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Jan 24th 2012

Welcome Chris Henley to the Veeam Product Strategy Team

Posted by in Announcements |


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 @NerdyLikeThat

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 “Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference” as well as a contributing author of “Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2.” 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.

ChrisHenley

Welcome to the Veeam Teeam Chris!

Nov 30th 2011

v6 is YOUR Release!

Posted by in Announcements |


On the back of every Veeam business card is our motto “Listening to you, building the tools you need.”

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

Jan 14th 2011

nworks Management Pack for VMware webinar now available

Posted by in Microsoft |


Last month, Alec King from Veeam and Microsoft MVP Pete Zerger of SystemCenterCentral.com presented a webinar about Veeam’s solution to monitor VMware environments within Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) via the nworks Management Pack for VMware. This webinar is a good example of how customers can leverage their Microsoft investments in System Center, yet provide a familiar monitoring platform to the VMware footprint within the organization.

The nworks Management Pack for VMware offers incredible visibility into the VMware vSphere environment by leveraging the VMware SOAP API. Not just is this smart, it is also cool. In the webinar, Alec and Pete explain how the management pack goes into the VMware vSphere environment to deliver very relevant information that infrastructure administrators can use to set very specific alerting and monitoring thresholds. Organizations that utilize Microsoft System Center Operations Manager will appreciate the seamless integration of this management pack for the VMware infrastructure. The webinar is available for on-demand replay here in Windows Media format.

If you want to download the slide deck, you can do so here.

Also during the webinar, 12 lucky attendees won a copy of the book System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 R2 Unleashed. Congratulations Dean, Bruno, Jeremy, Ralph, Jonathan, Ravi, Mikael, Shaun, Michael, James, Brian and Douglas! So, it pays to attend Veeam webinars!

Dec 3rd 2010

MAC address changes using the VMXNET3 adapter

Posted by in Microsoft |


Recently in an internal discussion and lurking through the Veeam Forums, the VMXNET3 virtual adapter came up in regards to its behavior when a MAC change occurs. The VMXNET3 adapter is one of the new paravirtualized devices that are part of the vSphere compliment of technologies.

The behavior in question is that when a Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 virtual machine is cloned or otherwise incurs a change to the MAC address; the virtual machine will re-enumerate the Ethernet interface. This also happens when using Veeam Backup and Replication’s SureBackup functionality. While I’ve historically been a fan of the VMXNET3 interface, everyone should be aware of this behavior. There are limitations with VMXNET3, such as it not being supported for use in the VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) virtual machine configuration for all versions of vSphere.

The re-enumeration of the Ethernet interface will make it appear still as a VMXNET3 interface, but in the operating system; it will become the next in sequence. For a virtual machine that is created with the default option of selecting an automatically assigned MAC address, the network interface will show up as shown in the figure below if the MAC address changes:

image

This is all too familiar as many virtualization professionals had this happen when performing physical to virtual conversions, as well as the upgrade that we may have performed going to VMXNET3 from a previous adapter type. Because of this behavior of the adapter, VMware has published this KB article recommending the use of the E1000 adapter type for templates using Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7. If the virtual machine has a custom-defined MAC address, most of these issues do not occur; but this isn’t really a practical solution.

This is just the case when a virtual machine that is launched within SureBackup has an automatically configured MAC address, the virtual machine may not respond correctly to this new environment. The primary observation in most situations is that the guest virtual machine will enumerate the additional network interface (as shown above) and it will not retain any of the networking configuration options that were part of the source virtual machine. This means that the interface will boot up requesting a DHCP address and not have the static IP address configuration that was previously assigned. This doesn’t apply to the other virtual network adapter types (such as E1000 or VMXNET2) or other operating systems such as Windows Server 2003.

For the same virtual machine that was shown above, it receives a new MAC address in the automatic configuration. This is due to how the VMXNET3 interface enumerates itself in Windows. The VMXNET3 device shows its enumeration in the Windows Device Manager as shown below:

image

This corresponds to its location in the NetworkCards hive of the registry. Basically, each time a new network card interface is enumerated in the operating system; they are displayed here as well. Here is where these IDs are enumerated in the registry:

image

While all of this is the rather standard experience that we have gone through in cloning a virtual machine or related tasks, it can impact the SureBackup feature of Veeam Backup and Replication 5. In this forum thread, a Veeam user highlighted a situation where using VMXNET3 can impact the SureBackup functionality. Anton Gostev, a product manager at Veeam, points out that the 5.0.1 release of Veeam Backup and Replication will have a workaround.

Update: Version 5.0.1 has been released. Be sure to update previous versions to the latest release.

Aug 3rd 2010

We’ve Moved!

Posted by in Announcements |


Some of you may have noticed that it’s been a while since there was a post on VeeamMeUp.com. The reason for that (besides the fact that I’ve been busy) is that we’re moved the “un-official” VeeamMeUp blog to a new home, Veeam.com/blog. What started out for me 3 years ago as an experiment and play on words has now grown into a full fledged corporate blog.

