Posts tagged veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication v5 Preview – Instant Indexing

Aug 15th

Posted by vmdoug in Veeam Backup & Replication

No comments

There’s now an FAQ section in the Veeam Forums for Veeam Backup & Replication v5.

The screen shots below were created with a pre-release build of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 featuring vPower, many dialog boxes and text will change with the final release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5.

Another new feature in Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is the ability to create a catalog (or index) of the files contained within the Windows image backup. Cataloging is only available for Windows file systems with version 5 but we do have plans to extend this to other file systems as well as applications in future releases.

Indexing is now an option that appears on the VSS “Backup Consistency” screen on backup jobs. Creating the file system catalog is extremely fast and it is stored with the backup image. The full text indexing is actually handled by utilizing Microsoft Search Server so it does not affect the backup window when selecting the option to build the guest file index.

Once the backup is complete, the catalog file is passed off to the Microsoft Search Server. Simply connect Veeam’s Enterprise Manager to the Search Server through the configuration settings and you can now search across all Veeam Backups for any file on your Windows VM’s. Since Enterprise Manager supports multiple Veeam Backup & Replication Servers, you can search for files no matter what server was used to back them up.

The default search option is to only look at the most recent backups. This can easily be changed by utilizing the Advance Search feature.

Select a time period to search through all backups created during that period:

The search results are now very different as you see the results for all backups.

Clicking the link for the file brings up a window that tells you exactly where that version of the file is. You can print this information as well

Now that you know what version of the file you want to recover, simply run the Recovery Wizard for Windows Guest Files and choose the proper backup to recover from

With version 5 we’ve also included a “reason” box for all restore activities, this helps to track why a particular restore has been done.

Once you’ve completed the wizard, simply browse to the location of the file and recover it.

Another option for finding files that does not require Microsoft Search Server is to utilize the “Browse” functionality on the Files tab in Enterprise Manager. The browse feature displays the catalog of files for the chosen VM and restore point:

, , ,

Christmas in August: Veeam’s Totally Transparent Blogger Contest

Aug 6th

Posted by vmdoug in Announcements

No comments

For more information about Veeam Reporter Free Edition, click here

What: Shameless promotion to drive downloads for the new FREE product for VMware: Veeam Reporter Free Edition and also do some good at the same time via charitable donations

How: Bloggers who participate each get a special download link that tracks how many unique downloads each blogger sends.

Details:

We will be registering bloggers for the contest starting today. Once registered, we will send each blogger a link to download the release candidate of Veeam Reporter Free Edition. The obvious intention here is that bloggers blog about it and talk about the new free tool.

The contest officially begins on the day we release Veeam Reporter Free Edition. At that time we send each blogger their unique link for them to promote. This link will go to Veeam’s site and allow people to register (if not already registered) and download Veeam Reporter Free Edition. Bloggers are allowed to use any means (within reason, see note below) they want to distribute the link including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. We also encourage bloggers to mention to their readers that there’s a charitable donation involved if they should win.

NOTE: bloggers are NOT allowed to employ an army of teenagers to drive downloads, we will be checking the authenticity of downloads and if anything appears abnormal we will disqualify the blogger. This includes but is not limited to: hiring an outside firm to drive downloads, hacking social networking sites or any method that would be considered “not normal” by the officials at Veeam. Veeam does not allow the use of “public” email domains for registrations and downloads.

The blogger who drives the most unique downloads for Veeam Reporter Free Edition between the start date and Monday, August 30th 11:59 PM EDT will receive the grand prize. We will be announcing the winner at Veeam’s VMworld US party. While this is a party you won’t want to miss if you’re at VMworld, you do NOT need to be present to win.

Veeam will promote all participating blogs on our official landing page for Veeam Reporter Free Edition as well as in an official corporate blog post at http://www.Veeam.com/blog.

Prizes:

This has been the most difficult part to determine. We thought about giving cash or technology but in the end we decided that it would be best to give the prize money to charity. We even conducted an informal poll of the bloggers who expressed early interest in participating and I think one respondent summed it up best:

My vote is for something donated to charity.  It’s in the spirit of the contest – we’re helping Veeam out, Veeam is helping us out (promoting our blogs), so we should help out others who are in need.  I don’t think we all need MacBooks or cash when there are others in the world who need those things a lot more than we do.

We were also inspired by one of the Seattle Tech Field day participants, Kevin Houston, and his Plea to VMworld attendees.

