SureBackup and vPower

We started off the Spring of 2010 with our big announcement regarding SureBackup. This announcement was important for us because we knew that it was going to take some time to understand just what Recovery Verification was all about.

When you introduce something new to the market, you need to give enough time for it to soak in. When the summer came around, we started talking about vPower or Virtualization Powered-Data Protection. I gave the first live demo of SureBackup Recovery Verification, Instant VM Recovery and Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) at TechFieldDay 3 in Seattle and it was very well received. So well received in fact that one of our competitors announced something very similar to our patent-pending Instant VM Recovery a few weeks later that to this day still has not been released.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference held in June, Veeam was recognized as a finalist for Partner of the Year in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. This was great recognition for Veeam, specifically around our Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware.

Launch of Veeam ONE

Veeam is more than Backup & Replication, we also have a major focus on VMware infrastructure management. Veeam ONE was launched to create a single solution that customers could look to for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, reporting and chargeback. Also, since different customers need different monitoring solutions depending on their environment, Veeam ONE comes in 3 different flavors, including flavors for Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.

Best of VMworld

For me the best part of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was winning 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. Not only did the then current version of Veeam Backup & Replication (v4) get a finalist award in its category for the 2nd year in a row, Veeam ONE also was chosen as a finalist in its category. Of course when it comes to new technology, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was the big winner with the Gold award and the top prize, Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the awards that one vendor received 4 awards.

v5 Launch

With all of the excitement and buzz we created around SureBackup and vPower, it was great to finally release v5 to the market and watch it take off. For the launch “event,” we had more than a thousand people on a live webcast and on that day we hit an all time record for web traffic to veeam.com. So far we’ve had over 60,000 downloads and so many positive comments regarding the revolutionary functionality.

Informal poll at Gartner Data Center Conference

While not an official Gartner survey, this quick poll of 178 attendees at the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference shows that Veeam Backup & Replication is used by the same percentage as backup solutions from the “bigger” vendors. Here’s a graphic showing the results:

The Awards!

There has been no shortage of awards for Veeam in 2010 and they seem to keep rolling in. The following were all in addition to the VMworld awards mentioned above.

• Best Free vSphere Tools – As I previously blogged about, Veeam took the top 3 spots in the VMwarevideos.com and vChat Best Free vSphere Tools survey.
  
• Virtualization Review – Veeam was also awarded 2 Reader’s Choice Awards from Virtualization Review in their 2011 Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Veeam ONE took a merit award and Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was named a winner. These awards are based on reader input so we would like to thank everyone who voted for Veeam.
  
• SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of the Year 2010 – We were very happy to have won 2 Product of the Year awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com. Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization and v4 was also the Product of the year for 2009 in the same category – that’s 2 years in a row! Also, Veeam ONE: 2010 Product of the Year in the Virtualization Management category, that marks the first time in the history of the awards that one company has taken GOLD in 2 categories in the same year.

  

• Storage Magazine | SearchStorage.com Product of the Year – Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. When looking at who we beat out, this is a pretty significant award for us!
  

The Results!

155%

Of course all the awards don’t really mean much without good financials to back them up. As our press release announced, Veeam had a very, very good year financially with 155% growth over last year. Being a private company we don’t detail the exact revenue, but when you consider we’ve grown over 100% each of the past 4 years it’s not difficult to figure out. So when you consider Veeam as a company to do business with, understand that we’re still growing, we’re still 100% self-funded and we’re profitable!

This is a good starting point for analyzing the footprint of data for the Veeam Backup and Replication v5 installation, as well as its supporting components. Other pieces, such as Active Directory and DNS are not listed on the diagram; but are nonetheless critical to the overall operation of the solution.

Do you have any comments about this networking information? What types of additional resources would you like to see? Leave a comment below.

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.

The fundamental issue is that a system can be backed up without any issues or warnings on the task, but is not bootable or otherwise usable. Consider the case of a virtual machine that has a critical system component missing, such a portion of the registry. The virtual machine is able to run and be backed up, but may not be able to reboot correctly. Further, the system administrator may not even know that there is a problem with the virtual machine. In this case, the system would be backed up and the source would match the backup, albeit not operational. This is the case for any virtual machine protection tool, including Veeam products that are simply just backed up.

The issue that can come into play is retention policies. It is not atypical for a critical system in today’s demanding IT environments to have high uptime numbers, and this high uptime may end up exceeding the backup retention policy. Let’s take an example of a critical system that only has one or two maintenance windows per year. In this situation, this system is backed up regularly and retained off-site on three tiers of storage including off-site storage in a three month retention. The issue becomes that unless the backup is fully functional, the retention policy could propagate only an inoperable virtual machine if a full restore is needed.

As we already know, SureBackup’s objective is to provide verification to the virtualization administrator that the virtual machine is indeed bootable and that critical applications start up as expected. This cornerstone feature is a way to ensure that the backups are in good shape, but also possibly to identify any issues with the virtual machine that would prohibit a successful recovery operation.

