Be sure to check our FaceBook page for a complete collection of pictures from the show floor as well as the Veeam party.

Our CEO, Ratmir Timashev, with our Best of Show award

The Veeam VMworld Team

@Gostev and I at the Veeam party

Our VMworld booth in all its vPower glory

People having a good time at the Veeam Party

Craig from Mirazon and Matt Carpenter at the Veeam Party

The Videos

There was no shortage of video cameras at VMworld and it seemed that I was in front on all of them

We did something a little different this year at VMworld by hiring Glen Thayer to help us get people to our booth as well as shoot videos each day at VMworld.

Just for fun!

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

After 1 week, I can say that the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Of course I know all of you can’t wait to “try it out” for yourselves. The requests for beta participation have been coming in from all over the globe and while we will have a beta program, it will rolled out in phases to ensure we get the best feedback possible from those that can devote the time to trying it out in their environments. I did give a little hint on my recent podcast with Douglas Brown over at DABCC, take a listen here.

Below are some quotes as well as links to blog posts and articles about SureBackup. If I have missed anyone I do apologize, there’s a lot of great blogs and articles out there. If you want to be included, send me an email or send me a tweet.

http://lodev.name/2010/03/22/veeam-unveils-surebackup/

The most significant feature is called Recovery Verification. With this feature, backup operators can opt to automatically verify the integrity of each and every backup.
To enable this, VB&R includes an NFS daemon that presents the images on the backup pool as a regular NFS datastore to the ESX farm. VB&R automatically registers the virtual machines (in a fenced-off network) and tests if the backup is bootable. (And doesn’t get stuck in Safe Mode, for instance.) This mechanism is OS- and application independent.

http://www.virtuallifestyle.nl/2010/03/veeam-announces-surebackup/

Cool Stuff

It makes a cool solution for actually using your DR-site for the verify process. Just replicate the backups to the second site and do the verification there. As Lode Vermeien puts it: “So I can do cross-site backup and verify at my DR site? If so, bye bye SRM.. (for 90% of my customers, who can’t afford SRM in the first place)”. It does in fact differ hugely from SRM, as SureBackup does not require array-based replication.

http://virtualisedreality.com/2010/03/22/veeam-sure-backup/

No longer do you have to hope you backups are working in-between tests as they can be verified to be working not just valid every backup, the ability to be able to granularly restore elements from any applications by starting a VM from the compressed backup file. This also introduces lots of new possibilities for testing environments etc.

http://www.van-lieshout.com/2010/03/how-sure-is-your-backup/

Universal application-item recovery

This new technology enables you to recover any virtualized application. Because of the image level backup, it’s fully OS agnostic. No special backup agents are required. It doesn’t matter which OS or even which (custom) application you are running. You can just start your VM from a backup and retrieve the items you need. Because the complete environment is started, you can use the application’s native management tools.

http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/03/surebackup-by-veeam.html

One of the biggest issues Administrators have with verifying the validity of Backups of an OS is that when doing this you cannot only rely on the restore only of one restored system.

http://www.vladan.fr/veeams-secret-weapon/

This applies not only to individual VMs but also to for example to VMs like Exchange 2007 which needs Active Directory and DNS to work with.  All this “linked” servers must be “UP ” to be able to check your Exchange 2007 server is backed up correctly. So we might see those 3 VMs to be verified at the same time….. and declared consistent…

The new patent technology will be able to run VMs directly from compressed backup files. It’s OS and platform independent, without the need for an agent installed inside of a VM.  How your actual infrastructure has to be setup?

http://www.techhead.co.uk/amazing-new-vmware-backup-product-announced-veeam-surebackup

To me this all sounds too good to be true and I am going to be interested to see how quickly it will perform these VM backup verifications, along with how many it can do concurrently and whether this is just limited by the hardware on which you are running it on.  Veeam give an impressive example of the times we can expect to see:  An MS Exchange server VM with 156GB of storage only takes 2 minutes to verify – wow! Now that I look forward to seeing.

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/03/veeam-announces-surebackup-technologies.html

This goes well beyond the verification of integrity for a backup image that disaster recovery vendors usually do and it’s definitively an interesting way to leverage virtualization. Veeam will support it with any guest OS (not just Windows) and any application. It will even work with Backup & Replication 4.x archives.
But the company has some news about restore too.

