It is with great excitement that we announce that Chris Henley has joined Veeam. Chris will be working with myself (Doug Hazelman) and Rick Vanover to build relationships within the Microsoft Hyper-V and virtualization community. You can follow Chris on Twitter
Chris comes to Veeam after 9 years of working with Microsoft as an IT Pro Evangelist. He loves technology and has a passion for helping others implement solutions that make their lives work better. Chris is an accomplished public speaker with a fun style that conveys deep technical concepts in ways that are easy to understand. Chris is the co-author of “” as well as a contributing author of “.” He loves to write and says, “It is a great experience writing technical material! People use that book to make their environment better. I love being a part of their solution!”
Chris spends a lot of his time working on emerging technologies and teaching IT Professionals how to take advantage of those opportunities. One of his key areas of focus in the past 2 or 3 years has been on Hyper-V and the virtualization space.
While delivering a series of seminars focused on Cloud design Chris was introduced to Veeam and its Backup and Replication tools.
“I knew right away that this was something I wanted to be involved in! The tools were focused on the future of IT. They were designed with virtualization in mind. They were easy to use and they just worked. As soon as backup and replication v6 came along with support for Hyper V I knew I had to get on board with Veeam! The opportunity here is Amazing!
Chris loves Hyper V and thinks that it will be a key player in the hypervisor marketplace. He is excited to be a part of the growth and development of Veeam!
You may have also noticed that we’ve done some redesign on the blog. All posts will now feature a header that includes a photo of the author, an example including Chris’ picture is below.
As Veeam moves forward and starts to become focused two virtualization platforms, I thought to myself now is the time to work out how I’m going to introduce Microsoft Hyper-V in my lab environment. I wanted to know if it could be virtualized running inside a VMware virtual machine of some sorts. Veeam has been very successful in presenting its solutions through the use of portable labs running for example on laptops nested under VMware Workstation. We would often have a nested ESX server, vCenter, DC and Veeam apps running on a single laptop and I wanted to know if Hyper-V could be thrown into the mix.
This post will function as a how-to guide and provide a step-by-step process to run Hyper-V virtual machines on either VMware Workstation 8 or ESXi 5.
For an upcoming whitepaper series, we have decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of us simply providing a list of management challenges; we’d like to hear from you! What is your biggest issue in managing your VMware vSphere (or VI3) environment? This is an opportunity to help us tailor the whitepapers specifically to your needs.
Our whitepapers are one part of the many resources we provide that are not entirely specific to Veeam products. The Veeam Community Podcast, featured webinars, and whitepapers focus on general virtualization technology topics and are meant to enable the Veeam community to be more equipped on the journey to virtualization bliss. More >
Last week, I presented a webinar titled, 5 New ways to use vPower. The objective of this webinar was to explain how the SureBackup functionality with vPower can bring a few more options to the VMware vSphere administrator. While I was focusing on SureBackup, a few questions were raised related to the networking capabilities of the Virtual Lab functionality. In the Users Guide, this diagram explains the Virtual Lab well:
However, there are still questions that may arise for each of the virtual machines behind the proxy appliance (located at the top end of the diagram). Here are five facts about these machines behind the proxy appliance:
1. The SureBackup virtual machines cannot pass through the Proxy Appliance to the production network. The VMs that reside in the isolated network are on a vSwitch that is only accessible to the proxy appliance. There is no route from this network out other networks.
With this safeguard, the isolated network virtual machines have the same IP addresses as the production virtual machines. This is the fundamental way that the virtual machines can start as expected while not interfering with the production instances within the isolated network.
2. The Virtual Lab proxy appliance is created from the wizard. When the Virtual Lab wizard creates the networking configuration for the proxy appliance, the virtual machine that performs the proxy appliance role is created with the input from the wizard. The proxy appliance is created from the contents of the C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\LiveCD folder in default installations. Each proxy appliance will have individual network configuration from the Virtual Lab wizard , which creates a floppy image to provide the proxy appliance its configuration. The virtual floppy image also is where logs are written. The floppy image file is stored as config.flp file in proxy appliance folder on selected datastore.
3. The vSwitch has no physical adapters assigned. If you look in the network inventory of the host, you may notice that there are no vmnic interfaces assigned to it. The figure below shows an example vSwitch for a Virtual Lab:
This is, by design, to keep the virtual machines in the Virtual Lab isolated. The SureBackup proxy appliance does have a connection on a production network vSwitch, but its configuration prohibits pass-through from the isolated to production networks. Inbound traffic is permitted through the access IP, if configured, within the Virtual Lab wizard.
