Tag: Veeam Vanguard

Veeam Vanguard 2018

Education / Life / Virtualization

Here in the US Thanksgiving Day traditionally falls on the fourth Thursday of November. While it is one of my favorite holidays today is a day of thankfulness for me as I’ve been honored to be named a Veeam Vanguard for 2018. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of the group since its inception and it is one of my highest honors. Thanks as always to Rick, Kirsten, Dmitry, Andrew, Niels, Anthony, Michael, Melissa and Danny for keeping the Vanguards the best of its kind around. To those who have also been renewed into the program please accept a heartfelt congratulations as you’ve earned it through your involvement and I look forward to trolling right along with you for another year. While the e-mails have just been sent so there aren’t any statistics yet I see quite a few new members who are quite deserving popping up on twitter. Some I know already and other I look forward to getting to know. One of the really nice thing about the Vannies is we are a small group so everybody pretty much gets to know everybody. If you are looking for success in this group please don’t be shy, come be social and share the knowledge you have. Are you just learning about the program or didn’t make the cut this year? If you are active with Veeam join the conversation in the forums, on Twitter, on Reddit, any of the various Slack communities, or your own blog …

Windows Server Deduplication, Veeam Repositories, and You!

Virtualization

Backup, among other things, is very good at creating multiple copies of giant buckets of data that don’t change much and tend to sit for long periods of time. Since we are in modern times, we have a number of technologies to deal with this problem, one of which is called deduplication with quite a few implementations of it. Microsoft has had server-based storage versions since Windows 2008 R2 that has gotten better with each release, but as any technology still has its pitfalls to be mindful of. In this post I’m going to look a very specific use case of Windows server deduplication, using it as the storage beneath your Veeam Backup and Replication repositories, covering some basic tips to keep your data healthy and performance optimized. What is Deduplication Anyway? For those that don’t work with it much imagine you had a copy of War and Peace stored as a Word document with an approximate file size 1 MB. Each day for 30 days you go into the document and change 100 KB worth of the text in the document and save it as a new file on the same volume. With a basic file system like NTFS this would result in you having 31 MB tied up in the storage of these files, the original and then the full file size of each additional copy. Now let’s look at the same scenario on a volume with deduplication enabled. The basic idea of deduplication replaces identical blocks of …

Veeam Vanguard Again in 2017

Education / Life / Virtualization

It has been a great day here because today I learned that I have once again been awarded acceptance into the excellent Veeam Vanguard program, my third time. This program, above any others that I am or have been involved with takes a more personal approach to creating a group of awardees who not only deserve anything good they get out of it but give back just as much to the community itself. In only its 3rd year the group has grown; from 31 the first year, 50(ish) the second, to a total of 62 this year. There are 21 new awardees in that 62 number so there really isn’t a rubber stamp to stay included, it is legitimately awarded each year. The group has grown each year but as you can see not by the leaps and bounds others have, and for good reason. There is no way this experience could be had with a giant community. At this point in the post I would typically tell you a bit about what the Vanguard program is and isn’t but honestly, Veeam’s own Dmitry Kniazev really put it best in a couple recent posts, “Veeam Vanguard Part 1: WTH Is This?” and “Veeam Vanguard Part 2: What It’s Not.”  What I will add is that as nice as some of the perks are, as DK says in the Part 1 post the true perk is the intangibles; a vibrant community full of some of the smartest, most passionate people in the industry and …

