In this post I’ll give you a brief overview of new Veeam Backup & Replication v8 features, together with links to more detailed information about each feature.

You can also subscribe to updates on Veeam Backup & Replication v8 here.

NetApp snapshot support

What's new in Veeam Backup & Replication v8? Starting with the new version, Veeam Backup & Replication can use NetApp storage snapshots as backup or as a replica source for its jobs. This will reduce the impact on production VMs and allow for backing them up several times during business hours.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: Veeam to offer advanced data protection with NetApp
Video: NetApp and Veeam Backup & Replication v8

EMC DataDomain Boost support

Another noteworthy feature is EMC Data Domain Boost support.

Veeam Backup & Replication, by itself, works pretty fast. However, after combining it with DD Boost you will definitely see some additional performance improvements. VMware vExpert Rick Vanover, described in his recent blog post an interesting experiment in which he used v8 BETA to create a full synthetic backup of a VM, with and without leveraging the DD Boost. The results showed a 15x faster backup when the DD Boost was in place.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: EMC Data Domain Boost coming to Veeam Availability Suite v8
Video: EMC Data Domain Boost support

New Explorers for Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory and Exchange

With the release of version 8 the list of explorers built in Veeam Backup & Replication has been extended. Now admins can restore individual objects from Active Directory (AD) and Microsoft SQL backups, in addition to backups of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint Server. Lost a computer account from the organizational unit? Simply specify the path to the Veeam backup file or AD database (ntds.dit).

Veeam Explorer for Exchange was also updated with the ability to recover individual items hardly deleted by a user.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: You Must Try Veeam Explorer for Active Directory!
Video: Veeam Explorers - Whiteboard Fridays

Veeam Cloud Connect

Veeam releases Veeam Cloud Connect, a new default component of Veeam Backup & Replication, which helps customers send their data to the service providers’ side in a fast and secure manner (SSL) and with no more VPN tunnels, dedicated repositories and additional investments in the offsite infrastructure.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: Welcome Veeam Cloud Connect!
Video: Veeam Announces a NEW Feature – Veeam Cloud Connect

End-to-end encryption

Veeam Backup & Replication v8 has built-in encryption functionality (256-bit AES) for Backup jobs, Backup Copy jobs, Tape jobs and VeeamZIP.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: Encryption coming to Veeam Availability Suite v8!
Video: End-to-end encryption in Veeam Backup & Replication v8

New replication enhancements

Version 8 also includes a number of important replication enhancements able to simplify the life of every virtualization admin using Veeam Backup & Replication. The list includes WAN Acceleration for the replication process, failover plans (create logical groups of VMs, set the boot order of VMs, configure boot delays, etc.), planned failover (set the time when your source VM should be shut down and the target replica should be started) and more.

Read more on the topic:

Blog post: Major replication enhancements in v8
Video: Veeam Replication Enhancements – Coming in v8

As far as the EXACT release date, that’s always kept secret. Officially, though, the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v8 is planned for Q4 2014. BETA is available on request; contact your Veeam rep for BETA information.

If you want to watch demo of new version 8 features, go to this page: Videos – All features coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v8

You can also subscribe for updates to be the first to know when Veeam Backup & Replication v8 is available.

[[_SUBSCRIBE_FORM_]]

Which features are you looking forward to the most? I've included links to some of our most popular Veeam Backup & Replication v8 materials above, but I'd love to hear what you think. Contact me on Spiceworks or Google+.

Introduction

In our next part of this blog series we are going to talk about proactive monitoring and maintenance tasks.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

In many cases actions are taken when the environment already has an issue and end-users are suffering from an outage. However, System Center Operations Manager and more specifically our Management Pack is written around pro-active monitoring. Instead of the traditional fire-fighting that happens in many environments, you can use the different MPs and their views and reports to monitor pro-actively and solve issues before they actually happen.

Maintenance tasks

Proactive monitoring can be as easy as repeating certain tasks on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. No, it won’t protect you from sudden drops in performance or sudden crashes, but if you perform this well, you will manage to solve quite some incidents before they actually happen.

In this example we jump back to the Veeam MP. In those management packs, there are quite some views that you can investigate on a daily basis. Let’s look at one of the possibilities

Daily Tasks

In the Veeam MP there is a view called Top Hosts.

This view can be used to see quickly what you hosts are doing on 4 important performance counters. As you can see, at this moment everything is green (good) but when there would be another color like yellow or red, you would be able to drill-through and search for potential upcoming problems.

Many management packs have such views that you can use to look at every day. Another real-life example. One of the big issues I once had in a certain company that many engineers got called out of their bed because there was a sudden alert stating that a disk was running full on a server. Of course I wanted one of my engineers to be notified of this, but after a couple of weeks in service I wanted to know why we never “saw it coming”…

It didn’t took me long to figure out what really happened. The monitor for hard drives (in the base OS management pack) had a warning and critical state. Because during the day everybody was busy fixing the critical issues, nobody watched the warning ones. This meant that when the free space dropped from warning to critical, the notification came (mostly at night because of certain processes that ran at that time).

