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Posts tagged veeam

Jul 17th 2011

Introducing V-index

Posted by in Announcements |


Today marks the launch of Veeam’s latest community effort, the V-index. I’m very excited about this new offering as it gives the virtualization community access to a number of data points on the growth and adoption of virtualization. All of the research is conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent company that Veeam has contracted to do the virtualization surveys. Please understand that the survey results are not those of just Veeam customers, Vanson Bourne has their own contact list of companies that they use for these surveys.  
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: image 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: image 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..
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Feb 17th 2011

2010 – What a year for Veeam!

Posted by in Awards |


Doug Hazelman here and I wanted to share with everyone just what a great year 2010 was for Veeam. As we move into 2011 and continue our upward trend I’m sure more great things are around the corner but I really believe that 2010 is one of the years that will go down in Veeam history as being one of the best.

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. More >
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Dec 14th 2010

Veeam FastSCP for physical servers? You bet.

Posted by in Veeam FastSCP |


FastSCP was Veeam’s first product, and to this day is a free product that can be used to move files to and from ESX(i) servers. Stepping back in time, configuring SSH on an ESX server to move files via SFTP was a little clumsy; but possible. FastSCP allows VMware administrators to perform file copy, move and delete actions to and from Windows to ESX(i). FastSCP also allowed these operations to go directly from one ESX(i) server to another. 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!
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Dec 10th 2010

Happy holidays from Veeam–NFR’s for VCPs, VCIs and vExperts

Posted by in Announcements |


Back in October, Carl-Fredrik (@Cape200) sent the following Tweet:
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 cape2000
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
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Dec 8th 2010

Garbage backed up, garbage restored? Not with SureBackup.

Posted by in backup |


Since I’ve started here at Veeam, one of the foremost things I’ve been doing is become more familiar with the products. One feature that caught my eye and has been a popular aspect of Veeam Backup and Replication v5 with vPower is SureBackup. Basically, SureBackup verifies the backups not only that they were taken correctly; but that they are usable. There is plenty of information on SureBackup, as a refresher; see Doug Hazelman's earlier blog post from before SureBackup being released.

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.

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Dec 7th 2010

Microsoft System Center VMware monitoring

Posted by in System Center |


Pete Zerger is a familiar name among virtualization enthusiasts. Many of you know that he is a co-founder of a web community (Systemcentercentral.com) dedicated to all things System Center, and a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) focusing on Microsoft System Center among other things. As a co-owner and a consulting partner at AKOS Technology Services, Pete still finds time to be an active speaker, blogger, and an author of various System Center educational material. December 9th, 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 9th. Hope to see you there!
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Dec 6th 2010

Veeam’s vHoliday vSurprise

Posted by in Announcements |


It’s that time of year again. 2 years ago Veeam launched Veeam Monitor Free Edition during the holiday season. The launch was preceded by a build up of people trying to guess just what it was we were releasing on December 22, 2008. Last year we teamed up with Rick Scherer over at VMwaretips.com and gave away some software to some lucky winners. 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!

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Nov 29th 2010

Q4 Promotions – take advantage of them now

Posted by in veeam |


It is now December and there are just a few weeks left of these 2 promotions. We thought you may be interested in taking advantage of this opportunity before the offers end on December 24. 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.
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Nov 18th 2010

Veeam Sweeps the Results of the Best Free vSphere Tools Survey

Posted by in Announcements |


Coming after a great Best of VMworld award and other accolades for Veeam Backup & Replication v5, it’s good to see that our free products are getting some awards as well. David Davis from Train Signal along with Kendrick Coleman from Acadia did a popular session (MA8339 “10 Best Free Tools for vSphere Management”) at VMworld 2010 in both San Francisco and Copenhagen. To coincide with these sessions, David Davis setup a poll on his site VMwareVideos.com to ask the community what their favorite free vSphere tools were. The results of this poll were announced on November 16, 2010 during a vChat episode 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!
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Nov 17th 2010

Virtualization: Feature or Platform?

Posted by in Analyst |


An interesting article from Storage Switzerland came into my inbox yesterday titled “VMware Backup: Feature or Platform” While Veeam is a client of Storage Switzerland as noted in the article, what impressed me about this article was how the author, George Crump, 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 VMware platform (and virtualization in general). Expect more great things from Veeam as we continue to innovate on these virtualization platforms.
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