Fixing Domain Controller Boot in Veeam SureBackup Labs

Systems / Virtualization

We’ve been dealing with an issue for past few runs of our monthly SureBackup jobs where the Domain Controller boots into Safe Mode and stays there. This is no good because without the DC booting normally you have no DNS, no Global Catalog or any of the other Domain Controller goodness for the rest of your servers launching behind it in the lab. All of this seems to have come from a change in how domain controller recover is done in Veeam Backup and Replication 9.0, Update 2 as discussed in a post on the Veeam Forums. Further I can verify that if you call Veeam Support you get the same answer as outlined here but there is no public KB about the issue. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, either each time or permanently, and I’ll outline both in this post. The booting into Safe Mode is totally expected, as a recovered Domain Controller object should boot into Directory Services Restore mode the first time. What is missing though is that as long as you have the Domain Controller box checked for the VM in your application group setup then once booted Veeam should modify the boot setup and reboot the system before presenting it to you as a successful launch. This in part explains why when you check the Domain Controller box it lengthens the boot time allowed from 600 seconds to 1800 seconds by default. On the Fly Fix If you are like …

The Most Magical Time of Year: Influencer Program Selection Season!

Education / Life / Networking / Uncategorized / Virtualization

Each year many of the major companies in the tech industry allow people to be nominated, by themselves or by others, to be recognized for the contributions to the community that surrounds that company’s products. These people are typically active on social media, in both online and in person forums and user groups and often will write blogs about their experiences with the products. In return for what is essentially free, grass-roots type marketing the companies will provide awardees any number of benefits; access to licenses for products for homelabbing as well as sometimes access to engineers, preferred experiences at conferences, NDA level information, etc but in some cases the biggest benefit is the recognition itself. As of today (November 10, 2016) two of the bigger and in my opinion one of the best programs are all open for nominations. Program Name Program Leader Nomination Link Cisco Champions Lauren Friedman Nomination Link VMware vExpert Corey Romero Nominations Accepted until 12/16 Veeam Vanguards Rick Vanover Nominations Accepted until 12/9 I’m honored to be both a vExpert and a Veeam Vanguard and like to think of myself as an honorary Cisco Champion (they can’t accept government employees) so I have some experience with each of these programs. Let’s take a look at all three. VMware vExpert may not necessarily be the oldest influencers program but it is probably the one socially active technical people know except possibly the Microsoft MVP program. In many ways vExpert is not only an honorary of its …

Setting Up External Access To A Veeam SureBackup Virtual Lab

Systems / Virtualization

Hey y’all, happy Friday! One of the things that seems to still really fly under the radar in regards to Veeam Backup & Replication is its SureBackup feature. This feature is designed to allow for automated testing via scripts of groups of your backups. An example would be if you have a critical web application. You can create an application group that includes both the database server and the web server and when the SureBackup job is run Veeam will connect a section of its backup repository to a specified ESXi host as a datastore and, start the VMs within a NAT protected segment of your vSphere infrastructure, run either the role based scripts included or custom ones you specify to ensure that the VMs are connecting to the applications correctly, and then when done shut the lab down and fire off an e-mail. That workflow is great an all but it only touches on the edge of the power of what SureBackup can do for you. In our environment not only do we have a mandate to provide backup tests that allow for end-user interaction, but we also use SureBackup for test bed type applications such as patch tests. An example of the latter here is when I was looking to upgrade our internal Windows-based CA to Server 2012 R2. I was able to launch the server in the lab, perform the upgrade and ensure that it behaved as expected WITHOUT ANY IMPACT ON PRODUCTION first and then tear down …

Lots of new stuff coming from Veeam

Systems / Virtualization

Veeam had what they called “THEIR BIGGEST EVENT EVER” and while it at times did seem to be really heavy on the sales for the sake of sales pitch, there was a lot of stuff to legitimately be excited about for those of us who use their products. From the features coming in Veeam Backup & Replication in version 9.5 in a couple of months through the first new feature of next year’s version 10 all in total there were 5 major announcements here today that those of us using the product can make use of. In this post I’m going to run briefly through these and in the coming months will provide some deeper insights when possible. Veeam Backup & Replication / Veeam ONE 9.5 (October 2016) Nimble Storage Integration- Nimble with be the next vendor after EMC, NetApp and HP storage systems that will allow Veeam to interact at the array level, allowing for backups from snapshot. If you are a Nimble customer (like me) this is going to be some good stuff Advanced usage of Windows Server 2016 ReFS- This is the real gravy here for anybody who is having to work with any kind of synthetic operations with their backup files. Through an integration Veeam has with Microsoft when ReFS is used to back your Veeam repositories your weekly rollups are going to take a heck of a lot less time and as well as see less storage consumption for long terms “weekly fulls”.  This is due …