Solution, I build a custom dashboard (at that time rather primitive) and forced a daily task on my engineers too look at that dashboard every day. If they saw a warning, it needed to be fixed at once before it could become critical. When now somebody got called because of a disk running out of disk space issue, the responsible engineer had to come explain how he or she missed it the day before (I know, there are sudden drops but that will always happen…)

Weekly / Monthly tasks

Some dashboards can be looked at daily, others you might look at weekly or even monthly. But besides dashboards or views you can also work with reporting. In SCOM you can work with historical data (default a year worth of data) and perform trend analysis, capacity planning and forecasting. Some management packs have that type of reporting out of the box, for other management packs you will need to build them yourself.

This report (for example) can be reviewed every Friday to view what our storage on our virtualization platforms is doing. This should give us insight whether we are suffering on IOPS, latency, free space or others way before it will actually downgrades the environment.

Conclusion

By simply using the standard views and quickly reviewing them on a daily, weekly or monthly basis you can avoid problems before they actually “cause” problems.

For many of us, August brought vacation, tasty food and probably a short break from self-education. Now it’s a good time to continue your studies.

If you want to deploy, administer and manage the infrastructure in your organization as a successful technologist, check out these free training materials the Veeam Team provided last month.

An introduction to virtualization

Are you a beginner in the way of virtualization? Watch this “level-101” educational video for IT pros where MCITP Chris Henley:

Defines virtualization and describes its benefits over traditional approaches
Describes VM architecture and hypervisor design principles
Talks about 2014 virtualization trends

Watch this 50-minute video

Getting started with Exchange 2013

Wondering how to get started with Microsoft Exchange Server 2013? Our system engineers, Niels Engelen (@NielsEngelen) and Johan Huttenga (@JohanHuttenga), recorded a 50-minute tutorial for you. Watch it to learn more about:

Exchange 2013 architecture (architecture history, an overview of main components, DAGs, management tools)
Deployment planning (prerequisites, patching, virtualization considerations)
Installing Exchange 2013 (demo)

Watch the video

A quick reminder: Only six days left to sign up for the second free webinar out of the three-episode series: Managing your Exchange architecture (Sep. 4^th @ 11:00am CEST). Register today!

Virtualizing Exchange 2013 - the right way

Thinking about virtualizing your Microsoft Exchange Server? This 21-page PDF might be a good start. In this paper, Tony Redmond, MVP and author of 13 books, tells about:

His recommendations for Exchange 2013 deployment (Exchange virtualization – to be or not to be?)
Exchange support for virtualization technologies (from the point of view of storage, clustering, memory, etc.)
Operational considerations (upgrades, backups, etc.)

Read this 21-page expert guide

Software-based WAN acceleration 101

Software-based WAN acceleration is all about getting backup files offsite when the bandwidth is limited. For example, Veeam’s built-in WAN acceleration is designed for image-based backups and optimized for its own file format.

Watch this video where Veeam expert Chris Henley explains what software-based WAN acceleration is, how it works and how you can use it in Veeam Backup & Replication.

Watch the Software-based WAN acceleration 101 video

Nutanix and Veeam Backup & Replication for Hyper-V: Best Practices

Veeam expert Luca Dell’Oca and Nutanix engineer Derek Seaman created a 24-page overview of the joint Veeam + Nutanix solution, including:

Architecture (components, deployment model, restore options)
Configuration details
Best practices

If you plan to use Veeam and Nutanix in your environment at the same time, this PDF might be very helpful.

Download the PDF

VMworld

VMworld in San Francisco was a great event for Veeam’s customers and partners. Thousands of people came by the Veeam booth for the latest on Veeam’s products and attended our famous party. We had two key sessions, which will be offered at VMworld Barcelona as well:

STO2905-SPO - Veeam Availability Suite v8 Deep Dive by Doug Hazelman and Anton Gostev
STP3156 - Restores for any occasion: 39 restore scenarios from 1 Veeam backup by Luca Dell’Oca and Rick Vanover

Additionally, Veeam’s CEO Ratmir Timashev was featured in the CUBE by Silicon Angle. You can watch his interview here.

Rounding out VMworld, we had one Instagram photo featuring our sessions (be sure to follow Veeam on Instagram at @Veeam_Software), the booth and the party. You can see many more great VMworld photos by using the #VMworld Instagram hashtag.

VeeamON

Speaking of key events, have you heard about VeeamON? Veeam is offering the industry’s premier data center availability event this October in Las Vegas. We’ve added key content to the VeeamON website including:

Bonus announcement: Canadian MVP Community Days on Sep. 22-29, 2014

Attention, Canadian readers! Free registration for MVP Days Community Road Show, which will be held on Sept. 22 – Sept. 29, is open. Locations include Saskatoon, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. Join industry experts for a one-day event to discuss first-hand experience in cloud, virtualization, mobility and management.

More information, topics and registration is available at MVPDays.com

I'd glad to hear what you think, so drop me an email with your thoughts, or contact me on Twitter or Spiceworks.