The move was necessary for several reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that Veeam recognizes the value of blogging and rather than starting from scratch we decided to move VeeamMeUp. We’ve imported all of the content over and have redirected the traffic from VeeamMeUp to this new address so (hopefully) any incoming links will be preserved as well as any internal links. Of course with any migration there’s always the chance for an issue so if you notice something, please comment or let me know at VMDoug at Veeam dot com.

I will still be providing much of the content as VMDoug but you’ll also see some other contributors here as well. Our goal is to open up the blog to the smart people we have here at Veeam so that they can contribute as well. Who knows, we might even see a post or two from Ratmir.

For now, here’s a quick list of what’s been going on the past month…

-doug

Jun 3rd 2010

Veeam and Microsoft Tech·Ed 2010

Posted by in Conference |


It’s always fun trying to pick themes for Tradeshows. With VMworld we can pretty much pick any theme since everyone there is part of our target audience. With Microsoft Tech·Ed the decision is a bit more difficult…how do we appeal just to select audience members that manage VMware?

gotvmware_final

OK, maybe that wasn’t so difficult after all.

If you’re going to be in New Orleans June 7-10, please stop by the Veeam booth and learn all about how you can manage VMware with Microsoft System Center. We’re going to have a good size booth and plenty of engineers on hand to demo our Veeam nworks Management Pack 5.5, including our new PRO Pack for SCVMM that we announced back at the Microsoft Management Summit.

Besides product demos we’re also going to be giving away “Got VMware” t-shirts and we’ll also have raffle drawings during the show where we’re giving away a free copy of Train Signal’s System Center Operations Manager Training. We’d like to thank our friends at Train Signal for working with us on this raffle. The drawing times for the raffle are below, make sure you’re at the Veeam booth for your chance to win.

  • Monday 8 p.m.
  • Tuesday 4:30
  • Wednesday 4:30
  • Thursday 2:45

The Veeam Team looks forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans!

Apr 12th 2010

Veeam and Microsoft Management Summit 2010

Posted by in Microsoft |


I’m really looking forward to my first MMS experience next week in Las Vegas. Veeam is a gold sponsor at MMS this year and with good reason, we have some exciting announcements to make. If you listen to my Chinwag with Mike Laverick, you’ll get an idea of what those announcements are (around 28 minutes in). I’m not going to write about those announcements yet, I’ll do a post after MMS and share my thoughts on what I learned as well as the reaction we get regarding our Microsoft System Center strategy moving forward.

The giveaways!

Of course people want to know what kind of swag they can expect from Veeam when they visit our booth #111. We will have our popular “blinky luggage tags” as well as some fine branded USB drives (loaded with Veeam goodness), but what about the “big giveaway”? I’m happy to announce that we’ll also be giving away copies of the latest and greatest book on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner, Andy Dominey. We will have a limited number of copies available and as always it will be first-come-first-served so make sure to make you way to booth #111 quickly. We’re also happy to have the authors of the book on-hand in our booth to do book signings, the schedule is below. If you’d like to get an idea of the type of content in the book, check out a recent post on System Center Central where the authors talk about the Veeam nworks MP for VMware.

MMS Book Signing Schedule

The following times are when the authors of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed will be at Veeam Booth #111 for book signings:

Tuesday: 1:00 – 2:00 PM

Wednesday: 1:00 – 2:00 and 5:00 – 6:00 PM

Thursday: 1:30 – 2:30 PM

Jul 24th 2009

Veeam announces commitment to Hyper-V

Posted by in Microsoft |


Several weeks ago Microsoft approached Veeam asking us if we would be supporting Hyper-V, especially their R2 release which RTM'ed just the other day. Of course Veeam's strategy is to support Hyper-V, we just hadn't announced it publicly yet. Micosoft was kind enough to allow me a guest blog spot on their virtualization blog to make the announcement. Veeam will be making additional announcements on this blog discussing our Hyper-V strategy in more detail in the coming weeks, we're very excited to be entering this new era of virtualization.

Check out the full post here, below is an exerpt.

R2 Veeam Too

Veeam’s tagline is “listening to you, building the tools you need.” We’ve heard your requests and we’d like to announce now that Veeam is committed to fully supporting Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. While Veeam has continued to build some of the best software for data protection and management of VMware infrastructures, we realize that customers are now faced with more virtualization choices. By fully supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, Veeam can help you manage heterogeneous hypervisor deployments and clouds with the innovative solutions you’ve come to expect from Veeam. The management and R&D teams at Veeam have a long history of working with Microsoft going back to the Aelita days, and we’re all excited to be working with Microsoft again.

Update July 30, 2009

Check out VMETC's post on the laws of vMotion

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