Less innovative, but still a very welcome addition, SureBackup also comprises the capability to restore application-level items, like emails from an Exchange Server, users from an Active Directory LDAP server or records from a SQL Server.
Proper roles and permissions for each object will be recovered too.

http://infoworld.com/d/virtualization/veeams-surebackup-transforms-vmware-image-backups-315

The process is safe, and according to Veeam, it is also fast. As an example, Veeam said it was able to bring up a backup image of a 150GB Microsoft Exchange server with 200 mailboxes in less than two minutes. The key here is that this technology takes minutes rather than hours of manually trying to do the same functionality today.

http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/the-hoard-facts/2010/03/surebackup-coming-soon.aspx

It all sounds good, and Veeam got some pretty good analysts to provide supportive quotes, so it would seem that the only remaining challenge is getting the word out ASAP.

As Hazelman puts it, “This is going to take some time for the market to absorb because it is so different.”

http://www.josemariagonzalez.es/2010/03/25/surebackup-nueva-manera-hacer-backups-vms.html

Llega SureBackup!

Creo que uno de los mejores valores de Veeam es el plantear cosas nuevas, con “pensamiento paralelo”, innovando y generando nuevas maneras de hacer las cosas. No es fácil, lo hicieron con la copia sintética decremental o inversa (siempre que la explico mis clientes asumen que es lógico, pero nadie lo había hecho antes.

Via Google Translate:

I think one of the best values of Veeam is raising new things, with “parallel thinking, innovating and creating new ways of doing things. It is not easy, it was with the synthetic copy decrement or vice versa (provided that I explain my customers assume that it is logical, but nobody had done before.

http://www.dpmworld.net/2010/03/24/veeam-surebackup-un-nuovo-modo-di-intendere-il-backup/

Recovery Verification è una soluzione pensata per verificare l’effettiva funzionalità di un backup a caldo di una macchina virtuale. I backup a caldo si appoggiano ai Volume Shadow Service di Microsoft, soluzione pensata per garantire la consistenza di un backup o di uno snapshot a caldo di una macchina virtuale. Sfortunatamente il VSS presuppone che le applicazioni siano VSS-aware: in caso contrario non viene garantita la consistenza. Tramite il Recovery Verification, Veeam vuole offrire un potente strumento in grado di avviare la macchina virtuale in un contesto separato dalla produzione per verificare non solo il corretto funzionamento del sistema operativo, ma anche (tramite appositi script) il funzionamento delle applicazioni installate.

English:

Recovery Verification is a solution designed to verify the functionality of a hot backup of a virtual machine. The hot backup will build upon the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service, a solution designed to ensure the consistency of a backup or a hot snapshot of a virtual machine. Unfortunately the VSS requires that applications are VSS-aware: otherwise there is no guarantee consistency. Through the Recovery Verification, Veeam will provide a powerful tool to start the virtual machine in an environment separate from production to test not only the proper functioning of the operating system, but also (through the provided script) the operation of installed applications.

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/2010/032210stor2.html

Veeam verifies virtual machine recovery

Enhanced software tests recoverability of image level backups

http://www.quostarinsight.com/?p=63

The new feature included in Backup and Replication 5 answers a question which always sits at the back of IT managers  minds – ‘in an emergency can I recover from my backups?’ We all have our DR drills and undertake regular test restores and rebuilds in a lab. But on the whole, if the backup product says it was successful then we trust it.

Veeam are going to stop that niggling question for machines in your virtual environments forever. Backup and Replication 5 will not only backup your machines at the high speeds seen in version 4, but now also test those backups will boot for you. Now you know they are there when you need them in a crisis.

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/03/22/veeam-transforms-vmware-image-level-backups-with-breakthrough-technology.aspx

Recovery verification is made possible by new patent-pending technology that allows a virtual machine to run directly from a compressed backup. By publishing the content of backup files directly to ESX hosts, Veeam eliminates the need to extract backup files, and the time and storage required to do so. The technology also includes automatic creation of an isolated test environment using available production, disaster recovery (DR) or lab resources. It supports any guest operating system and virtualized application.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259930/veeam-introduce-verification?page=1

The problem with virtual machine backups, according to Veeam, is that companies cannot be sure whether they have a valid backup unless it is extracted and run to ensure that the application is functioning properly.

http://www.newstatesman.com/technology/2010/03/backup-veeam-test-enables

Veeam has added new a new capability to its Backup & Replication offering that will enable companies to verify the recoverability of backups from VMware virtual machines. The company says that one of the issues with current backup and restoration technology is that there is no way of verifying whether a backup has been successful or not and whether the operating system and applications will start without errors.

http://vuemuer.pmiservice.biz/?p=1144

Effettivamente si tratta di una funzione veramente utile, non vedo l’ora di mettere le mani sulle prime beta della versione 5.0 di Veeam Backup, il prodotto che integrerà questa tecnologia.