Veeam Content Roundup for July 2014

Introduction

In our final part of this blog series we are taking managing and monitoring with System Center to the next level.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

In part 6, we are going to take it one step further and start creating our own dedicated views to make our work even easier.

Setting the scene

The Veeam Management Pack for System Center already has fantastic views in it, but sometimes you need to have more specific views for your infrastructure needs. For example, the Top VMs dashboard is a great view, but it shows you the top 10 VMs of your entire environment. Maybe you just need a view for a specific group of VMs (when you are for example an app owner). We already talked about creating specific groups, and that is something which we are going to use here also for the scoping.

In our example, we are going to create a few views based on a set of VMs that are allocated to a specific project. The project manager wants to have that data to be able to right-size the project when it goes into production. And he specifically wants to see the memory pressure on the specific VMs. I am convinced that you can come up with many examples or use-cases to create your own views.

The great thing about the System Center framework that this is very easy to do, so let’s get started.

Step 1: Create a new Management Pack

This is not necessary but it is considered a best practice. On the other hand, creating a separate management pack for each project or view is also not the best idea. I tend to work for each management pack with an override management pack and a specific one for views and customizations. For details on how to create a Management Pack, see part 2 of the series

Step 2: Create a group

We are going to create a specific group with all the VMs in that belong to that project. There are different ways to do that as we already discussed in part 4

Step 3: Create a view

You will notice that there is suddenly an additional folder in your tree. That folder has the name of the management pack but can be renamed if you want to.

Under that folder, I have created a dashboard view (grid layout) that holds 2 widgets.

Now I can create my own widget based on the Microsoft templates or based on the Veeam templates.

When choosing my widget (in my case, it is the Veeam Traffic Light Widget) I fill in some details such as:

Name: Top ProjectX VMs Memory Pressure

For the Scope and Counts, I choose the specific group we created and as the performance counter I choose Hyper-V Dynamic Memory VM / Average Pressure % / _Total

For the time range, I choose for the last 1 Days and for the maximum results I choose 20

Finally, in the Display settings, I choose to add Warning and Critical colors to it (80% being warning, 100% or higher being critical) and I finish the dashboard

And after a short time, your first customized dashboard is created

Conclusion

Going further and customizing views with the data that is being gathered is an easy way to bring lots of added value to Operations Manager and to the specific teams that need to view that data. The example we used is a very simple one, but with some imagination I’m sure you can think up lots of more cool dashboards that can be used for monitoring.

This is the final part of our 6-part series. I hope that you realized that importing a management pack requires more than just importing it. Every management pack that you consider to import should be looked at first, do the necessary preparations, and then use as much as possible to your own advantage.

VeeamON 2014 is coming up in just a few weeks (Oct. 6 - 8 in Las Vegas, NV), so I’d like to share what I’m most looking forward this year (and I see at least five good reasons to attend this event).

1. In depth training and hands-on experience

VeeamON 2014 is an excellent opportunity to explore Veeam solutions.

This is a great conference for educational sessions on data protection, availability and monitoring. VeeamON 2014 offers different education tracks (Technical program, Monitoring program, Technical-Sales, Technical-SE and Business programs). Every attendee has an option of choosing business or technical sessions to get the most from this event. I’ve already selected about 15 sessions right for me (out of 50+ sessions included in the agenda).

Alexis Ohanian, entrepreneur of reddit, Hipmunk and social enterprise breadpig, is the VeeamON 2014 celebrity keynote speaker. I look forward to hearing Alexis as well as Ratmir Timashev (President and CEO of Veeam), Doug Hazelman (VP, Product Strategy) and Anton Gostev (VP, Product Management) talking about Veeam’s future directions and products. I’m particularly excited about Veeam Backup & Replication v8 being released in Q4 2014.

Attendees can also meet Veeam engineers and discuss the latest product roadmaps, exchange ideas with developers and quiz the Veeam staff about some possible “ahead of the curve” approaches. New IT strategies can be later applied in your organization.

2. VMCE training course with 80% discount ($650 only)

I’ve already written about the VMCE certification in one of my previous posts (How to: Become a Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE)). One of the most popular aspects of VeeamON 2014 is the opportunity to take VMCE training for $650 (80% off the regular price which is approximately $3,000). Well, as you can understand, this is a good opportunity to validate your skills at a significant savings.

Note! The spaces for the training fill up quickly (as of writing this blog post, only 40 seats are left), so take this advantage and reserve your seat early.

3. Connection, Collaboration, Communication

During the event IT pros can connect with hundreds of technical and business decision makers from across North America, Europe and Asia. Attendees will meet industry leaders, technology experts, companies and well-known authors from all around the world. Take your time to build relationships with them.

For example, HP, VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp and other sponsors will be showcasing their solutions during VeeamON 2014. Schedule a time and visit these sponsors. Ask for a live demo, get answers to difficult questions and collect business cards so you can follow-up after VeeamON 2014 (and ask for future discounts).