Veeam Backup Repository Best Practices Session Notes

Education / Virtualization

After a couple days off I’m back to some promised VeeamON content. A nice problem that VeeamON had this year is the session choices were much more diverse and there were a lot more of them. Unfortunately this led to some overlap of some really great sessions. A friend of mine, Jaison Bailey of vBrisket fame and fortune, got tied up in another session and was unable to attend what I considered one of the best breakout sessions all week, Anton Gostev‘s Backup Repository Best Practices so he asked me to post my notes. For those not too familiar with Veeam repos they can essentially be any manner of addressable disk space, whether local, DAS, NAS, SAN or even cloud, but when you start taking performance into account you have to get much more specific. Gostev, who is the Product Manager for Backup & Replication, lines out the way to do it right. Anyway, here’s the notes including links to information when possible. Any notations I have are in bold and italicized. Don’t underestimate the importance of Performance Performance issues may impact RTOs Five Factors of choosing Storage Reliability Fast backups Fast restores DR from complete storage loss Lowest Cost Ultimate backup Architecture Fast, reliable primary storage for fastest backups, then backup copy to Secondary storage both onsite AND offsite Limit number of RP on primary, leverage cheap secondary Selectively create offsite copies to tape, dr site, or cloud Best Repo: Low End Any Windows or Linux Server Can also serve …

Community and the Rural IT Professional

Education / Life

I was born and raised in a small area between Charleston and Huntington, WV. While I recognized my hometown, Scott Depot, was a small town growing up I thought of both those cities as just that, proper cities with all the benefits and drawbacks that go with them. As I grew older and my worldly view wider I came to realize that what I considered the big city was to many a minor suburb, but never the less it was and still is my home. This lack of size and economic opportunity has never stood out more than when I began my career in Information Technology. After graduating from Marshall University with what I still believe to be a very respectable skill set many of my fellow graduates flocked to bigger areas such as Columbus, OH, RTP and Atlanta. I chose for a variety of reasons to stick around here and make a career of it and all in all while not always the most stable it has been fairly successful. There are very few large datacenters here with most datacenters being composed of a handful of racks. Some go to work for various service providers, others enter the VAR space and I found my niche in what I like to call the Hyper Converged Administrator role. The HCA tends to wear most if not all of the hats; virtualization, storage, networking, server administration, etc. I consider myself somewhat blessed that I’ve managed to avoid the actual desktop admin stuff …

Presenting at VeeamON 2015: Design, Manage and Test Your Data Protection with Veeam Availabilty Suite

Education / Virtualization

Last week I was presented with the honor of being invited to speak at Veeam Software‘s annual user conference, VeeamON. While this was not my first time doing so I was very happy with the end result this year, with 30-40 attendees and positive feedback both from people I knew beforehand as well as new acquaintances who attended. My session is what I like to think of as the 1-1000 MPH with Veeam, specifically targeting the SMB space but with lots of general guidelines for how to get your DR system up and running fast and as error-free as possible. Some of the things I do with Veeam buck the Best Practices guide but we have been able to maintain high levels of protection over many years without much interruption. The session starts with the basics of designing your DR plan, then designing your Veeam infrastructure components to suit your needs, followed by tips for the actual implementation and other tricks and gotchas I’ve run into over the years. Anyway due to the amount of information that was covered I promised attendee’s that I would put my slide deck out here for reference so here it is. If anybody has comments, questions or anything in between please feel free to reach out to me either through the comments here or on twitter. For attendees please keep an eye on your e-mail and the #VeeamON hashtag as the videos of all presentations should be made available in the coming weeks. This …