Via Google Translate:

Indeed this is a really useful feature, I can not wait to get my hands on the first beta of version 5.0 of Veeam Backup, the product that will integrate this technology.

http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/blog/?p=4940

Veeam SureBackup can restore VMs on local systems, hot-site systems, or dedicated systems. VMs are restored into private virtual networks within specific resource pools so that your systems can be configured to lower the overall impact of restoration testing.

http://www.vmgu.ru/articles/veeam-surebackup-news (with some help from Google Translate)

Key components of the solution for backing up VMs on ESX server defined by the following exclusive benefits Veeam Backup:

• Самый лучший бэкап (работает быстрее всех, дедуплицируется эффективнее всех и может быть проверен на восстановление) The best backup (runs faster than anyone else, deduplitsiruetsya better all and can be checked for restoration)
• Самое лучшее восстановление (максимальная гранулярность до уровня приложений, восстановление файлов большинства ОС) The best recovery (maximum granularity to the level of applications, file recovery OS)
• Самая недорогая защита виртуальных машин с точки зрения катастрофоустойчивости (репликация от Veeam не требует больших вложений в отличие от VMware Site Recovery Manager) The most inexpensive protection of virtual machines from the standpoint of disaster-(replication of Veeam not require large investments, unlike VMware Site Recovery Manager)

http://news.techworld.com/virtualisation/3218037/veeam-claims-to-have-cracked-vm-backup-problem/?getDynamicPage

The company uses proprietary technology that, for the first time, allows a virtual machine to run direct from a compressed backup. By publishing the content of backup files direct to ESX hosts, Veeam said that it eliminated the need to extract backup files, and the time and storage required to do so. Hazelman said that the technology would work for any application that runs under VMware.

http://speicherguide.de/Magazin/StorageNews/tabid/114/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/12270/Veeam-SureBackup-veredelt-Vmware-Image-Backups.aspx

Der Backup-Prozess selbst muss nicht verändert werden

Zu der Technologie gehört auch die automatische Bereitstellung einer isolierten Testumgebung, die je nach Wunsch direkt in einer verfügbaren Produktionsumgebung oder auf Disaster-Recovery- bzw. dezidierten Testsystemen laufen kann. Es werden alle Gast-Betriebssysteme und virtualisierten Applikationen unterstützt. »Wir wollen nicht, dass Administratoren ihre Backups verändern«, betont Hazelman. »Aber wir geben ihnen jetzt die Möglichkeit, ihre Backups zu verifizieren mit dem eindeutigen Ergebnis: Ja, dieses Backup ist gut. Und wenn eine Virtuelle Maschine (VM) recoverd werden muss, dann startet sie ganz einfach, und hat keine Fehler.«

Via Google Translate:

The backup process itself does not need to change

To the technology include the automatic provision of an isolated test environment that can run directly to each request in a production environment or on available disaster recovery or dedicated test systems. It supports all virtualized guest operating systems and applications. “We do not want that administrators” change their backups, emphasizes Hazelman. “But now we give them the opportunity to verify their backups with the clear result: Yes, this backup is good. And if a virtual machine (VM) must be recoverd, it starts easily and has no errors. “

http://blog.vmote.net/?p=135

Watching the Veeam SureBackup webcast yesterday (25/03/2010) it was quite apparent they couldn’t be more on the flip side to a typical backup vendor approach. Everything about the SureBackup technology they’ve developed is focused on the verification and testing of your backups. So much so the virtual machines don’t even require a restoration to be tested. To me this says everything I need to know that this technology, the vendor wants you to use the backed up data and not forget about it until it’s too late.

