I have the opportunity to work with some really smart people who do some really great things with technology. Steven Duckaert is a co worker and friend who is one of those IT guys who takes what is possible and makes it Reality! Recently I saw him do a demonstration of integrating Veeam Backup & Replication and System Center to automate VM recovery.  I asked him to write it up so I could put it on the Blog. The following post is what he wrote. It’s a great Post! Thanks Steven!

When it comes to architecting jobs for VMware vSphere virtual machines, the Automatic option for the Transport mode proxy configuration is the best option if you are not giving too much thought to the configuration. The Automatic option goes through a number of communications options checks to see what’s available on the proxy and determine the best way to back up the VM. This decision process has a number of factors that go into the mode selection for the active job. Direct SAN access is favored first in all situations, virtual appliance hot-add as the next best thing, and Network Mode as the common denominator to work in most every situation to sum up the ... Read more

This is a special guest post by Veeam SE Mike Beevor from the United Kingdom. Follow mike on Twitter @MikeBeevor. Over the last few months, I have found myself being asked more and more about Veeam’s permissions, coming face to face with the ultra-paranoid of the IT world: the Security team. Having promised to send out the Permissions Guide to a customer with a rather unusual set up, I thought that I would blog about some of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked and some of the more useful information I’ve discovered.

As Veeam moves forward and starts to become focused two virtualization platforms, I thought to myself now is the time to work out how I’m going to introduce Microsoft Hyper-V in my lab environment. I wanted to know if it could be virtualized running inside a VMware virtual machine of some sorts. Veeam has been very successful in presenting its solutions through the use of portable labs running for example on laptops nested under VMware Workstation. We would often have a nested ESX server, vCenter, DC and Veeam apps running on a single laptop and I wanted to know if Hyper-V could be thrown into the mix.

Since I’ve started at Veeam, I’ve had the unique pleasure of working on a number of different projects that engage virtualization technologies with the virtualization community. One of the projects I began working on right from the start was a community educational resource, Backup Academy. This week, we are happy to announce that it is now in session! But what is Backup Academy? Backup Academy has a simple mission:

No matter what segment of technology we are talking about, unique terms and a never-ending acronym soup seems to follow us. Veeam Backup & Replication has a number of terms that may be used as well. These can be shown in the product itself, discussed in the forums or even in these very blogs. Here is a rundown of five common terms in the product:

Storage options for a vSphere virtual machine (VM) can be configured a number of different ways. Each option has pros and cons associated with it, and every situation of course is different. Let’s start with the two main categories of storage resources in vSphere: NFS and SAN. NFS storage has VMDK files residing on an NFS share and is a standard file server protocol.

The vSphere SAN options are where the configuration choices increase and may become confusing. SAN options include VMFS volumes on fibre channel and iSCSI shared storage resources or local disk resources on an ESX(i) server.

When it comes to designing a vSphere environment, a lot of topics come into play in deciding how to provision storage to a virtual machine (VM). One decision point is whether or not to use Raw Device Mappings or RDMs. RDMs allow a special file in a VMFS volume to act as a proxy for a storage resource. The logical unit number, or LUN, that is a candidate for an RDM is attached to an individual VM; rather than formatted for the entire cluster. The benefits of using an RDM are for clustering support requirements and to allow disk commands to be sent directly to the storage resource from a VM.

One of the cool features of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is its ability to document the status of the virtual machine backup within the virtual machine’s annotations by using attributes. This is one of the many notification options for an individual job, which may contain one or more virtual machines. Other notification options are also available, including email and SNMP.

Today Veeam hosted a webinar titled “Running Exchange on VMware”. Most of the focus of course was on backup and recovery of Exchange once it’s been virtualized. As I was preparing for the webinar (with a lot of help from Anton) I realized that the information would also make a good blog post. Below are the main points of backup and recovery for Microsoft Exchange and how Veeam Backup & Replication v5 addresses them.