Posts by Rick Vanover

When it comes to deciding what are can be considered “BEST” practices, a lot can be up for interpretation. One thing that we do know for sure is that when Gostev presented VT-466 VMware Backup Best Practices: 2015 Edition there was something for everyone to learn. This was without a doubt one of the most popular sessions from VeeamON 2014 and 2015, and I can’t wait to see what the 2017 edition will look like!

That being said, we’ve decided to release a few key points here in a blog series from this session from last year, to share the knowledge and ramp up for VeeamON 2017.

Many times when I explain how Veeam backups work, people have questions about how data is moved for incremental backups. In addition, there are frequent questions about the differences between incremental and differential backups. In this post, I’ll explain these differences and show what Veeam does and why the options are what they are today.

Last year, we launched the Veeam Vanguard program. Veeam Vanguards are people who embrace Veeam the best in their respective communities. They come from all backgrounds and are spread across different products. Partners, customers, influencers and others are represented here. Now, we’re pleased to announce that the second round of Vanguard nominations are open for 2016 recipients.

Veeam Availability Suite v9 introduced integration for EMC VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays. These are a great storage system to run your vSphere VMs and also for leveraging Veeam. If you have one of these arrays, even if you aren’t a Veeam customer, you should really check out this integration.

Let’s first identify what parts of the data center we are talking about. From a storage perspective, any EMC VNX or VNXe storage system (including VNX2), a vSphere installation (except the free hypervisor) and a Veeam Backup & Replication system may be used, including Veeam Backup Free Edition for the restore technique from the storage snapshots.

Though virtualization has become the new normal for businesses of all sizes, physical server infrastructures are still quite widespread. Do you think that the companies using traditional, physical server networks are wasting money? This post will show you why this is exactly the case! Let’s start with what we used to have when physical servers were the normal platform of choice. The architecture of a physical server is quite plain. Each server has its own hardware: Memory, network, processing and storage resources. On this hardware, the server operating system is loaded. From the OS you can then run the applications. Pretty straight-forward.

Data centers of today are dealing with three serious challenges: 24/7 operations, no patience for downtime or data loss and a growing amount of data. Investments in modern storage systems can help the Always-On Business run and meet these needs, but there is a challenge on where and how we will store backup data for the data center of today.

The natural choice to meet this challenge is to leverage deduplicating storage systems, and HP StoreOnce Catalyst is coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v9 (Part of Veeam Availability Suite). HP StoreOnce Catalyst allows companies to take control of data by providing enhanced backup performance and control for data movement across the enterprise.

When we released Veeam Explorer for SQL Server last year, I was very excited about this new Explorer. It truly addresses the database restore situation with ease for virtualized SQL Server systems running as a virtual machine (VM) on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V without requiring the expertise of a SQL Server database administrator (DBA). In this blog post, I’ll focus on simply restoring a SQL Server database from a Veeam backup job.

There are three ways Veeam Explorer for SQL Server works to restore SQL Server databases: From the image-based backup restore point, from a log replay to point in time, and from a log replay to a specific transaction.

Last year I was tapped to spearhead a new project here at Veeam: launch a global influencer program. This honestly was something I was a bit timid about as I have no experience operating a program like this. I’ve happily been nominated as a VMware vExpert and a Cisco Champion for a number of years. Additionally on my team, Doug Hazelman, Luca Dell’Oca and Clint Wyckoff have been nominated as current and prior vExperts and Mike Resseler as a Microsoft MVP. We feel we have a good background on how these types of programs should operate and now we are happy to publically announce the Veeam Vanguard Program.

The question that has been on everyone’s mind is: “Which array will Veeam integrate with next?” Well, we are happy to announce that Veeam Availability Suite v9 will integrate with EMC storage.

This is a big deal, as this announcement really includes two different array families and scores of configuration possibilities. Both the EMC VNX and EMC VNXe families of arrays are supported. This integration is also powerful as it includes both the Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots recovery technique and Backup from Storage snapshots.