After some careful consideration we determined that if Veeam picked the charity it wouldn’t mean as much to the bloggers, that is why we have decided to go with Charity Choice, this allows each blogger to choose the charity of their choice from a list of over 100 charities. Here’s the breakdown (in the interest of full disclosure and transparency):

  • The first 15 bloggers to register and participate will each receive a $25 charity gift card
  • The Grand prize will go to the blogger who generates the most downloads: $1,000 charity gift card
  • The honorable mention prize (to be determined by Veeam): $250 charity gift card

Of course we encourage each blogger to mention their charity of choice in their posts.

Are you an interested blogger? Click HERE TO REGISTER
, , , ,

We’ve Moved!

Aug 3rd

Posted by vmdoug in Announcements

2 comments

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

, ,

Veeam and Microsoft Tech·Ed 2010

Jun 3rd

Posted by vmdoug in Conference

1 comment

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!

, , ,

Reporter 4 – Tracking Changes

May 17th

Posted by vmdoug in Veeam Reporter

1 comment

Today Veeam released Veeam Reporter 4.0. This release is significant for many reasons but one that I’d like to focus on here is the new tracking and auditing capability. We introduced change tracking with Reporter 3.5 but we were missing one critical piece…who made the changes? With Reporter 4.0 we now pull in the vCenter audit logs and correlate every change back to the person (or system) that made the change. Another feature that’s not available from the vSphere client is the ability to not only see the new value, but the previous value as well.

Let’s take a look at an example.

You come into work on Monday morning and you’ve got an inbox full of emails about a particular virtual machine. On Friday everything was working fine but on Monday it won’t respond, even though you can see it’s powered on and you can access the console through the vSphere client.

After a reboot doesn’t fix the issue, you now need to determine what changed. Using the vSphere client, you can see that doug.hazelman changed a custom attribute:

image

The screenshot above shows that the Custom Attribute “TEEAM_FUNCTION” was changed to PROD for the VM “XPViewTemp”. This is slightly helpful in that you know you have an automated process that reconfigures VM’s based on custom attribute values. Setting “TEEAM_FUNCTION” to PROD kicked off a script that moved it to the production network which is why people who could access it on Friday can’t access it today. The easy fix it to change “TEEAM_FUNCTION” back to the previous value…but what was it? The proper setting determines how this VM works, you need a quick resolution. Veeam Reporter to the rescue! All you need to do is run the infrastructure changes report showing all changes for that VM over the weekend. Clicking the name of the VM in the report, you can easily see that the old value was DEV:

image

Now all you have to do is change the attribute back to the correct value, let your automated script reconfigure the VM and you’re good to go!

The above example is a bit of a stretch (who automates VM configuration based on attributes?) but was meant to show how quickly and easily it is to get this data from Reporter 4. While the scenario above shows a change made in a relatively short time frame, what if the change had been made 2 months ago? How would use us the vSphere Client (or even PowerShell) to find who changed it as well as what the previous value was? Reporter 4 can give you that audit data for any time frame, you choose a date and Reporter shows you the configuration as it was on that date. If you want to see how an object has changed over a period of time (including WHO changed it), just select a time “window” for your report to get the detail.

There are a lot of powerful, new features in Reporter 4. I did the voice for this quick overview video, check it out and then download Reporter 4 to see what YOU can do with it.

, ,

MMS = Great Success

Apr 26th

Posted by vmdoug in MMS

1 comment

I have to say my first MMS conference was a great experience. Not only did I have a chance to meet a lot of great new people, I also go to see first hand Microsoft’s messaging and go-to-market strategies around the entire System Center platform. The keynotes were great (thanks for streaming them live), if you didn’t catch them, you can watch them online here: Tuesday and Wednesday. I thought Bob Muglia did a great job explaining “the cloud” in his keynote on Tuesday and provided some nice examples of how Microsoft is utilizing their own management framework for Azure and Bing.

I sat in on Edwin Yuen’s session, “BD02 Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware” and I thought he did a great job at keeping it high level. I tweeted a few things while at the session, I think the best message I heard was:

VMDoug: “It’s all about management, pick the hypervisor that works for you. You don’t need to replace VMware” @edwinyuen #mms2010

That message fits in perfectly with the announcement Veeam made on Tuesday about closing the loop on VMware management. With the new Veeam/nworks Management Pack and PRO Pack combination, customers will be able to monitor and manage VMware from System Center the same way they manage Hyper-V. I know to a lot of the VMware crowd this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but remember, it’s about management, not the hypervisor. You can check out a video explanation by Veeam’s own Alec King here on YouTube:

Another great success at MMS was our book giveaway. Veeam gave out 500 copies of the book “Microsoft System Center 2007 R2 Unleashed”. Two of the authors, Kerrie Meyler and Cameron Fuller (pictured below), were at the Veeam booth signing copies and the lines were pretty long.