4. The vSwitch is located only on one host. During the Virtual Lab wizard, the selected host is the only one that receives the vSwitch for the SureBackup Virtual Lab. In this way, the Virtual Lab is contained to this host and will not move around should a vSphere feature such as vMotion be configured.
5. Distributed Virtual Switches (DVS) are supported with Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0.1. Using a DVS on the ESX host is now supported for the Virtual Lab. Further hosts that are part of DRS clusters are also supported with version 5.0.1.
The Virtual Lab is an incredibly useful tool, yet the networking configuration should be fully understood before proceeding. If you haven’t checked out the User Guide, it’s the authoritative resource for these feature. Some lab time to go through the drill with vPower is also a good idea to be fully comfortable.
How do you use the Virtual Lab within Veeam Backup and Replication v5? Share your comments below.
What an honor for Veeam! We were selected in this year’s Reader’s Choice Awards by . The news crossed the wire today via our press release, and this is a big deal for Veeam.
In the Reader’s Choice Awards, Veeam Backup and Replication v5 was selected as the winner of the Virtual Business Continuity category and the Veeam ONE Solution for VMware received the Merit Award in the Virtual Management & Optimization category.
This week, the Americas Veeam team is gathered in Atlanta for the annual kickoff for 2011; and this is great news for us to celebrate together. While we are logistically hampered by strong winter weather in the Southeast, this is a bright spot and a big deal for the Veeam team.
The Reader’s Choice Awards are available (registration required) and are also figured in this month’s print issue of Virtualization Review magazine. Be sure to check out Veeam in the Reader's Choice Awards. Thank you virtualization community!
While it may seem trivial, there are a number of use cases for running a backup on a powered off virtual machine. This can be to increase the automation levels with VMware features such as Distributed Power Management (DPM), a subset of the DRS) of vSphere. DPM will power down under-utilized ESX(i) servers and consolidate the workload to the remaining hosts of the DRS cluster.
While DPM does a good job of managing hosts during periods of low activity within a cluster, it doesn’t do much for virtual machines. There can be plenty of situations where virtual machines could be subject to being powered off during out-of-service hours. Shutting down Windows Servers automatically is easy enough with centralized scripts using PowerShell, shutdown.exe or even a local scheduled task. The revival task to power on the virtual machine is also an easy one-liner that can be easily automated with the Start-VM command, as shown below:
If a number of virtual machines are permitted to be powered off, the use case for DPM becomes more attractive. While idle virtual machines will release memory back to the host via VMware’s memory management techniques, the ultimate resource giveback is a powered off state. To be fair, when the virtual machine is powered back on, DRS and some of the memory management techniques may take time to re-arrange all of the newly added resources to the cluster.
Regardless of the reason a virtual machine is powered off, Veeam Backup and Replication can still protect the virtual machine in this state. In fact, the snapshot burden that the virtual machine, host and storage systems undergo is lessened by the fact that the redo-log files have effectively nothing to write to the source VMDK. While the virtual machine is powered off, features such as VMware’s Changed Block Tracking of each VMDK are still utilized during the backup job for optimal performance. Further, all of Veeam's restore and vPower features are available for the powered off virtual machine.
There are two important notes for backup up powered-off virtual machines, the first is that application-aware processing does not occur on a powered-off VMs and the second is that this is not a good use case for a domain controller. See this earlier blog post about what may happen for a domain controller.
As a side note, if multiple backups are run on the virtual machine while it is powered off; the subsequent backups (when using incremental mode) will be a small container only of headers because nothing has changed. In regards to excluding powered off virtual machines from a backup job, this was raised in a forum discussion and the current product only allows exclusion of templates from the backup job.
Most agent-based backup tools can't back up powered-off virtual machines. This may be an obstacle for taking DPM to the next level and setting up automated shutdown and power up operations for virtual machines, yet ensuring they are backed up. Do you perform automatic shutdown operations of virtual machines during out of service hours? Would you if you could back them up? If so, explain your environment below.
When version 5 of Veeam Backup and Replication was released, many noticed that incremental mode for backup jobs is now the default. This may have caused some confusion to new customers as well as some that have not had much experience with Veeam Backup and Replication. Further, jobs created with version 4 retained their reversed incremental job mode.
