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Veeam Backup & Replication

Jan 25th 2011

Five important points of Virtual Lab networking in Veeam Backup and Replication v5

Posted by in backup |


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:

clip_image002

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:
clip_image004

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.

Jan 11th 2011

Veeam selected as a winner of Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Awards

Posted by in Awards |


What an honor for Veeam! We were selected in this year’s Reader’s Choice Awards by Virtualization Review. 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 online at Virtualization Review (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!

Jan 7th 2011

Powered-off VMs? Veeam Backup and Replication does that too.

Posted by in Bloggers |


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 Distributed Resource Scheduler (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 PowerCLI command, as shown below:

clip_image002

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.

Jan 4th 2011

Why is incremental the default in Backup and Replication v5?

Posted by in Bloggers |


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.

image

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.

Dec 28th 2010

DNS resolution planning for Veeam Backup and Replication

Posted by in Bloggers |


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 High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (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.

Dec 16th 2010

Veeam’s response to the “DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer’s Guide”

Posted by in Analyst |


Recently the results of a buyer’s guide were released by a 3rd tier analyst company known as DCIG. In this guide, CommVault Sympana 9 received top honors. CommVault issued a press release stating this fact earlier this week. In the press release, they found it necessary to call out Veeam specifically (emphasis ours):

According to the report, CommVault received “Best in Class” honors for overall functionality in comparison to other solutions in the market, across seven categories encompassing technology, management, backup, restore, deduplication, media and support. CommVault outranked offerings from legacy software providers, including EMC, Symantec, CA and IBM, as well as point-level virtualization software vendors, such as Veeam.

It is important to note some facts:

  1. This “Guide” is created by an analyst firm DCIG and technology advisory firm, SMB Research. But, it is distributed EXCLUSIVELY by CommVault, not DCIG.
  2. CommVault also sponsors DCIG web site. DCIG has the following disclaimer on their web site: “DCIG is paid a fee by CommVault® Systems, Inc. in connection with this blog. CommVault® undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements contained in this blog; these statements represent the views and opinions of DCIG only.” See here: http://sales.dciginc.com/about/index.html. Not once does CommVault disclose this relationship with DCIG, either in the guide or in the press release mentioned above.
  3. DCIG is stating that 30 vendors were identified and sent a questionnaire and 24 responses were received. The “Guide” includes Veeam as one of 24 vendors, however, Veeam never responded to the questionnaire! Here is DCIG’s description of the process: “We identified some 30 vendors who provide Virtual Server Backup Software solutions. You will find all of these vendors identified in this Buyer’s Guide. After making contact with all the vendors, we sent out a questionnaire with 130 questions. We ultimately received back 24 responses to our questionnaire.” Again, Veeam did NOT respond. How did DCIG included Veeam’s responses if Veeam didn’t respond? Is DCIG lying about the fact that they received Veeam’s response?
  4. DCIG positions this document as “The Insider’s Guide” to Evaluating Virtual Server Backup Software. However the guide is NOT based on:
    1. Customer interviews, or
    2. Technical evaluations in a lab.

    Instead, the “Guide” is based on vendor responses: “After making contact with all the vendors, we sent out a questionnaire with 130 questions. We ultimately received back 24 responses to our questionnaire.” Insider means somebody who is intimately familiar. How can DCIG claim it if they purely compiled some of the vendors responses?

The EXCLUSIVE LICENSEE of the “Guide” is the vendor who is selected as the TOP vendor by the “Guide”.  If the “Guide” was paid by the vendor, can you trust it?

Dec 10th 2010

Happy holidays from Veeam–NFR’s for VCPs, VCIs and vExperts

Posted by in Announcements |


Back in October, Carl-Fredrik (@Cape200) sent the following Tweet:

VEEAM should really give every VMware VCP a full copy of their complete catalog! If I had gotten that I would have made them some money! 2:04 PM Oct 16th via Tweetie for Mac

cape2000

This got us thinking, should we do this? I talked to a few people, including Maish Saidel-Keesing who has a popular blog called Technodrone and TechHead Simon Seagrave. They agreed that this would be a great idea for the community.

After discussing the idea internally we got the ball rolling, everyone agreed it was a great idea. Of course it’s taken us some time to get the announcement out there, one of the reasons is that we wanted to wait until we released Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.1 since it fixed several minor issues. With 5.0.1 released and the Dutch VMUG on the horizon, we decided to go ahead and make this our 2010 Holiday gift.

From our official press release:

Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced that Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 with vPower™ is now available free to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, and VMware Certified Instructors. Any vExpert, VCP or VCI can receive a free two-socket software license (valued at approximately $1,800) for non-production use, including training, evaluation and development.

Ready for your NFR key? Simply visit this link and register and you’ll be on your way to trying out the best products for managing and protecting VMware infrastructures.

