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!

■ 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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From the site:

V-index is an online virtualization industry study performed by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company. It is based on a survey of 500 enterprises across the US, UK, France and Germany and is designed to measure 3 parameters – virtualization rate, consolidation ratio and primary hypervisor in use.

So what do you get at V-index.com? First off, you get a quick look at virtualization adoption in a series of 3 different areas: penetration rate, consolidation ratio and Hypervisor in use:

You also get access to a series of snippets that you can put on your own blog or website. The data behind these snippets will be automatically updated each time the v-Index is updated (currently quarterly). Here’s a sample snippet:

V-index There are many different sizes and styles to choose from so feel free to pick the one that works best for your site. Also on the site is a page full of infographics on the v-Index results. These infographics show the splits by country for each of the 3 areas in the survey:

Of course, you can also download the full V-index report in PDF format and also provide feedback on other areas or data points you’d like to see in the V-index.

Again, V-index is meant to be a community resource, Veeam’s involvement is to sponsor the survey by Vanson Bourne and make the results available to everyone. You can use any of the data on the V-index site, please check the privacy policy for more information..

SureBackup and vPower

We started off the Spring of 2010 with our big announcement regarding SureBackup. This announcement was important for us because we knew that it was going to take some time to understand just what Recovery Verification was all about.

When you introduce something new to the market, you need to give enough time for it to soak in. When the summer came around, we started talking about vPower or Virtualization Powered-Data Protection. I gave the first live demo of SureBackup Recovery Verification, Instant VM Recovery and Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) at TechFieldDay 3 in Seattle and it was very well received. So well received in fact that one of our competitors announced something very similar to our patent-pending Instant VM Recovery a few weeks later that to this day still has not been released.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference held in June, Veeam was recognized as a finalist for Partner of the Year in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. This was great recognition for Veeam, specifically around our Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware.

Launch of Veeam ONE

Veeam is more than Backup & Replication, we also have a major focus on VMware infrastructure management. Veeam ONE was launched to create a single solution that customers could look to for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, reporting and chargeback. Also, since different customers need different monitoring solutions depending on their environment, Veeam ONE comes in 3 different flavors, including flavors for Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.

Best of VMworld

For me the best part of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was winning 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. Not only did the then current version of Veeam Backup & Replication (v4) get a finalist award in its category for the 2nd year in a row, Veeam ONE also was chosen as a finalist in its category. Of course when it comes to new technology, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was the big winner with the Gold award and the top prize, Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the awards that one vendor received 4 awards.

v5 Launch

With all of the excitement and buzz we created around SureBackup and vPower, it was great to finally release v5 to the market and watch it take off. For the launch “event,” we had more than a thousand people on a live webcast and on that day we hit an all time record for web traffic to veeam.com. So far we’ve had over 60,000 downloads and so many positive comments regarding the revolutionary functionality.

Informal poll at Gartner Data Center Conference

While not an official Gartner survey, this quick poll of 178 attendees at the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference shows that Veeam Backup & Replication is used by the same percentage as backup solutions from the “bigger” vendors. Here’s a graphic showing the results:

The Awards!

There has been no shortage of awards for Veeam in 2010 and they seem to keep rolling in. The following were all in addition to the VMworld awards mentioned above.

• Best Free vSphere Tools – As I previously blogged about, Veeam took the top 3 spots in the VMwarevideos.com and vChat Best Free vSphere Tools survey.
  
• Virtualization Review – Veeam was also awarded 2 Reader’s Choice Awards from Virtualization Review in their 2011 Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Veeam ONE took a merit award and Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was named a winner. These awards are based on reader input so we would like to thank everyone who voted for Veeam.
  
• SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of the Year 2010 – We were very happy to have won 2 Product of the Year awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com. Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization and v4 was also the Product of the year for 2009 in the same category – that’s 2 years in a row! Also, Veeam ONE: 2010 Product of the Year in the Virtualization Management category, that marks the first time in the history of the awards that one company has taken GOLD in 2 categories in the same year.

  

• Storage Magazine | SearchStorage.com Product of the Year – Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. When looking at who we beat out, this is a pretty significant award for us!
  

The Results!

155%

Of course all the awards don’t really mean much without good financials to back them up. As our press release announced, Veeam had a very, very good year financially with 155% growth over last year. Being a private company we don’t detail the exact revenue, but when you consider we’ve grown over 100% each of the past 4 years it’s not difficult to figure out. So when you consider Veeam as a company to do business with, understand that we’re still growing, we’re still 100% self-funded and we’re profitable!

Working with large files has never honestly been pleasant. VMware-based virtualization required that administrators work with large files such as CD-ROM .ISO files as well as the occasional virtual machine disk format (VMDK) file much more often than before. This is due to ESX(i) not natively supporting the Windows disk formats, including NTFS and FAT. Instead ESX(i)’s native file system, VMFS is used to hold all relevant data on an ESX(i) server. This includes local storage if it is available on the server.

All of that is old news, but here is a little trick where FastSCP may not always be thought of as the best tool: Moving large files on physical systems. There are plenty of situations where moving large files with Windows will fail every time. Even resorting to RoboCopy and RichCopy will still yield the same futile result. Don’t believe me? Create for yourself a single file of about 650 GB and try to copy it to another drive letter with Windows native browser or tools.

The use case for physical servers is to have FastSCP installed on a system that has mapped network drives to allow Windows to Windows copies of large, cumbersome files. The network drives are to other systems, where the large files will need to be copied or moved. For newer operating systems, a tweak to the User Access Control feature of Windows may be required to display the network drives within FastSCP (as well as Veeam Backup and Replication). Check out this Veeam Forum post for more information on that configuration. The figure below shows both products with the mapped network drive available to move large files:

FastSCP will move these large files where the native Windows mover won’t be able to do it. This is because FastSCP manages the file transfer in small increments, continuously. While it is not quite a block or API-based transfer that we are familiar with in vSphere; it will move the large file from one Windows System to another regardless of them being a physical or virtual system.

There are of course ways around this issue where Windows Explorer or RoboCopy won’t get the file copied. These can include running Windows Server Backup (we can still call it NTBackup) to encapsulate the file and another step to launch a restore operation at the destination, setting up an FTP service or starting a web service engine. I believe you’ll find that FastSCP can help out swimmingly in this regard outside of virtualization!

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

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

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

From our official press release:

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

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

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

The fundamental issue is that a system can be backed up without any issues or warnings on the task, but is not bootable or otherwise usable. Consider the case of a virtual machine that has a critical system component missing, such a portion of the registry. The virtual machine is able to run and be backed up, but may not be able to reboot correctly. Further, the system administrator may not even know that there is a problem with the virtual machine. In this case, the system would be backed up and the source would match the backup, albeit not operational. This is the case for any virtual machine protection tool, including Veeam products that are simply just backed up.

The issue that can come into play is retention policies. It is not atypical for a critical system in today’s demanding IT environments to have high uptime numbers, and this high uptime may end up exceeding the backup retention policy. Let’s take an example of a critical system that only has one or two maintenance windows per year. In this situation, this system is backed up regularly and retained off-site on three tiers of storage including off-site storage in a three month retention. The issue becomes that unless the backup is fully functional, the retention policy could propagate only an inoperable virtual machine if a full restore is needed.

As we already know, SureBackup’s objective is to provide verification to the virtualization administrator that the virtual machine is indeed bootable and that critical applications start up as expected. This cornerstone feature is a way to ensure that the backups are in good shape, but also possibly to identify any issues with the virtual machine that would prohibit a successful recovery operation.

December 9^th, Pete Zerger and Veeam Director of Product Management Alec King, will discuss VMware monitoring in SCOM. In this webinar they will talk about integrating VMware into Ops Mgr & VMM, the key performance indicators that you should watch for, scalability best practices, and System Center tuning and customization.

Join Pete and Alec at this VMware Monitoring in Microsoft System Center live webinar on December 9, 11:00 am EST. 10 attendees will WIN the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 UNLEASHED.

If you are not able to attend but have a question for Pete about System Center, please post in the comments below and we will make sure to get an answer for you. A recording of the webinar will also be available shortly after December 9^th.

Hope to see you there!

This year we’re again preparing another holiday surprise. It’s not a new product or an existing product for free (like in 2008), instead it’s a gift to the VMware community. Doug Hazelman will be announcing the “gift” at the Dutch VMUG happening on December 10, 2010. We’ll also be issuing a press released and there will be a blog post announcing the vSpecial gift.

We have already talked to some of you in the community about this so if you "know" please don't spoil it for everyone else. If you're on Twitter, look for special hash tag clues this week.

Happy Holidays!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about this VMware and Veeam promotion.

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