CIMG0534

If you didn’t get a copy of the book at MMS don’t worry, Veeam has additional copies that we’ll be giving out at special events throughout the year.

, , ,

Veeam and Microsoft Management Summit 2010

Apr 12th

Posted by vmdoug in Microsoft

1 comment

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

, , ,

Thanks to our Loyal Customers

Apr 8th

Posted by vmdoug in Announcements

2 comments

If you’re a Veeam ProPartner then you should have received this update already but I wanted to get this out there for the rest of the world. As we move towards the next release of Veeam Backup & Replication which will include SureBackup, you will start to notice that we will have 2 versions, Standard and Enterprise. The idea behind offering 2 versions is to give customers a choice when purchasing, they may not want all of the features that will be included with Enterprise (at a higher price point).

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 clip_image002[362] clip_image002[363]
Replication clip_image002[364] clip_image002[365] 2-in-1: backup and replication for one price, in one cohesive solution; includes replica rollback and replication to/from ESXi
Hot VM copy clip_image002[366] clip_image002[367] Facilitates ad hoc backups and migrations
FastSCP™ clip_image002[368] clip_image002[369] Integrates Veeam FastSCP, the #1 file management tool for VMware administrators, into the operator console
Architecture
vStorage APIs clip_image002[370] clip_image002[371] Highly efficiency and “future-proof” solution that uses the vStorage APIs for Data Protection
Changed Block Tracking clip_image002[372] clip_image002[373] Lightning-fast incremental backups to minimize backup windows and allow for more frequent replication
Multiple backup options clip_image002[374] clip_image002[375] Back up directly from SAN, over LAN, with virtual appliance, or direct from target
Centralized control of distributed deployment clip_image002[376] clip_image002[377] 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 clip_image002[378] clip_image002[379] Leverages Veeam’s proven FastSCP engine
Synthetic backup clip_image002[380] clip_image002[381] Eliminates the need for periodic full backups (provides “forever incremental” backup), thus saving time and space
SmartDedupe™ clip_image002[382] clip_image002[383] 10x space savings on backup storage
SmartCDP™ clip_image002[384] clip_image002[385] Near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDP
Instant File-Level Recovery
Windows clip_image002[386] clip_image002[387]
Linux clip_image002[388] clip_image002[389]
Other clip_image002[390] clip_image002[391] Unix, Solaris, BSD, Mac
Indexing and Search
Windows guest file system indexing clip_image002[392] clip_image002[393] 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 clip_image002[394] clip_image002[395]
Application-Item Recovery
Universal application-item recovery clip_image004[22] clip_image002[396] OS- and application-agnostic object-level recovery for application administrators
User-directed recovery clip_image004[23] clip_image002[397] Available for any application with a web front-end
, , ,

Opportunities

Apr 2nd

Posted by vmdoug in Announcements

5 comments

Once (maybe twice) in your professional life you are presented with a great opportunity. Sometimes you understand the opportunity going into it, other times you realize a few years later what a great opportunity you stumbled upon. When I joined Aelita Software in the fall of 1999 I had no idea the of the opportunity I had stumbled upon. Up until that point I had been doing mostly administration work around Lotus Notes and then later Microsoft (NT, Exchange, Desktop, Server), supporting an office of 60+ people here in Columbus. I started searching for a new job using the standard job sites and I found a position I had never heard of at a company I had never heard of: Sales Engineer for Aelita Software. The interview process was interesting to say the least but what really hooked me was the technology. I had been involved in a NT 4 domain consolidation project using another company’s software…when I saw the corresponding Aelita product, I was blown away by the speed and simplicity. I joined Aelita as the 2nd SE and it was the start of a great ride that culminated with Quest Software purchasing Aelita in the spring of 2004.

Fast forward a few years to 2007 and low and behold the old Aelita team had gotten back together to form Veeam Software. While I may not have realized the great opportunity initially at Aelita, I knew the opportunity at Veeam and it was really a non-decision for me to be part of it. I joined Veeam as the SE manager (and only SE at the time) and got to work building a team of SE’s that I can say are some of the best SE’s in the industry. As typical for startups, the people who join early usually end up wearing multiple hats and that’s no exaggeration for me. I found myself doing a number of different things: hiring and managing SE’s, product management, marketing, social media, sales, etc. In the past few weeks I’ve also done 99% of all the SureBackup briefings with analysts, press, bloggers and Veeam employees…the number of calls/presentations is somewhere around 40.