Personally, I enjoy meeting virtualization experts and attending technical panel sessions.

VeeamON 2014 sponsors

4. Lab Warz: Show the top level of Veeam expertise and win $10K

How well do you know Veeam products? Be sure to participate in the Lab Warz competition, a good opportunity to measure strength with industry leaders from all around the world, and prove your level of IT expertise.

The winner will get $10,000. Prizes for other places (from the 2^nd to 10^th) are valued up to $700-$2,000.

Visit the Lab Warz page

5. VeeamON 2014 Party!

As some of my colleagues say, “Work hard, party hard.” The VeeamON 2014 conference would not be complete without a BIG party. The party is on Tuesday, Oct. 7 from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at LIGHT Nightclub at Mandalay Bay Hotel. BTW, be sure to wear comfortable shoes

So, I really hope that you will get (or have already got) the “green light” from your boss for sending you to VeeamON 2014, because this event is definitely worth it (just don’t mention the party ). If you can’t be there, connect socially! Connect with Veeam on social media to hear all the happenings during the conference. The official VeeamON conference hashtag is #VeeamON, so use it on Twitter to view the latest conversations.

When we released Veeam Backup & Replication version 6, one of the big “what’s new” items was our enterprise scalability through our distributed architecture and automatic intelligent load balancing. The move to the proxy/repository architecture was a big one for us because previously all backup activities ran through a single backup server. There were several reasons for moving to this architecture…

Distribute backup processing across multiple proxy servers to make it easier for you to scale your B&R deployment
Achieve higher availability and redundancy: if a proxy goes down, another one can still complete the task – no more single point of failure
Reduce impact from backups on production infrastructure through intelligent load balancing
Dramatically simplify job scheduling (by automatically controlling the desired tasks concurrency)
Control backup storage saturation (for when the backup storage is too slow)

With automatic intelligent load balancing, Veeam Backup & Replication picks the best proxy server (best in terms of connectivity to VM data, as well as least loaded with other tasks) to perform the backup for a VM each time the job runs. With v7 we enhanced this further by adding parallel processing, meaning a VM with multiple virtual disks could be backed up by more than one proxy at the same time. In simple terms, here’s the priority order a backup server uses to determine the best proxy for a given VMware virtual disk:

Direct SAN (direct storage access, no impact on production hosts)
Hot add (direct storage access through ESXi I/O stack)
Network Block Device (NBD) (VM data is retrieved over the network through the ESXi management interface)

When you set up a Veeam proxy for VMware, you are given the option to either manually choose connection modes and datastores, or let the proxy automatically detect these. You’re also given the option to set the maximum number of concurrent tasks for the proxy:

The backup server also takes into account the current load (max concurrent tasks) to make sure that the infrastructure isn’t overloaded. With v7 we also enhanced our compression algorithms to dramatically reduce CPU usage, so that each proxy could do more work. As customers upgraded to v7 and started to put it through its paces one thing started to become clear…we were too fast!

For many of our customers there was no problem with leaving the backup jobs and proxies on full automatic mode. The backup jobs were completing on time and there were no complaints. But certain customers, especially those with 24/7 workloads (the always-on business) and with too many backup proxies deployed, would experience an issue due to production storage availability being impacted by too much load from backup jobs. Applications were becoming less responsive during backups and some were even getting alarms in their monitoring systems. The issue was IOPS, not enough of them. Backup can be pretty I/O intensive and if you have some VMs doing other I/O intensive operations in parallel with backup then you can have issues.

To solve this issue we first took the “easy” route and simply set limits on the datastores –“No more than x tasks per datastore at a time” in one of the first v7 patches—but this solution was too difficult to manage…what if someone placed a new SQL server on a datastore, rendering your previously carefully planned limit too high? And if you set the limit too low and conservatively, you may not have enough time in your backup window to complete the backups. It became clear to us that manual limits just won’t cut it in highly dynamic virtual infrastructures.

So with v8, we are Introducing Backup I/O Control (patent-pending), a new capability in Veeam Backup & Replication v8. Backup I/O Control is a new, global setting that lets you set limits on how much latency is acceptable for any VMware or Hyper-V datastore. Think of it as a service-level agreement for your datastores.

The idea is pretty simple and comes in two parts. The first setting, “Stop assigning new tasks to datastore at:”, means that when the backup server is assigning a proxy for the virtual disk, it will now take latency (IOPS) into consideration. The backup job will wait for the datastore to become “not too busy” before starting the backup. The second setting, “Throttle I/O of existing tasks at:”, is for when a backup job is already running and latency becomes an issue due to an external load. For example, if a SQL maintenance process were to start running in a VM using the same datastore as the backup job, then the backup job will automatically throttle its read I/O from the corresponding datastore so that latency drops below the setting selected. The backup job might take a little bit longer in this case, but at least it won’t be affecting applications.

You can see an example of this setting in action in the graph below, where I/O control is turned on:

The green line in the graph is read latency and you can see that once Backup I/O Control is enabled, read latency drops below 20ms, and then goes out of hand again when it is disabled.

In Veeam Backup & Replication v8, Backup I/O Control is a global setting in our Enterprise Edition. For the default values, we have decided to go with slightly reduced thresholds, reflecting the Warning and Error levels that we normally see from our customers that use our monitoring solutions. These are fully customizable, however.

If you have our Enterprise+ Edition then you use Backup I/O Control to set the latency on a per-datastore basis, rather than a single global setting. This is especially useful if you have datastores that need a higher/lower setting based on workload or importance, for example higher latency is usually acceptable for test/dev workloads.

As always, here at Veeam we’re continuously responding to the needs of our customers, and the evolution of this feature is no exception. With the introduction of proxy servers and distributed processing in v6, and parallel processing in v7, we were able to more easily let our customers scale, and maximize backup processing along the way. Now, with the addition of Backup I/O Control in v8, we can let our customers better customize how much they maximize backup processing, allowing them the highest possible backup performance while minimizing the impact on production workloads – and better catering to the requirements of the always-on business.

Less than 1 month left until VeeamON 2014 (Oct. 6-8). My colleagues planned this event for many months, and today, when we entered the final stage of preparation, I decided to make a short overview of all the sessions that will be offered within five tracks: Technical-Sales, Technical-SE, Business, Technical and Monitoring.

Agenda

Before I tell more about the tracks, I want to say a couple of words about the VeeamON agenda in general.

As I mentioned above, VeeamON 2014 will take place in Las Vegas, on Oct. 6-8.

Oct. 6 (Monday) is the Partner Day. All sessions in this day are dedicated to Veeam partners and how they can meet their business goals together with Veeam.

Oct. 7 (Tuesday) and October 8 (Wednesday) offer general sessions (including breakout sessions by industry experts, executive keynotes, expert panels, and more) intended for all types of attendees.

I would also like to give a special mention to the VeeamON 2014 Party which will take place in the LIGHT Nightclub at the Mandalay Bay Hotel on Oct. 7 from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. You don’t want to miss this event!

Technical-Sales program

The Technical Sales Professional track includes four 1-hour sessions on Oct. 6. All of them go one by one starting at 1 p.m.

During these partner sessions, you will learn more about what’s new in Veeam Availability Suite v8, Veeam Management Pack v7, Veeam Cloud Connect and how to use these tools for greater customer value.

The list of speakers includes Veeam executives such as Anton Gostev (VP, Product Management), Doug Hazelman (VP, Product Strategy) and Alec King (VP, Product Management, Veeam MP).

Technical-SE program

The Technical System Engineers (SE) track offers four 1-hour sessions on Oct. 6. This program is all about best practices for Veeam partners and real-world examples complemented by undocumented tips & tricks beyond official technical guides from our architects.

Session attendees will learn about deploying Veeam ONE in large environments, the multi-tenant capabilities of Veeam Enterprise Manager for service providers, Veeam Backup & Replication deployment aspects from the point of view of right-sizing proxy servers or backup repository performance, and more.

Business program

The Business track includes more than 20 sessions, 6-9 sessions each day.

On Oct. 6 (Partner Day), you can learn more about the Veeam ProPartner Program, Veeam certification, and how to get real benefits for your business with the help of Veeam.

If you want to learn more about joint solutions, for example, Veeam with NetApp, ExaGrid or Kaseya, than Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 are your days. Tuesday and Wednesday offer fifteen 1-hour sessions about availability best practices and first-hand experiences from customers who are leveraging Veeam on a day-to-day basis.

Sessions in the Business track are presented by speakers from companies such as Forbes, Gartner, VMware, NetApp, The Register UK and more.

Technical program

The Technical track is designed for IT pros. During the 15+ sessions, Veeam experts will tell you about what’s new in Veeam Availability Suite v8 from the technical point of view, best practices, most common misconfigurations, performance bottleneck analysis, deduplication, storage architecture and its right sizing, and more.

Every attendee will leave inspired having learned something new and ready to implement new improvements in their virtual environment.

Monitoring program

Another interesting program is the Monitoring track which will take place on Oct. 7.

These sessions are dedicated to Veeam ONE and Veeam Management Pack for VMware and Hyper-V, i.e. keeping an eye on your repository, hosts, VMs and applications. Attendees will get a deep-dive in monitoring dashboards, reports, customized alarm notifications, capacity planning, troubleshooting and more.

You can find the VeeamON 2014 agenda and VeeamON 2014 sessions on the official website.

Personally, I plan to do a lot of learning over the three-day conference. Feel free to let me know if you would like to connect at the event – I will be glad to meet with our readers and discuss your thoughts on data availability and virtualization.

You may think that VM sprawl has never been a problem for your infrastructure, but what if it IS a problem and you just aren’t aware of it?

What is VM sprawl?

VM sprawl is a symptom of any rapidly growing virtual infrastructure. When any given department in the company opts to run their specific applications on dedicated servers, they can do this, thanks to virtualization. VMs are often set up for temporary usage, like testing or development labs, and after some peak usage owners may forget about them. The more virtualized applications and workloads you have, the more likely that “virtual junk” will appear in your infrastructure and cause VM sprawl. You could say that this is the modern version of the “Server under the desk” phenomena of years past.

It costs real money

The chaotic increase of unmanaged VMs drives extra resource consumption in your environment. Even inactive (idle) VMs still utilize host storage and CPU, wasting the resources you could otherwise allocate to more heavily used applications. Eventually, VM sprawl will exhaust your environment and force you spend some serious money on extra hardware.

How does Veeam Availability Suite keep an eye on VM sprawl?

Veeam Availability Suite delivers more than 80 reports on the VMware and Hyper-V backup and virtual infrastructures with its Veeam ONE component. Let’s see, which reports help you detect key VM sprawl threats and provide you analysis and recommendations on right-sizing and efficient allocation of resources.

Running out of capacity, or where is my free space?

To begin with, let’s note that Veeam Availability Suite features advanced capacity planning which helps to forecast, plan and oversee virtual infrastructure resources (CPU, memory and storage). Next time you look at the Capacity Planning dashboard, a lack of available space (or maybe memory, or both as it is shown on images below) may be an eye-opener for you.

Should you panic immediately purchase additional storage? Keep calm, and use these 5 hints for virtualization sprawl control:

Hint #1. Identify “Zombies”

Actually, they are not really zombies and they don’t eat brains. Instead, they eat up storage space and other resources. The term “zombie” is used for low-activity, idle VMs that are running, yet effectively doing nothing, which sets them apart from high-use production workloads.

Run the Idle VMs report to get a list of idle VMs and decide whether to shut them down, reconfigure their roles or decrease their hardware provisioning. To build this report specify the thresholds for CPU, memory, disk, network usage and the amount of time spent by a VM in the idle state.

The Idle Templates report shows unneeded objects, which you can either migrate to more capacious storage or simply delete. The key metrics here is the last access to the VM template.

The Inefficient Datastore Usage report catches low-activity zombies and gives you a clear picture of inactive VMs’ locations, the dates they were last accessed and the amount of space allocated to them.

Hint #2. Eliminate excess backups

When your backup repository runs out of space (Capacity Planning for Backup Repository reports will notify you on the matter), check if there are any surplus backups using the VMs Backed Up by Multiple Jobs report. There may be some VMs included into several discrete backup jobs and, thus, sprawling within your repository. Veeam Availability Suite detects the overlapping VMs and shows their target backup locations and referred backup jobs.

Hint #3. Clean up garbage

Garbage files are the side effect of multiple everyday changes in your virtual infrastructure. VM configuration data and temporary files may still remain on the datastore and consume space after their parent objects are deleted.

The Garbage Files report reveals objects, which are no longer being used and points you to these junk files’ locations.

Hint #4: Categorize your VMs

Veeam Availability Suite supports the business categorization of objects in your virtual infrastructure, which can also help you win the virtualization sprawl “war.” Each VM can be assigned to one or several groups by a variety of custom parameters such as department, purpose, specific project and so on. Select a group and you’ll get an at-a-glance view of all of the included machines.

For example, let’s say you’re running a temporary project (let’s say R&D) with a number of VMs. After completing the project, you can open a group of assigned VMs and remove the unneeded ones to free up storage space.

Hint #5. Detect orphaned and old snapshots

As far as we are discussing the problem of wasted resources, specifically on the redundant VMs, VM snapshots are not the case. At the same time, an excessive amount of snapshots influences your infrastructure in the same way, and I recommend you include them in the sprawl control process.

If a snapshot falls out of the relevant snapshot-chain, it is an orphaned snapshot. This may occur after errors such as host failures, inaccurately performed backups and unsuccessful-snapshot consolidation. The sprawl of forgotten snapshots may consume significant storage. VMware recommends keeping up to three snapshots in a chain for a single VM, each for a maximum of 3 days.

The Custom Infrastructure report is based on the Virtual Disk and VM parameters (selected as the object types) and built with custom columns (Name, VMDK file, Virtual Disk: Label, Snapshot: File name, Snapshot: File size) and custom filter (VMDK file - Contains - 0000) will show you a list of all orphaned VMware snapshots in your infrastructure.

You may want to use a step-by-step guide on building this particular type of Custom Infrastructure report, which can be found here in the Veeam Support Knowledge Base.

Another means of snapshot sprawl control is the Active Snapshots report built on snapshots’ age and size metrics. With this analysis, you’ll quickly see which VM snapshots in your virtual environment are the oldest (so most likely you won’t ever need to roll-back a target VM to that state) and the largest.

Set up once and run regularly

To make your life easier, and keep all the reports we discussed above close at hand, you can create a new folder in the Workspace (let’s name it VM Sprawl Control) and save each of the seven suggested reports there. During the first run of each report, you need to specify the required parameters and desired thresholds. When everything is set up, schedule automatic reports delivery for the entire folder and you will always be notified of potential risks in advance.

Helpful resources

Veeam Availability Suite reporting
Veeam Availability Suite for VMware and Hyper-V
Video: Advanced reporting and capacity planning for backup
Video: Veeam ONE product demo
Recorded Webinar: Veeam ONE v7: New Features and vCloud Director Integration
Veeam Help center: Veeam ONE 7.0 Dashboards and Reports
White paper: Top 7 VMware Management Challenges
White paper: Top 10 Best Practices for VMware Monitoring

When I heard that Data Domain Boost was coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v8, part of Veeam Availability Suite, I initially didn’t think much of it. After using the beta for a while now, I am very surprised how much the Active Full backup benefits from Data Domain Boost! Let’s dig into what I’m so excited about and how it works.

There are a number of new features I mentioned when I blogged about the new feature in June, but I use the Active Full backup a lot myself, and let’s explain how this works. It is true source side deduplication when data is coming into the Data Domain appliance. Blocks from the virtual disks of VMs that are already on the appliance are not even transferred. The best place to see this is in the backup job below. Check out the rise of the green vs. red lines in the backup window:

This is key for a number of reasons. That divide between the red and green is where Data Domain Boost is kicking in on an Active Full backup. These VMs are thin provisioned, on block storage, are on a 1 Gigabit Ethernet network and are ingesting to the Data Domain appliance at well over 100 MB/s in the Veeam job monitor. I even hit over 200 MB/s at one point during an Active Full backup.

We have a number of different lab environments here at Veeam, but I noticed that this environment over time started performing better with Data Domain Boost as I used it more. Why? Because more data has been ingested. There is now more source data that is deduplicated and as more deduplication hits come in; they are deduplicated before they even get transferred. This was truly awesome as when more like VMs are backed up, the Active Full backup is ridiculously quick.

Whether there are VMs that are in more than one backup job (quite common actually!) or if VMs are deployed from a template, the like blocks will benefit from Data Domain Boost over time. Either way, this feature will help on ingest to the Data Domain over time making backups perform better.

Do you see the Active Full backup helping to reduce your backup windows? If so, how? Share your comments below.

More information on Data Domain Boost with Veeam Backup & Replicatin v8:

Good news! Those of you who participate in the Veeam Community Forums probably know that earlier this week, Veeam’s R&D team released the BETA2 of the new Veeam Backup & Replication Plug-in for LabTech.

Veeam Backup & Replication Plug-in for LabTech is intended for service providers who use both LabTech, one of the industry-leading IT automation software, version 2013.0 or later to manage virtualized endpoints and Veeam Backup & Replication to protect VMware and Hyper-V VMs.

With the help of this plug-in, you can monitor key metrics of Veeam Backup & Replication’s infrastructure (Veeam backup servers and protected VMs) in LabTech Control Center. The plug-in creates detailed dashboards, alerts, reports and more using native LabTech architecture and data collected by LabTech agents from Veeam backup servers and VMware and Hyper-V VMs.

The list of built-in monitoring tools provided by the plug-in includes a number of dashboards (Backup Infrastructure Dashboard, Backup Jobs Dashboard), out-of-the-box functionality for raising alerts and creating tickets as well as:

Predefined alerts
Predefined reports
Predefined dataviews for events, jobs and protected VMs
Integration with the LabTech Backup Manager
Veeam backup tabs
And more

I’m also pleased to note that Veeam Backup & Replication Plug-in for LabTech will be supplied for free and will not require any license.

Download Veeam Backup & Replication Plug-in for LabTech BETA2 at the Veeam website. Let us know what you think in an appropriate discussion on the Veeam Community Forums, Twitter or comments below.

Many eyes in the technology world are on Veeam’s Premier Data Center Availability Event, VeeamON 2014, taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada this week.

October 6, the first day of the conference, was dedicated to partners, and I’d say it was deeply nerdy and user-friendly at the same time. Personally, the energetic atmosphere was very different from other conferences I’ve ever attended. And the information was definitely interesting.

Making a long story short, there were three key takeaways from Day 1 I wanted to share with you today:

Veeam’s next generation of data center availability—Veeam Availability Suite v8
Veeam User Group opened to partners and end-users
Lab WARZ

VeeamON 2014: Partner Keynote

Always-on Business and Veeam Availability Suite v8

As I’ve already written above, today had a marked focus on the Partners. In general, Veeam partners of all types are here and we had partner enablement tracks.

VeeamON 2014 kicked off with the Partner Keynote about the Veeam present top partner opportunities. Despite the early start (8:30 a.m.), the conference hall was full. Veeam CEO and President Ratmir Timashev said a BIG Thank You to all Veeam Partners for joining the event this year, made a short introduction to the Veeam history and joked that “The best product never wins.” The main idea of this part was that we live in an always-on world. The modern business cycle no longer fits in the traditional 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. work day. Today people need an Always-On Business, and Veeam helps to enable it.

Dave Russell, a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner provided some interesting results of Gartner’s research and showed that by 2014, 30% of companies will change the backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and capacity.

