While we’ve had educational content in the past for partners, having this End User Training is our next exciting milestone.

This is also a good time to introduce John Martin, our new director of Global Education Services at Veeam. John has a lot of experience in many areas of the development and delivery of learning content, services and the associated technology infrastructure. He has delivered addresses at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, Computer Training World, Training Directors Forum, WBT Producer, ASTD, the British Association for Open Learning, and SmartNet in New Zealand.

We are happy to have John on the Veeam Teeam! Welcome aboard!

You can reach John via email at john.martin@veeam.com if you have any questions, comments or observations on any of the educational resources for Veeam products.

This initial release of Veeam End User Training covers the following products:

· Veeam Backup & Replication

· Veeam ONE

· Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware

· Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware

This training resource will answer some of the top design and architecture questions that new and existing customers may have about our products. Popular how-to topics are also addressed in these modules. For each product, the Main Content summarizes the product. Then, when you scroll down and view the Product Videos tab, you’ll find additional videos for specific technical tasks related to the product. This is shown in the following figure:

Veeam product training is another valuable resource to help IT pros, partners and prospects be properly equipped for successful virtualization. Other resources include the Veeam Forums, Product Demos, Featured Webinars, the Veeam Blog, the Veeam Community Podcast, Backup Academy and V-Index.

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.

Welcome to the Veeam Teeam Chris!

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 a special guest post by Veeam SE Mike Beevor from the United Kingdom. Follow mike on Twitter @MikeBeevor.

Over the last few months, I have found myself being asked more and more about Veeam’s permissions, coming face to face with the ultra-paranoid of the IT world: the Security team. Having promised to send out the Permissions Guide to a customer with a rather unusual set up, I thought that I would blog about some of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked and some of the more useful information I’ve discovered.

The customers in question are often services organizations who look after multiple large financial customers and, as such, are at the forefront of data protection, IT security and general, all-around paranoia regarding anything accessing their networks at all.

The first part of the security aspect isn’t really that unusual; it involves creating the Veeam Service account, commonly specific to the Veeam product that you are using, and assigning the specific AD users or groups to that account. This generally stems from a requirement internally to work on a “needed permissions” basis, thus removing any non-critical permissions from the service account in either the vCenter or in the active directory infrastructure.

An alternative to this, and we generally see this in larger environments, is to create a service account group in Active Directory specific to a particular role within the product. Backup, for example, would commonly see the following user roles with the following abilities:

Once this is done, we then look at the permissions that this role requires inside of VMware; after all, this is what we are working to back up, or report upon. The list of permissions for creating backups on Veeam Backup & Replication v5.0.2 is found in the table below:

The interesting things to really note here are around the different modes that Veeam is able to back up over and subsequently, the ability to tighten the permissions required to the specific environment. Virtual Appliance mode requires the add existing disk, remove disk and change resource permissions because Veeam uses the VMware HotAdd functionality to attach the source drive to the Veeam VM to transfer the data to the target storage, and has been doing so since v3.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication. Disk lease in the SAN mode of Veeam Backup and Replication is required, as Veeam physically takes management of the VMFS volume from the ESX(i) environment for the period that it copies the data over the physical storage infrastructure.

Once we’ve created the service account with the appropriate permissions, it often turns to firewalls and port numbers, so we examine the communication ports that Veeam operates across. Ports 9392, 9393 and 9394 are used for Backup and Replication Services, the backup catalog and the Veeam Enterprise Management console respectively. These ports are all standard TCP ports and can be amended to fit into a corporate firewall infrastructure. It is definitely worth checking with the security team that these ports are open and available for use without causing conflicts and having them added as trusted ports in the port database.

In today’s market, VSS-enabled backups are expected, and application-aware backups are certainly at the top of the desirable list as more and more organizations need to perform object-specific recoveries into complex applications. I’ve always found DBA’s to be slightly touchy about backups, since agents can have unintended effects on the databases that they are used on, especially if they are developed in house, and additional permissions are required for the agent to be able to communicate with its relevant backup server.

Veeam’s own VSS implementation for backups is innovative, using a transient piece of code to initiate a VSS flush within the application. This is done using the application’s own VSS engine with the framework provided by the operating system. The conversation soon turns to the breadth of customization of the VSS interaction on a machine basis. The long and the short of this is that a lot of secure environments will not provision an over-arching, domain-wide VSS service account, but rather rely on machine specific VSS credentials to perform a flush. Veeam gives you the ability to set individual VSS credentials per machine within a job, ensuring that the appropriate level of permissions are maintained on a set once basis.

Having done this, and dependent upon whether the application owners wish to retain the log files for their own log shipping purposes for Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL, the option to truncate the logs at the start or the end of the backup, or not at all, ensures flexibility on a per machine basis.

One of the longest and most protracted of the discussions, with several opinions being voiced, is where the Veeam server itself should reside in infrastructure terms, both in relation to the notion of keeping data separated and also in relation to the location of the vCenter that it was working on. This is followed swiftly by the number of Veeam servers you should have and whether you should manage them all with the Enterprise management server!