Getting to the point…

After that too long introduction, my point is that I’ve been given another great opportunity here at Veeam. Starting today I’ll be known as the Senior Director of Product Strategy. I’m very excited with this new role as it will allow me to interact with all the departments here at Veeam but also interact more closely with our partners, press, analysts and community with much more focus than I previously had time for. Many of you already know me more as VMDoug and less as the Director, Global Systems Engineer Group so the nice thing is that to the outside world this move is pretty transparent.

I’m also very happy to announce that taking my place on the SE side of things will be David Siles, aka dsiles, Veeam’s own vExpert and all around super-smart individual. David has been filling the role as Enterprise SE for North America for the past year and his new role will give him a global focus. I’m very happy to pass the torch to David as the new Director, Worldwide Technical Operations.

The final announcement today is something that’s been brewing for the past quarter. Ricky El-Qasem, aka rickyelqasem, will be Veeam’s new Director of Educational Services. Ricky came to Veeam from a UK distributor where he was responsible for training and has trained many of the current UK VCP’s. Ricky has done an outstanding job as an SE and now he gets to focus his energies on creating Veeam University and making sure that our channel partners and customers have the best training curriculum available.

I know both David and Ricky understood the opportunity when they came to Veeam and I’m happy to see them take advantage of it and move into these new roles. As for myself, expect to see me pick up my travels again this month as I get out there and spread the word about Veeam and the great products and people we have here.

Thanks,

Doug Hazelman
Senior Director, Product Strategy

,

What is Backup Verification?

Apr 1st

Posted by vmdoug in SureBackup

3 comments

I’ve been mulling a post about this in my head for a week now and I thought I would get some thoughts out there on what it means to verify your backups. Veeam’s marketing department has done a great job in getting the word out about SureBackup but what is it really? Some have suggested it’s nothing but a patch for our synthetic backup approach. Some have even gone so far as to indirectly say through anonymous corporate blog posts that we have a poorly designed product with Backup & Replication version 4.0. I guess not everyone “gets it” so that’s why I’m writing this post.

What we’re talking about with verification has nothing to do with how we store our backups but everything to do with the virtual machines inside of our backups. Our synthetic backup approach is a proven technology that we did not invent, simply refined. Our source based de-duplication of data as well as removal of “empty” blocks has been proven for over 2 years in production environments. So if you think all of this buzz is just about verifying the integrity of the “backup file”, think again.

Some history

Veeam R&D did not initially set out to provide verification capabilities. We were actually doing research into how to provide functionality that our customers were asking for, namely application-item level recovery. Since we are doing image-level backups, how could we allow our customers to retrieve individual application items such as email, SQL, etc.? Some vendors recommend backing up data twice, once with an image-level product and again with a different agent based product (with specific agents for each application). This approach means 2 backup vendors (not integrated), resource contention on hosts and almost double your backup space…we knew there had to be a better way.

Building on our advanced file-level recovery capability we knew that if we could just start a recovered VM we could then start the application and pull out individual application items. In the past this was done by restoring the entire VM in an isolated network, a process that can take a considerable amount of time and effort for just 1 email. What if we could just run the VM from the backup file without having to extract it? R&D quickly got to work to see if this was even possible…

The Aha Moment

Sometimes in software development you start out to solve one problem and in the process realize that you can solve other problems, problems that no one ever thought could be solved. When was the last time you started a server running from a tape backup? When was the last time you verified the ability to successfully recover (and start) all of your servers that have been backed up (monthly? quarterly? yearly? never?)?

Veeam R&D quickly realized that they were on to something big here, what some call the “aha moment”…what if we could startup the VM’s directly from the backup file in an isolated environment just after the backup occurs? Could we actually give our customers peace-of-mind that their image level backups (which are simply crash consistent) would perform as expected if they needed to do a full recovery? The answer to those questions is “Yes we can”!

Verification

So that is how this whole verification idea came about, we wanted to provided item-level recovery and we ended up doing that as well as something thought impossible by many.

Verification is:

  • Comprehensive – maintain dependencies across VM’s (email, directory, DNS) to provide the verification
  • Flexible – allows custom scripts in verification jobs based on specific OS and application
  • Fast – starts the VM’s, checks them and shuts them down…in minutes
  • Non-destructive – No changes are made to what’s stored in the backup, the verification environment is fenced off from production
  • Automatic – Once the jobs are created, they run on schedule
  • Peace-of-Mind – once verified, you know you can recover the VM’s and they will work.

So when you think about verification, take the points above into consideration. Verifying the integrity of a backup file is easy, verifying the fact that the VM will work when it’s recovered? That’s not so easy…but it will be soon.

, ,
« Older Entries
Veeam is #1 for VMware backup