Many have surely wondered why is this now the default job mode? There are number of reasons that this change was made. The foremost of which is that this format makes Veeam backups more ready to go to tape. The big difference is the transfer to tape, the previous jobs would change the archive bit on the large full backup file, the .VBK. The reverse incremental job modifies the .VBK file during each iteration. This means that if the .VBK file is to be transferred to a tape target, it would have to be transferred each time in its entirety due to the fact that the archive bit has been changed.
The archive bit behavior of the .VBK file is improved with the incremental mode. As it is not modified until the synthetic full iteration rolls previous incremental backups into the .VBK file. The new job mode’s default option is to include the synthetic full backups, also called forever-incremental. With this, there can be multiple .VBK files on disk. These may be large files, but a ripe candidate for data deduplication; should it be available on the storage target. If deduplication is not available, the .VBK files can consume quite a bit of space on disk and generally depends on retention configuration. A good way to represent this behavior is with a graphic, shown below.
The new incremental mode behavior rolls the prior job iteration .VIB files into the .VBK file during the synthetic full. At that point, the (new) .VBK file is modified and the archive bit will change for the file; which may effect the transfer to tape throughput. For those who are transferring to tape, this will save in transfers of the large .VBK file as the archive bit doesn’t change until the synthetic full operation. This is the default configuration, and it goes without saying that reviewing the User Guide for Veeam Backup and Replication v5 is a good idea for explanations of how this and the other backups modes operate.
These and other reasons are why this mode is now the default. Not to turn our ears to the community, user feedback for easier tape support is one of the drivers for making this the default as well. There are other features with incremental mode, such as being able to perform a restore concurrently while a backup is running because the backup files are no longer locked.
For disk only based backup jobs, it may be best to stick with the reverse incremental mode; which was the default in version 4 and for any upgraded jobs. How do you manage your job configuration with Veeam Backup and Replication v5 for job configuration? Share your comments below.
In all aspects of virtualization, there is one consistent supporting technology that enables everything to “just work” - DNS. For VMware vSphere and VI3 environments, DNS is critical for ESX(i) communication to vCenter. This criticality stems from VMware’s (HA) and (DRS) features being able to communicate to the management node of vCenter Server.
In terms of data protection with Veeam Backup and Replication, DNS also plays a critical part. This is especially important if multiple DNS zones, local Windows workgroups or multiple DNS servers are in use. The user interface of Veeam Backup and Replication is somewhat deceiving in that the connection is made directly to the vCenter Server in most situations. Individual hosts can be added, however most people aim for better scaling by pulling in the vCenter management node.
When a vCenter server is added to the Veeam Backup and Replication console, it confirms the DNS resolution to that endpoint. Further, the job definition that selects an individual host, virtual machine or other object in vCenter relies exclusively on the resolution to the vCenter Server and the objects in the vCenter database. This is the case when the vCenter Server is added into Veeam Backup and Replication exclusively.
DNS is used to connect the dots when the job is launched. At that point, Veeam Backup and Replication needs to determine where the virtual machine is located. This returns the VMware ESX(i) server where the virtual machine(s) for the job are located. This network resolution is directly from the Veeam Backup and Replication server to the ESX(i) host. This means that the Veeam Backup and Replication server needs to be able to resolve the host’s fully qualified domain name (FQDN) directly. Further, if advanced VMware features such as the vStorage APIs are to be used; port 902 needs to be open between the ESX(i) host and the Veeam Backup and Replication server to establish a network file copy (NFC) to perform the data mover operation when not using virtual appliance or direct SAN access modes.
DNS comes in to play when any of the components are not on the same zone or on the same Active Directory domain for the Windows systems or when multiple DNS servers are in use. It becomes an important end-to-end design element to ensure a full-circle DNS resolution consistency. This was a topic for me recently in a lab that has a separation between different domains and resolution realms, I was stuck on this very scenario!
As in any part of today's infrastructure, DNS clearly is an area that needs to be consistently accurate. Whether it be DNS configuration on the ESX(i) host itself to resolve names, Veeam Backup and Replication server's DNS configuration, or parts in between; DNS configured correctly is critical for all systems to work smoothly.