A good friend of ours, Michael White with VMware let me know about a blog post he had forthcoming following the public announcement of VMware's vCloud Director product general availability. Michael is the Americas Solution Specialist SE for business continuity and disaster recovery for VMware. He contributes to the Uptime (Business Continuity) Blog at vmware.com.

Michael has been doing a good deal of testing with vCloud Director specifically in his domain of expertise. In his latest blog post he describes some of his results. Specifically of interest to me is Michael's testing of Veeam Backup & Replication v4 and the native ability to protect VMs that have been provisioned by vCloud Director.

If you are using agent based backups already in your organization, you can continue to do that. This may not work for you depending on the security that you have enabled in your cloud. If you are using the vStorage API set for the backup it may or may not work for you. Currently, the VMware Data Recovery (vDR) product will not work when backing up vCD provisioned VM's. This should be fixed in the next release of vDR. But generally, your software should work. In my testing I used vDR v1.2 (which didn't work), Backup Exec 2010 R2 13.0 Rev 4164 (agent based and worked) and Veeam 4.1.2.125 (which worked).

So if you want to start testing the new vCloud family of products, know that Veeam Backup & Replication, which is built on a solid architecture using available APIs and best practices, has you covered both today and in future.

A big thank you goes to Michael White for the testing and acknowledgment.

Our approach to multi-OS file level recovery is patent-pending, and is based on virtual appliance architecture. We provide a specially designed FLR helper virtual appliance based on a Linux kernel which has a minimal set of components, but is extended to be smart enough to be able to read data from multiple file systems and understand not just basic disks, but also things like Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and Windows LDM (Logical Disk Manager) partitions. The appliance is very small in size (around 10MB), and takes just 20 seconds to boot, making the solution very light-weight and fast.

To perform file level recovery, our product automatically mounts the VMDK files of the selected VM to FLR appliance as virtual hard drives. Due to some magic under the hood, the VMDK files are mounted directly from backup files, without having to extract those VMDK's first (similar approach to our instant Windows file-level recovery introduced in Veeam Backup 1.0).

Since we first introduced multi-OS FLR, we have continued to innovate and push the envelope of what's possible with image level backups. With Veeam Backup & Replication v5 we're introducing vPower, but we're also making an update to our multi-OS FLR approach. While the existing method worked great because it allowed us to support multiple file systems, some customers had an issue with the fact that our solution required VMware Player in order to operate. While there's nothing technically wrong with VMware Player, you can't install it on a virtual machine; this meant that our customers had to have at least 1 physical server if they wanted to take advantage of multi-OS FLR.

With Veeam Backup & Replication v5, we're moving away from VMware Player and on to ESX to run our FLR appliance. For our existing customers, this means that you no longer need a physical server to recover individual files from non-Windows file systems, all without any changes to the user experience. We're also introducing support for additional file systems, including commonly requested ZFS file system (most common choice for Solaris), bringing the total number of supported file systems to 15.

While version 5.0 provides wizard-driven experience for 15 of the most commonly used file systems, with our new, patent-pending vPower functionality it no longer means you are limited to only those 15. In fact, you will be able to recover from ANY file system! As we have already demonstrated, our vPower engine provides ability to publish any backed up VMDK on our vPower NFS datastore, directly from a compressed backup file. With the VMDK files readily available, you can simply mount these VMDKs to any VM that can read the corresponding file system (including the original VM), and restore the required files using native OS file management tools!

Alternatively, you can mount VMDK directly to your workstation, and use whatever tools you are using today to read data from those file systems. For example, FLR from Novell NSS volumes can be performed with Portlock Explorer – a tool that most Netware admins already have installed and are using every day.

The following screen shots are taken from an early "Alpha" build of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 featuring our patent pending vPower technology. While the functionality is there, some of the dialog boxes and text will change before the official release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5. The screen shots and wizards are very self-explanatory, I have provided additional text where needed.
Read more>>

SureBackup is coming in Q3…are you ready? Click the link and register to stay informed!

Changed Block Tracking

Veeam has supported CBT for over 8 months starting with our 4.0 release back in October of 2009. With the first anniversary of vSphere behind us, we’re glad to see some of the last vendors finally catching up and utilizing this technology. There’s also been some discussion online recently about possible issues with CBT, rest assured that Veeam has you covered and in over 8 months of CBT support, none of our customers has run into this issue. For more information on this, please check out this thread in our forums that also includes information on obtaining a fix if you feel you’re exposed to this issue.

Object-Level Restore

Most of you have heard by now of Veeam’s plans around Veeam Backup & Replication version 5 that includes the technology known as SureBackup. One of the things that makes me so excited about the new capabilities is that we’re going to be able to offer Universal Application Item-level Recovery – we’re not just talking about Exchange or files, but any data from any application without an additional charge for each application. Other vendors are promising object-level restore but only for Exchange and only if you purchase an additional and very expensive software tool (per mailbox) from their parent company. And yes, they’ve been promising this for years.

Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)

While other vendors try to make it seem like they’re the “thought leaders” when it comes to VSS, the truth is that Veeam has been leading the way in VSS for VMware backups for almost 2 years now. We knew early on that the only way to ensure proper VSS support was to write our own implementation and not rely on VMware to provide it for us. Additionally, with our VSS implementation everything is done at run time, no need to deploy and maintain a VSS agent executable on every Windows VM. Their implementation:

This driver is implemented as an .exe file which can be added to Windows 2003 and 2008 guests.

You can check out any of these previous posts on VSS if you want to know who the real thought leader is when it comes to VSS support on VMware:

Veeam Backup 2.0

Is your backup really VSS aware?

VSS and VMware ESX: What your VMware backup vendor isn’t telling you

The Great VSS Debate

Active Block What?

Now we’ve heard about this new technology that one of our competitors claims greatly improves the speed of backups. What they’re not telling you is all the limitations of this technology and the fact that it only makes FULL backups faster. Since Veeam uses a proven synthetic backup approach we only require 1 full backup. Here are some other limitations of that patent pending technology:

1. No benefit in incremental backups (deleting NTFS data does not update disk content, so data blocks do not change and are not picked up by CBT in an incremental backup)
2. Limited to NTFS and basic disks
3. Limited to full ESX since it relies on the Service Console (does not work with ESXi)
4. Not supported on direct SAN backups utilizing the vStorage API for Data Protection (90% of Veeam customers use VADP)
5. Without built-in dedupe their “full” backups are still larger than Veeam’s.

Be Careful What You Read, It May be Paid for

I’ve seen some materials that are pointing to an analysis provided by a “pay for play” blogger. I’m not going to mention names or link to sites here because I’d rather not give anyone the traffic. My only advice here (and this goes especially for the VAR community) is to research any “independent” sources your vendor is quoting, there’s a good chance they paid for that analysis and those words.

And finally, consider this: what does it mean when a vendor promotes a survey of beta customers in which 39% of the participants claimed reliability was the most important NEW capability. If reliability is a new capability, then I understand why so many partners and customers have chosen and continue to choose Veeam Backup & Replication

So what does that mean for current customers? Will they get Standard or Enterprise if they’re current on maintenance? They answer is the choice is yours! Yes, for a limited time Veeam will be offering customers current on maintenance the choice of Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 Standard or Enterprise once it’s released. This means that all of our current customers can rest easy and know that they’ll have the option of getting all the great new Virtualization-Powered Protection features that will be released later this year. Of course anyone who’s not a current customer but purchases Veeam Backup & Replication by 18 June 2010 will also be eligible for this offer.

If you’re not familiar with the Virtumania podcast put on by Rich Brambley and Mark Farley, be sure to check out Episode 6: “The Mean Green Veeam Team”, also available on iTunes. Rich and Mark invited David Siles and myself on to talk a little about Veeam and the virtualization market in general. I made an announcement about this offer on the podcast (right around 6:12).

What’s the difference?

While the exact details of the release a still being worked out, the table below details functionality that we know at this time to be included in Standard and Enterprise. You can also register for the upgrade here (along with more details on the offer): http://www.veeam.com/go/free-enterprise-upgrade

Feature	Standard	Enterprise	Notes
Data Protection Modes
Backup
Replication			2-in-1: backup and replication for one price, in one cohesive solution; includes replica rollback and replication to/from ESXi
Hot VM copy			Facilitates ad hoc backups and migrations
FastSCP™			Integrates Veeam FastSCP, the #1 file management tool for VMware administrators, into the operator console
Architecture
vStorage APIs			Highly efficiency and “future-proof” solution that uses the vStorage APIs for Data Protection
Changed Block Tracking			Lightning-fast incremental backups to minimize backup windows and allow for more frequent replication
Multiple backup options			Back up directly from SAN, over LAN, with virtual appliance, or direct from target
Centralized control of distributed deployment			Includes Enterprise Manager, a web-based console that provides a consolidated view of your distributed deployment; includes federation of multiple backup servers, centralized reporting, and consolidating alerting
FastSCP			Leverages Veeam’s proven FastSCP engine
Synthetic backup			Eliminates the need for periodic full backups (provides “forever incremental” backup), thus saving time and space
SmartDedupe™			10x space savings on backup storage
SmartCDP™			Near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDP
Instant File-Level Recovery
Windows
Linux
Other			Unix, Solaris, BSD, Mac
Indexing and Search
Windows guest file system indexing			Creates an index (catalog) of all Windows guest files that have been backed up
Search across backups	Current backups	All backups (current & archived)	Quickly search for guest files across backups
SureBackup™
Recovery verification	Manual	Automated
Advanced VSS support
Application-Item Recovery
Universal application-item recovery			OS- and application-agnostic object-level recovery for application administrators
User-directed recovery			Available for any application with a web front-end