And of course my favorite Tweet from last week (and a great article too):

wcpreston New blog post: Veeam is kicking ass and taking names w/their new SureBackup product: http://www.backupcentral.com/content/view/304/47/ Thu, Mar 25 14:19:34

So in looking around for solutions which best incorporated these new features I eventually came across Veeam. Utilising the thin provisioning feature to remove the overhead of no longer seeking out empty disk blocks and the unnecessary backing up of those empty blocks, Veeam also incorporates compression algorithms on the target backup device. Hence Veeam have a solution that not only reduces the amount of space used on the source host datastores but also the target backup storage device.

Of course WE believe that Veeam has the best solution for vSphere 4.0 and it’s good to see others out there recognize that fact. With Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 not only do we fully support the vStorage API for Data Protection and the VDDK but we also fully support ESXi, for both Backup AND Replication. As I’ve been talking to partners over the past few weeks at VMware Partner Exchange and even our friends at Mirazon, they’ve indicated that Changed Block Tracking is perhaps the BEST reason customers should upgrade to vSphere 4 and our customers agree: Insane Backup Speed.

Veeam was also very happy to win Gold in SearchServerVirtualization’s Product of the Year for 2009, further proof that yes, Veeam Backup & Replication is the best backup solution for vSphere 4.

Finally, I’d like to address Archie’s final note in his post:

So while Veeam are currently leading the way, the time is certainly ripe for more third party APIs to be developed and incorporated making VM backup nightmares a thing of the past.

Of course we do face increasing competition in this space. I don’t want to start a comment war so I should mention that both EMC Avamar and Symantec Backup Exec 2010 do now have support for the vStorage API for data protection. Some of our other competitors have also “announced” support for CBT for so far it’s just been talk and no shipping product.

Does all this mean that Veeam is just taking a break to let our competitors catch up to us? Of course not! Over the next few months Veeam is preparing to change the way you think about backups…FOREVER! I can’t disclose anything yet, but watch this space, the countdown has begun!

UPDATE: In case you’re wondering, the next version of Veeam Backup & Replication will not require a complete reinstall/re-architecture. SureBackup is an entirely new feature that will easily integrate in with existing Veeam Backup & Replication installations.

OpenBench Lab Report: Better Data Protection for VMware vSphere

By Jack Fegreus Managing Director openBench Labs.

System and storage virtualization introduces multiple levels of logical abstraction and resource redirection that can obscure and complicate important IT operations. Among the hardest hit IT operations are those associated with file-level data protection.
Read this white paper by industry expert Jack Fegreus to learn how you can:

• Minimize vSphere disk risk with backup and replication – combine backup and near-CDP-level replication to unify both data protection processes for IT with a synthetic backup process and consistent process wizards.
• Maximize backup performance with deduplication and compression – how you can reduce the footprint of full VM’s backups by 3 – 9 times with data deduplication, compression, and recognition of thin provisioning.
• Leverage full support for ESX and ESXi without VCB – fully utilize the new vStorage API or VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) when performing backup or replication, allowing SMB sites with or without shared storage to fully leverage ESXi, including the ability to replicate VMs to an ESXi host.
• Dramatically increase full and incremental backup speed and reduces storage requirements by utilizing new vSphere Changed-Block Tracking and thin provisioning.
• Higher RPO support via Virtual CDP with replication – leverage inline data deduplication and compression to provide near continuous data protection (CDP) with replication.
• Ensure transaction consistency at VM and application levels – ensure VM transaction consistency and Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for VSS-aware Windows applications such as Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange.

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure better VMware vSphere data protection through unified backup and replication.

http://www.veeam.com/go/better-data-protection-vsphere

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

By Eric Siebert

VMware vSphere™, the industry’s first cloud operating system, leverages the power of virtualization to transform datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud-computing infrastructures. VMware vSphere includes many new features and technological enhancements that can benefit you. While there are several reasons to upgrade to vSphere, this white paper focuses on how VMware vSphere and its vStorage technologies improve data protection and disaster recovery.

Read this white paper by industry expert Eric Siebert to learn how you can leverage vSphere to achieve:

• 30% average reduction in storage space
• 50% average increase in backup speeds when performing full backup
• 90% average increase in backup speeds when performing incremental backups
• 80% lower cost for near continuous data protection (CDP)
• Increased reliability

About the Author
Eric Siebert is a 25-year IT veteran whose primary focus is VMware virtualization and Windows server administration. He is one of the 300 VMware vExperts for 2009, author of the book “VI3 Implementation and Administration” and a frequent TechTarget contributor. In addition, he maintains vSphere-land.com, a VMware information site.

