this for Instant VM Recovery for the quickest recovery times. And with the help of additional functionality – an automatically managed, isolated “virtual lab” environment - we can leverage vPower to do things like SureBackup verification of backup jobs, item-level recovery (including leveraging the U-AIR wizards) and an on-demand sandbox for situations such as this service account remediation. For the virtual lab capability, the diagram shows how it exists in a generic setting:

There are few things to note. First of all, the virtual lab functionality keeps these virtual machines isolated from production. This is critical in order to not interfere with the production virtual machines as well as other systems within the environment. Secondly, the backup file is kept as read-only during this operation. This is to ensure that the integrity of the backup file is maintained. From a CPU, network and memory perspective, the virtual lab is running from the production vSphere cluster (on a designated host). From a storage perspective, the Veeam backup repository (or backup file) is presented as a virtual NFS datastore. From there, the individual VMs are enumerated, able to be powered on and are placed on a private network (again for isolation).

This is where my conversation with the VMware administrator comes back in. He explained to me how, once these virtual machines are powered on in the isolated environment, he was able to remediate the permissions model of a service account with too many permissions. He did this in the safe area presented by the vPower virtual lab. Further, by including a domain controller in the backup job and virtual lab, he very easily made additional changes to this multi-tiered application. By using the isolated virtual lab, it was very easy for him to go through granular changes in the permissions assigned to the service account, document those changes, test the application and be able to confidently implement the security changes into production.

Do you have a vPower story to share? If so, share it below or let me know: Rick.Vanover@Veeam.com.

1. SAN/NBD mode – This denotes that the Direct SAN access mode is being utilized for a job within Veeam Backup & Replication. The SAN part of the acronym stands for storage area network and the NBD part stands for network block device, which is the failover mechanism if SAN mode can't occur. This is the most optimal configuration for backup jobs , as the Veeam backup server communicates directly to the storage target to perform the backup. This can be an iSCSI target or fibre channel storage networks. If you have a choice on which mode to use, choose Direct SAN access!
2. Seeding – This is the process of performing the first pass of a job (such as a replication job) to removable media. In this way, the initial replication pass can leverage the quick access speeds of the local network. Further iterations of the job will only manage changes, which is optimal for low-bandwidth connections.
3. Application-aware processing or quiescing – This is the process of quieting a parts of a virtual machine. This is usually performed on an application or the file system. When it is made quiet, backups can be taken in a consistent state. For Windows systems, leveraging application-aware processing with Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) within Veeam Backup & Replication will properly quiesce (or prepare) the application for a backup, the option within the user interface is "Application Aware Processing."
4. Source and target – The source would be where the virtual machines reside on production (or primary) storage. The target is the destination to which the backups are made. For Veeam Backup & Replication, a number of targets are available to hold backup data. This includes iSCSI targets, deduplication appliances, NAS or CIFS shares, fibre channel LUNs, direct attached disk or storage on NFS resources. The target can also be called the backup repository, which would hold all of the Veeam data. Additionally, when referring to replication, the target is the host and datastore that you are replicating to.
5. Hot-add – This is frequently used when referring to virtual appliance mode backups within Veeam Backup & Replication. Basically, once the virtual machine backup is underway; the associated VMDK files are added dynamically to the Veeam backup server. This dynamic procedure can only happen when the virtual machine has a snapshot in place, and then the VMDK files of the source virtual machine are disconnected from the Veeam backup server once the backup steps are completed. Further, this option is only available when Veeam Backup & Replication is installed on a virtual machine. Veeam Backup & Replication has supported Hot-add mode since version 4, released in 2009.

This is just the tip of the iceberg! What terms within the product are you looking for answers on? Share your questions and comments below.

The vSphere SAN options are where the configuration choices increase and may become confusing. SAN options include VMFS volumes on fibre channel and iSCSI shared storage resources or local disk resources on an ESX(i) server.

This dizzying array of possibilities allows the individual VM to be provisioned with the following options for storage:

• A VMDK file residing on a production NFS datastore
• A VMDK file residing on a production VMFS datastore
• A Raw Device Mapping (RDM) in physical mode on a production SAN resource
• An RDM in virtual mode on a production SAN resource
• The iSCSI initiator configured within the guest operating system to an iSCSI target

These options will greatly impact how the VM is to be backed up with Veeam Backup & Replication. VMDKs are a rather safe bet and whether NFS or VMFS is used for the file system; I’d recommend VMFS if a decision needs to be made. Simply put, VMFS is first in line for new VMware features; namely Storage IO Control.

Using RDMs complicates the situation, as backup strategies may be impacted. Veeam Backup & Replication supports RDMs in virtual mode only. Be sure to see this recent post on this topic, RDMs explained for Veeam Backup & Replication.

The iSCSI initiator used within the VM needs to be used very strategically. The use case we like to see this configuration used is for the Veeam Backup & Replication server installed as VM with iSCSI storage as the target. The backup jobs will be sent directly to the iSCSI target, formatted as NTFS on the Veeam Backup & Replication server. This is brings better performance than leveraging VMDKs on a VMFS volume for this task. Further, the drive size can be very large to accommodate the backup repository. See this recent blog post on the Veeam blog, Using the iSCSI initiator within Veeam Backup & Replication in a VM.

Configuring the iSCSI initiator within a VM that is to be backed up with Veeam Backup & Replication will exclude the drives that are provisioned directly through the iSCSI target to the guest VM. This practice needs to be used with extreme caution, and our recommendation is to ensure that anything you back up with Veeam Backup & Replication is on a VMDK (or a RDM in virtual mode only when required). The primary reason is that the VMware snapshot won’t include the storage resources provisioned through the iSCSI initiator on the VM.

What considerations do you use when provisioning disk resources to an individual VM? How do you go about data protection for situations outside of the norm? Share your comments below.