At Veeam, community involvement is a big priority. We are lucky to have such a strong community in this area of technology, and for this post we have reached out to a few members of the virtualization community to contribute here. We’ve asked technology personalities to comment on what they think 2011 will see in virtualization in general. Not from what Veeam will be doing, but the general technology direction. In their own words, this is what our five virtualization experts foresee in 2011:
Edward Haletky, VMware vExpert and more:
I predict that we will see more big companies buying small companies as well as more partnerships within the virtualization ecosystem. This year we have seen major investments from well known players into smaller players. This trend will continue with the smaller players being bought by the larger players. I expect to see a consolidation in the virtualization eco-system.
In the virtualization security space, I expect VMware to make larger in-roads, adding more into vShield with the help of RSA. There will still be a gap in this space for the SMB as VMware's goal for the SMB is to convince them to move into the public cloud which is managed by the larger enterprises into which VMware sells.
I expect Secure Multi-Tenant within the public cloud to be a bigger and bigger problem next year as public clouds are attacked and put under pressure.
Maish Saidel-Keesing, VMware vExpert and more:
Cloud will become mainstream (even though not all definitions of cloud will be the same), be it either public or private cloud, but hybrid cloud will not be adopted with such ease. Organizations are weary of what they cannot control and until that issue can be addressed with a security solution that provides a level of management which does not fall short of their corporate network, connections between the the public and private cloud will not become mainstream. On the other hand - this provides a great number of challenges and opportunities for the security vendors to fill this gap.
All the other major virtualization players (Microsoft – Xen – Red Hat) - will release a cloud product this year.
Deb Shinder, Microsoft MVP and more:
One prediction I would make is that the private cloud, as a transition technology for organizations that aren’t yet ready to trust their applications and data to the public cloud and outside cloud providers, will become increasingly important in 2011 and since the private cloud concept is heavily dependent on virtualization, that will drive the development of more and more sophisticated virtualization options. I also think as more companies roll out Windows 7 clients, Windows Virtual PC running the XP Mode VMs will become a standard way of hanging onto those old proprietary applications that won’t run on Windows 7. To an increasing extent, virtualization will no longer be just about server consolidation. The ability to run virtualized applications seamlessly will remove many of the obstacles that once stood in the way of a broader adoption of virtualized solutions.
Chris House, VMware VCP and more:
For 2011, server and desktop virtualization will continue to grow across the datacenter, much like a fabric of steel rebar reinforcing the concrete pillars supporting the physical enterprise.
Existing physical workloads once thought of as poor candidates for virtualization will continue to be virtualized with growing success and virtualization barriers will be broken. The private internal cloud will continue to expand and envelop all applications.
Server vendors will increasingly sell higher density servers packed with processors and memory as customers turn from buying servers for applications to buying servers as building blocks for the virtual infrastructure. Storage vendors will continue focusing on optimizing their architectures for the virtual infrastructure, offloading storage activities and moving them to their platform for increased efficiency.
The desktop virtualization holdouts will dip their toes in the pool and find it warm and inviting; if not a little murky, but increased offerings from desktop virtualization vendors will further clear the water and enable these desktop managers to complete wide-ranging management tasks in hours rather than weeks or months.
Tom Howarth, VMware vExpert and more:
Tis the season to be jolly and time for reflection, but let’s look ahead to 2011 and think what may happen.
One thing that is going to happen, the service Console will be gone by the end of 2011. Now on to may happens, Cloud may have finally got out of Marketing and Fluff land and actually begun to deliver real value at a corporate level, rather than the toys that are currently being touted as Public Clouds.
NetApp will be acquired by somebody, maybe HP or IBM more likely Oracle to complete their service stack, a real storage offering is all that is missing from their portfolio now.
And on a personal note – I will finally commit to doing my VCDX.
Veeam blog site note: These predictions are entirely those of the individuals, and not an indication of any Veeam interest or future product. These are free community contributions from the above bloggers and personalities.
Now it is your turn, share your predictions below for virtualization in 2011!
It’s that time of year again. 2 years ago Veeam launched Veeam Monitor Free Edition during the holiday season. The launch was preceded by a build up of people trying to guess just what it was we were releasing on December 22, 2008. Last year we teamed up with Rick Scherer over at and gave away some software to some lucky winners.
This year we’re again preparing another holiday surprise. It’s not a new product or an existing product for free (like in 2008), instead it’s a gift to the VMware community. Doug Hazelman will be announcing the “gift” at the happening on December 10, 2010. We’ll also be issuing a press released and there will be a blog post announcing the vSpecial gift.
We have already talked to some of you in the community about this so if you "know" please don't spoil it for everyone else. If you're on , look for special hash tag clues this week.
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