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp

How Virtualization Cuts CDP Costs by 80%

By David Davis Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com

Until recently, CDP has been used only by the largest enterprise companies and only for their most critical data. For small and medium businesses (SMBs)—it was simply cost-prohibitive.
Thanks to virtualization, advanced disaster recovery methods that result in fast recovery and low system downtime are now available to all organizations, from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, for a very reasonable cost.
This white paper compares 3 different options of implementing CDP:

• “Legacy CDP” or Classic SAN-based CDP
• Software-based Server Replication
• Virtualization-enabled “Near-CDP”

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure business continuity and enable disaster recovery at an affordable price

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware_vsphere_continuous_data_protection

So why do we still have support for VCB? The simple answer is that we have a number of current customers that are using VCB and have not switched over to vSphere yet. We could have dropped support for VCB but then that would require us to maintain both 3.x and 4.x releases. Since 4.0 is an built upon 3.x and not a complete re-write of the software, we left VCB support in for our customers. The benefit is that our customers have a choice of how to process their backups: vStorage APIs, VCB or Veeam’s Service Console or Network modes. Of course I do recommend that customers use the vStorage API methods, it gives you the best performance and is also built specifically for vSphere.

Up to 10x Faster

Yes, it’s really true and our customers have posted as much on our forums. We’ve consolidated this feedback into a handy PDF document INSANE BACKUP SPEED, it’s not us saying this, it’s real people using our 4.0 product.

How is it so fast? One of the biggest reasons is Changed Block Tracking (CBT) which is included in the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). With CBT enabled for VM’s running on ESX or ESXi 4.x, VMware actually tracks the block level changes made to the VMDK. This way, when software like Veeam Backup & Replication takes a Snapshot, VMware returns a list of what blocks have changed. This significantly increases backup speed as we no longer have to try and determine the changes ourselves, VMware tells us in a matter of seconds.

The Critics

Of course anytime a vendor releases software that’s cutting edge and ahead of the rest of the field, others will try and knock it down. This recently happened on a blog sponsored by one of our competitors, claiming Veeam Backup & Replication was corrupting data. Of course when I first saw this I was a bit alarmed, but since they included a link to our forum where a user was reporting the problem, I followed the link and realized they were just sensationalizing something for their own apparent gain. Since this particular blog decides to heavily moderate comments, I thought I would post the facts here, lest any other competitors decide they want to sensationalize this non-issue.

The Facts

Taken from the Veeam Forum post:

1. Backups are NOT corrupted.
2. You can only run into this issue with NON-DEFAULT restore mode, in 1 restore mode of 3 existing modes.
3. Despite what competition may be claiming, there is no actual user data loss or corruption – VM will still boot and work.

The only real issue is OS and file system check tools complaining about unexpected content of the unused disk blocks. Linux ext3 file system and disk test tools merely suspect a problem seeing unused blocks being non-zeroed, and warn about this. This is specific to certain file systems only, for example, Windows NTFS considers this situation absolutely normal.

Of course every software has bugs, the example above is a bug in our software when using 1 particular recovery method and we have a fix available and it will be included in our next release. The important piece of information is that NO DATA WAS EVER CORRUPTED, just an issue on recovery and zero byte blocks. We are very thankful to our active forum  community and for bringing this to our attention. Veeam’s motto after all is “Listening to You, Building the Tools You Need”, it’s on the back of all of our business cards. I’d like to point out the below points about our user forum:

• Our forum is one of our greatest resources where people share their experience, best practices and getting support from Veeam and the community
• We understand that our competitors are so desperate that they will continue using our own forum to try and fool the community
• We will continue to be honest and direct with our customers in our forum vs. ending all the threads with ‘please contact our support’
• User feedback: The quality and effectiveness of this Forum alone would be enough to justify switching to Veeam, even if the product wasn’t superior to its competition (as it is at the moment). It seems just too good to be true… I hope it will continue this way!

Conclusion

Sorry to waste so much space on this post answering the competition. If they would allow comments on their own blog I would have written it there. In closing I just want to say that we encourage everyone to evaluate our software and make decisions for themselves. Put us in the lab and you will see, others promise, Veeam delivers!