■ 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.

p

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.

So, for just shy of 1K you get fully licensed vSphere. This is great but it still leaves you without an efficient backup and recovery tool, single pane of glass monitoring or detailed reporting...enter Veeam Essentials bundle...offering Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter for around US $2,000 (Americas pricing). The Veeam Essentials bundle is fully functional licensed versions of those 3 products for 6 sockets (3 hosts).

Of course Veeam is placing some limits on this bundle...

• Must be purchased with VMware vSphere Essentials (or proof of VMware vSphere Essentials must be given)
• Each bundle will only support 6 sockets. This means that even if you purchase multiple bundles, each Veeam product will only work on 6 sockets, you'll need to install other instances with the other license(s) to manage the other VMware vSphere Essentials vCenters.
• Each bundle is 6 sockets, no less (sorry folks, you can't get it cheaper for only 4 sockets)

What does all this mean? For just under US $3,000 (hardware not included) you get 6 sockets of VMware vSphere, 6 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication, 6 sockets of Veeam Monitor and 6 sockets of Veeam Reporter. That's 3 servers with up to 8 cores (2x4) and 256GB RAM each running VMware ESX(i). Couple that with a free iSCSI solution such as Starwind and now you're talking 2 TB of shared data for free (hardware and Windows licensing not included).

I did not include Support and Subscription (SnS) above because for VMware vSphere Essentials it's optional (it's not optional on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus). Veeam's Essentials bundle includes 1 year of support and upgrades in the list price.

Now, let's discuss a few things about the Free Version of ESXi. We've gotten a number of questions on this since we released the "news" and the Essentials bundle on the same day. Below is a simple table explaining what is and isn't supported:

Table of compatibility:

+ = supported/usable
- = not supported

Now please note that Veeam will not be supporting ESXi Free 4.0 at all. If you're a current customer using Veeam Backup & Replication for ESXi Free 3.x, please contact your Veeam ProPartner or sales person for vSphere options.

While I don't endorse or condone any of the following, I thought I would be doing an injustice if I did not include links to the community's reaction to our announcement regarding dropping ESXi Free support. The list below is just some of the reaction, be sure to read the comments in each as well.

Rick Vanover at Virtualization Review

Rich Brambley at VMETC

Eric Scholten at VMGURU.NL

Gabes Virtual World

Search Server Virtualization's Alex Barrett

Rich Brambley at VMETC again after Alex Barrett's post

Search Server Virtualization's Eric Siebert

Edward L Haletky's The "soon to be launched" Virtualization Practice

The comments to my post on the original announcement

Update: June 12, 2009 - New Links

Bridget Bothelo over at Virtualization Pro

Discussion over at ars technica (I noticed this in my referral stats)

Update: June 15, 2009 - New Links

Search Server Virtualization's weekly Podcast: VMware cuts free ESXi hypervisor support, fuels battle vs. Hyper-V

Update: June 26, 2009 - New Link

Mike Stokes over at eGroup

Update: July 3, 2009 - New Link

Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM

Mike Laverick from RTFM

As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware's product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free. One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Recently, VMware requested that Veeam Software discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy. In light of VMware's request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises its new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the Veeam Essentials bundle (announced today). This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing 6 sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, but it is actually better, because with Veeam Essentials at its special discounted price, customers also get Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter.