Coming after a great and other accolades for Veeam Backup & Replication v5, it’s good to see that our free products are getting some awards as well. from along with from did a popular session (MA8339 “10 Best Free Tools for vSphere Management”) at 2010 in both San Francisco and Copenhagen. To coincide with these sessions, David Davis setup a poll on his site to ask the community what their favorite free vSphere tools were. The results of this poll were announced on November 16, 2010 during a that I was asked to be part of.
Below I have posted the graph showing the top 10 but notice that Veeam took the top 3 spots. Also, Veeam was the only vendor to score over 8, pretty impressive! Veeam FastSCP continues to be the most popular free vSphere tool as chosen by the community. Of course Veeam Monitor Free Edition and Veeam Reporter Free Edition also did extremely well. Thanks to everyone who voted!
An interesting article from came into my inbox yesterday titled “” While Veeam is a client of Storage Switzerland as noted in the article, what impressed me about this article was how the author, , was able to sum up very nicely some of the things we’ve already been saying. Many of you may remember a previous blog post, “Will Dinosaurs Survive? (Response to: Will Dedicated VMware Protection Solutions go the way of CDP?)”, which was itself an answer to some bloggers calling virtualization focused backup vendors niche players.
One of the points I liked about the Storage Switzerland article was the entire history aspect of backup vendors…
In almost every case, when a new operating system or platform became dominant, a new data protection leader emerged. Novell NetWare begat Cheyenne Software, but as UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT emerged, this NetWare solution couldn’t make the transition to the new platforms. UNIX backup drove the establishment of Legato NetWorker (eventually EMC NetWorker) and Openvision NetBackup (eventually Symantec NetBackup). Microsoft Windows NT drove the establishment of Arcadia Backup Exec (eventually Symantec Backup Exec). Even CommVault, one of the more successful newer backup applications, was driven by the establishment of Windows as an enterprise, mission-critical operating system. In short, each new operating system or platform eventually brought a new data protection application.
This truly does show that it’s a great time to be a vendor focusing on the VMwareplatform (and virtualization in general). Expect more great things from Veeam as we continue to innovate on these virtualization platforms.
There've been some interesting blog posts lately about dedicated VMware data protection solutions such as Veeam Backup & Replication and whether those solutions will continue to thrive. started the discussion in his blog post "" This post caught the attention of Mr. Backup, , and he posted a response "", and then Jay posted a response to Mr. Preston "". All of this responding created yet another response by own "". With all of this talk about us, we figured we'd throw our own response into the fray.
All 4 blog posts make very valid points. The purpose of this post is not to call into question any of those points but to explain Veeam's position in the dedicated VMware data protection space. In fact, I wrote an article for Virtualization Review a few months back . The backup and DR space was very different in the age of the mainframe…then came Windows…now comes virtualization. Read more>>
It has been a whirlwind month for the Veeam Teeam coming off a great showing at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco. While Veeam was collecting more awards for the corporate mantle last week, there was some great knowledge exchange taking place by the Veeam technical team as well.
A good friend of ours, with VMware let me know about a blog post he had forthcoming following the public announcement of product general availability. Michael is the Americas Solution Specialist SE for business continuity and disaster recovery for VMware. He contributes to the at vmware.com.
Michael has been doing a good deal of testing with vCloud Director specifically in his domain of expertise. In his latest 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.
To say was a success for Veeam this year would be an understatement. We had record traffic to our booth, record attendance at our party and to top it all off we took home a record 4 Best of VMworld awards from TechTarget’s , including Best of Show. At the booth we were doing live demos of our upcoming Veeam Backup & Replication v5 as well as our Veeam ONE Solution. Below is a collection of pictures and videos, thanks to everyone who helped make VMworld a huge success for Veeam! Of course we look forward to seeing even more people at .
Be sure to check our 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 Read more>>
With our award winning Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0 quickly approaching, I decided to start providing an updates on new and great changes to the existing features of our product. Today, I will talk about our multi-OS file level recovery functionality. For those new to the product, Veeam introduced file level recovery (FLR) for Linux and multiple other file systems back in February of 2009. Instead of taking the traditional approach of writing Linux file system drivers for Windows OS, we leveraged the capabilities virtualization provides to deliver a much more elegant and robust solution, featuring support of 13 file systems at the time of version 3 release over 1.5 years ago.
Our approach to multi-OS file level recovery is , and is based on virtual appliance architecture. We provide a specially designed FLR helper virtual appliance based on a Linux kernel which has a minimal set of components, but is extended to be smart enough to be able to read data from multiple file systems and understand not just basic disks, but also things like Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and Windows LDM (Logical Disk Manager) partitions. The appliance is very small in size (around 10MB), and takes just 20 seconds to boot, making the solution very light-weight and fast.
To perform file level recovery, our product automatically mounts the VMDK files of the selected VM to FLR appliance as virtual hard drives. Due to some magic under the hood, the VMDK files are mounted directly from backup files, without having to extract those VMDK's first (similar approach to our instant Windows file-level recovery introduced in Veeam Backup 1.0).
Since we first introduced multi-OS FLR, we have continued to innovate and push the envelope of what's possible with image level backups. With Veeam Backup & Replication v5 we're introducing vPower, but we're also making an update to our multi-OS FLR approach. While the existing method worked great because it allowed us to support multiple file systems, some customers had an issue with the fact that our solution required VMware Player in order to operate. While there's nothing technically wrong with VMware Player, you can't install it on a virtual machine; this meant that our customers had to have at least 1 physical server if they wanted to take advantage of multi-OS FLR.
With Veeam Backup & Replication v5, we're moving away from VMware Player and on to ESX to run our FLR appliance. For our existing customers, this means that you no longer need a physical server to recover individual files from non-Windows file systems, all without any changes to the user experience. We're also introducing support for additional file systems, including commonly requested ZFS file system (most common choice for Solaris), bringing the total number of supported file systems to 15.
While version 5.0 provides wizard-driven experience for 15 of the most commonly used file systems, with our new, patent-pending vPower functionality it no longer means you are limited to only those 15. In fact, you will be able to recover from ANY file system! As we have already demonstrated, our vPower engine provides ability to publish any backed up VMDK on our vPower NFS datastore, directly from a compressed backup file. With the VMDK files readily available, you can simply mount these VMDKs to any VM that can read the corresponding file system (including the original VM), and restore the required files using native OS file management tools!
Alternatively, you can mount VMDK directly to your workstation, and use whatever tools you are using today to read data from those file systems. For example, FLR from Novell NSS volumes can be performed with – a tool that most Netware admins already have installed and are using every day.
The post announcing the winners is a bit late. We were supposed to announce the winners at Veeam's VMworld party, but for those of you who were there, you know it was a bit noisy There was also a lot going on at VMworld so I didn't have time to get this post together and properly audited to announce the winners.
While we received over 20 registrations for the contest, we ended up with 12 winners of the $25 charity gift card. Of those 12 winners, we had 9 blog posts directing people to download Veeam Reporter Free Edition, the other 3 used twitter and other means to generate interest and drive downloads.
The recipients of the $25 charity gift cards are listed below, along with their blogs and their entries, this list is sorted alphabetically by last name:
First Name
Last Name
Blog
Blog Entry for Contest
Jason
Boche
Barry
Coombs
Kelly
Culwell
Luigi
Danakos
David
Davis
Chris
Dearden
Onur
Demirel
Matt
Roblin
Alexander
Samoilenko
Greg
Stuart
Brian
Suhr
Rick
Vanover
And the winner is…
Rick Vanover! Rick is the grand prize winner and recipient of the $1,000 charity gift card. Congratulations Rick on driving the most downloads of Veeam Reporter Free Edition!
Honorable mention and $250 charity gift card goes to Jason Boche. It was a close race between Jason and Rick for the winner, less than 10 downloads separated them.
Thanks to everyone for your assistance in helping us get the word out!
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.
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.
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…
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There was also a lot going on at VMworld so I didn't have time to get this post together and properly audited to announce the winners.