Update: Maish has blogged about the holiday give on his Technodrone blog: http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/12/veeam-holiday-present.html

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.

Nov 30th 2010

How much should VMware backup cost?

Posted by in Competition |


Veeam released the new Backup & Replication v5 in October. The release date was marked by a Live Launch event webinar on October 20 that drew in almost 1500 attendees. The feedback that we have gotten so far has been outstanding and will provide us with the information we need to continue to improve.

As we have stated before, no other product possesses the capabilities that are available in Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago we found a dissatisfied Symantec customer who claimed that Veeam Backup & Replication v5 could do for him what Symantec couldn’t. We couldn’t resist and offered him the chance to try Veeam Backup & Replication. All we can say for now is so far so good!

In addition to being agentless, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 provides numerous advantages over legacy solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec, and has capabilities that Backup Exec is missing:

  • Backup Exec lacks instant VM recovery and therefore cannot eliminate the need to extract the backup and copy it to production storage when recovering an entire VM.
  • Backup Exec (agentless) lacks granular application-item recovery so it cannot provide a way out when a user accidently deletes important emails.
  • Backup Exec does not provide instant file-level recovery from an image-level backup, to any point in time, on any OS and file system, in seconds.
  • Backup Exec does not have the power to verify the recoverability of its backups.
  • Backup Exec does not offer image-based replication and as a result it is not able to offer affordable near-CDP.
  • Backup Exec DOES charge extra for deduplication, which seems to be an essential capability for any backup tool, seeing as how data volume is growing every day.
  • Multiple backups are needed for different recovery scenarios with Backup Exec, whereas Veeam only needs one.

We recently looked at a price comparison of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and were shocked at the results. Besides not providing all the functionality, Symantec Backup Exec can cost upwards of 4 times more and still has 5 times less functionality than Veeam Backup & Replication v5.

Veeam Backup & Replication v5 -
Enterprise Edition		 Symantec Backup Exec 2010
Instant VM recovery Yes No
Granular application-item recovery Any application Select applications only, additional cost
File-level recovery Any file system Windows only
Recovery verification Yes No
Agentless Yes No
One backup for all recovery scenarios Always Sometimes
Synthetic full backups Yes No
Deduplication Included Extra cost
Replication Yes No
Cost € 6,329* Simple, affordable € 28,404* Complex, expensive

*EMEA MSRP for the following configuration: 4 dual-socket ESXi servers connected to a SAN and hosting 1 Oracle server, 2 Microsoft Exchange servers, 4 Active Directory domain controllers, 2 SQL Server VMs, and 2 SharePoint Portal Server VMs.

Want more proof? You can read a review by one of our Beta testers to get a detailed look into Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower and until December 24, you can switch from Symantec Backup Exec to Veeam Backup & Replication v5 and get a 25% discount.

Are you satisfied with your current backup solution? Are you willing to pay over 4 times more for 5 times less functionality?

Nov 29th 2010

Q4 Promotions – take advantage of them now

Posted by in veeam |


It is now December and there are just a few weeks left of these 2 promotions. We thought you may be interested in taking advantage of this opportunity before the offers end on December 24.

Since the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 in October, we have gotten great reviews and invaluable feedback. You can read Eric Siebert’s review of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 that was posted on Searchdatabackup.com or see the in-depth review posted on Vladan.fr.

As you probably already know, Veeam Backup & Replication has features that are not available in any other existing products on the market:

  • Instant VM Recovery: Restore entire virtual machines from a backup file in minutes.
  • U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual items from any virtualized application, on any OS.
  • SureBackup Recovery Verification: Automatically verify the recoverability of EVERY backup, EVERY VM, EVERY time.
  • On-Demand Sandbox: Create test VMs from any point in time to troubleshoot problems or test workarounds, software patches or new application code.
  • Instant File-Level Recovery: Recover an entire VM or an individual file from the same image-level backup in any OS or file system.

With this promotion you can get 25% off Veeam Backup & Replication v5 when you provide a proof of license for a competing product. This is a limited time offer that will end soon. If you are not satisfied with your existing backup solution, give Veeam Backup & Replication v5 a try.

The second promotion that will end right before Christmas is on Veeam Essentials Plus. You can save 42% by getting a free upgrade to Veeam Essentials Plus when buying Veeam Essentials.

We are very glad to be a part of the “IF ONLY virtualization was…” campaign with VMware. VMware Essentials Plus and Veeam Essentials Plus will give SMB’s the ability to manage and protect their virtual infrastructure at an affordable price.

Veeam Essentials Plus includes Veeam Backup & Replication v5 Enterprise Edition (features listed above), the industry standard for VMware monitoring in Veeam Monitor 5.0, Veeam Reporter, Veeam FastSCP and Veeam Business View.

Learn more about this VMware and Veeam promotion.

Take advantage of these two great promotions before they are gone.

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