To answer the point on the location of the Veeam server first, the best argument we could make is that, in the truly secure environment that we were working in, a Veeam server should be in the DMZ and should only have access to the SAN that the production VM’s were located on and the VLAN that the vCenter Server was running on. This was then expanded to include each of the Veeam servers for each segmented environment, although this presented an additional management overhead through not being able to include all Veeam servers in the Veeam management console. This does serve to reduce some of the rollup reporting capabilities for the environment as a whole, and can present some issues in the approval of Veeam virtual lab creation, which is overcome by installing the Veeam Management console on one of the Veeam servers in each segmented environment.

This leads to a much needed conversation about whether SureBackup is a feature set that customers wish to implement in a secure environment. Whilst it is a no-brainer that the functionality is useful, there are some security aspects to take into consideration.

Firstly, there are the additional permission requirements below, and as is evident immediately that there are a lot more “intrusive” permissions that allow a Veeam administrator to make changes to the virtualized environment itself through the Veeam console. In the case of one POC, this was considered a step too far, as the backup team had no permissions in the virtual estate, and given the choice of the virtualization team, never would!

Further questions arose regarding interaction with the vCenter Server and the fact that Veeam SureBackup jobs were able to create and remove virtual machines into the virtual lab and be accessed for the potential removal of data. Whilst the second of these fears is easily allayed by the fact that the Active Directory permissions on the server in the Virtual Lab are maintained, so that the user is required to have the appropriate permissions on the application server to remove the data. Should these permissions be held however, there is the potential for data to be removed from the environment without permission.

The final piece of the POC was a puzzling one, which admittedly took me a couple of hours to resolve. Since security was key to the environment, all extraneous ports had been removed from the virtual switches inside the ESX(i) hosts to ensure that no unnecessary traffic or openings were left exploitable. This included the vmkernel port being removed from all but the vMotion VLAN, which precludes an NFS volume from being mounted on a host, and therefore prevents Instant VM Recovery being performed. So just note to have a quick check to see that the vmkernel port is present on the VeeamV if you are planning to use the feature!

Wrap up and Veeam Backup & Replication v6

If you haven't heard, we have released Veeam Backup & Replication v6, which brings in a few additional considerations; especially when vSphere 5 comes into play. In v6, at least one granular permission needs to be added. Under Roles, Virtual Machine -> Provisioning -> ‘Allow virtual machine download’ also needs to be checked to allow network mode to work. This is specific to vSphere 5 and VDDK 5.0; but is critical to provisioning security and roles for the enterprise. If you haven't checked out v6, start with our launch page here: http://go.veeam.com/v6-backup-replication

What do you do to ensure that your Veeam environment is as secure as it should be? Share your comments below!

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.

As Kevin pointed out in part 7, there are resources to help VMware IT Pros understand how to work with Hyper-V. This is extremely helpful, especially if you need to run a mixed environment of both VMware and Microsoft virtualization technologies. If you end up with a mixed environment, the next question is how do you manage it all? SCVMM has been able to connect to your VMware environment since the beginning. With System Center 2012, you’ll also be able to connect to a Citrix XenServer environment. Of course with SCVMM 2012 you’ll have the ability to define your compute “fabric” as detailed in Yung Chou’s post, Fabric, Oh, Fabric. This means that once defined, it shouldn’t matter if your hypervisor is ESX(i), Citrix XenServer or Hyper-V.

Coexistence is key

Getting all these virtualization platforms defined in SCVMM is a great start but then you have to consider how to keep track of it all. How many times has “virtualization” been blamed for issues in your environment when the real cause is something unrelated? Only through comprehensive monitoring of the virtualization fabric can you get true app-to-metal visibility in your environment. For Systems Center Operations Manager, Microsoft already has a Management Pack for Hyper-V and Citrix recommends the ComTrade Citrix XenServer Management Pack. On the VMware side, Veeam has been offering a Management Pack for VMware since the MOM days.

I bring up the importance of monitoring because when you have multiple platforms it’s very important from an operational sense to make sure you have solid metrics for each. Thanks to the extensibility of System Center Operations Manager, there are numerous 3^rd party management packs available for a wide range of systems and operating systems. Veeam just happens to make a great Management Pack for VMware. For a good overview, check out a recent Webinar we did with Pete Zerger, MVP – OpsMgr, Cameron Fuller, MVP - OpsMgr and Alec King, product manager for the MP.

Author bio:

Doug Hazelman is the Vice President of Product Strategy for Veeam Software. Doug shares his expertise via the Veeam blog, and other social media outlets. Doug has spoken about virtualization management at VMworld 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, Interop, and other events including regional VMUG meetings.

This quarter, VDI hypervisor statistics are in place. Also this quarter, the number of entities surveyed this quarter increased to 578. As always, our respondents were not necessarily Veeam customers, Veeam prospects, or previous-quarter respondents. Find out more at www.V-index.com.*

Results worth noting this quarter include:

• The average consolidation ratio was 5.1 to 1
• VMware hypervisors took 67.7 % of the server virtualization workload
• Reliability, application performance and data protection were top virtualization concerns

We recently interviewed Martin Turze from Vanson Bourne, the firm that conducts V-index research and reporting. Listen to our interview with Turze by clicking Veeam Community Podcast, episode 29.

The full report is available as a PDF and there is a nifty infographic available as well. The full press release is available here.

*No site registration required.