Veeam principals from the partner point of view were formulated as “Easy, Engaging, Predictable and Profitable.” Attendees also learned about many interesting facts related to Veeam today, for example:

1,500 employees
3,000 new customers each month
100% channel engaged
5 million VMs protected
Fortune 500 customers – 470, and more

I also attended several breakout sessions dedicated to various topics starting from Backup Cloud Connect to PowerShell and RESTful API. Veeam Availability Suite v8 and Veeam Backup & Replication v8 will be out in their final form this fall, although some early adopters were already able to get a look at the new features through a BETA during the summer.

If you’re interested, sessions will be available on demand a little bit later – we will let you know via email and social media.

Veeam User Group

It’s true that Las Vegas is a party city, but the Veeam User Group meeting is serious tech business (and maybe just a little bit of fun). We were honored to meet Scott Lillis (Senior Director of North American System Engineers) who kicked off the meeting at 10:45 a.m. It was good to see the large crowd engaged in asking questions during the event: MSP guest processing, dedupe appliances, vCenter replication and migration, failover and failback, PowerShell and more.

Veeam User Group meeting during VeeamON 2014

The Veeam User Group meeting was filled with informative technical presentations, conversations, networking with peers, and so much more. If you’re interested in becoming a Veeam User Group member, you just need to sign up here (and it’s free).

Lab WARZ

More than 250 registrants applied for the Lab WARZ competition to test themselves against the brightest Veeam engineers around the world. From 11 a.m. till the late evening, the Lab WARZ center was occupied by IT pros. Some of the attendees preferred to book the workstation for Tuesday, so I’m looking forward to the next two days of the conference to finally know the name of the Best Veeam Engineer for 2014. The first place grand prize of $10,000 is quite enough to make you feel special in Las Vegas (even if some people say you can never bring too much money to this city.)

VeeamON 2014: Lab WARZ

Last, but not least… Reminders

Just a couple of quick reminders for folks:

If you’re among the 1,300+ lucky attendees of VeeamON 2014 this year, don’t forget to install the VeeamON 2014 mobile app to keep connected with your peers while you’re at the event and get involved in conversations. It’s available for iPhone and Android mobile devices:

There is also the browser version for Windows phones.

Using this app can help you:

Build your personal agenda.
Subscribe for real-time updates from your peers, experts, bloggers and other VeeamON 2014 attendees.
Share your thoughts and feelings on the conference directly in the event’s newsfeed.

If you couldn’t join us this year personally, connect with Veeam on Twitter and Facebook to hear what’s happening during the event. Use the official hashtag #VeeamON to view the latest conversations.

We will share more news on VeeamON 2014 with the Day 2 Recap, so stay tuned!

VeeamON continues through its second day combining both partners and customers for a day full of training, content and fun. Here’s a quick rundown of what happened on this busy day:

The morning started with the general session where all attendees had a great showcase of the entire Veeam offering. We heard from Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev on his vision for the company and the markets we serve from both the customer and partner perspectives.

The general session then focused on key customer stories of how Veeam products have addressed data center availability challenges. These challenges are addressed by pillars that deliver the Veeam message at a high level:

· High-Speed Recovery

· Data Loss Avoidance

· Verified Protection

· Leveraged Data

· Complete Visibility

The general session continued on to discuss key partners and prepare everyone for the rest of the day.

After lunch, many attendees are now underway with the (Veeam Certified Engineer) VMCE training. The VMCE course is being offered at VeeamON for a discounted rate, and is a great way to differentiate yourself in the field for this great training program.

Today we also had a press release announcing new leadership for North America. Jim Tedesco has joined Veeam as Senior Vice President, North America Sales.

For attendees who were not in the VMCE track, they had an opportunity to attend great sessions that were delivered by Veeam experts, industry experts and key analysts. This was an opportunity to get focused access to the details of Veeam products that up until this point haven’t been offered anywhere else. Topics such as tips and tricks for installing Veeam ONE in large environments, best practices for VMware backups, the top 10 misconfigurations from our support experts and more. Additionally, our key partners were presenting this afternoon as well with their solutions for the modern data center.

Throughout the day, the LAB WARZ competition is continuing and the bar has been set! Ideen Jahanshahi from Oklahoma is on the leaderboard now, but can he hold it?

After all the work was done, it was time to kick back! A lot of content was taken in and Tuesday night had a Happy Hour in the Expo Lounge as well as the infamous party held at Lights Night Club in Las Vegas.

Stay tuned for more updates from VeeamON easily:

Use the #VeeamON hashtag on Twitter
Follow the Veeam_Software Instagram Feed
Like Veeam on Facebook

At Veeam, we believe the Modern Datacenter is based on virtualization. While we still see that some companies have a few remaining physical servers left, the majority are virtualized. However, a modern datacenter will still have certain physical devices. Most companies use physical workstations or laptops for their end-users to do their work and those devices have data on it that needs to be protected.

Because of that, we just announced a new product at our VeeamON conference today. Welcome Veeam Endpoint Backup Free!

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free is Veeam’s new backup solution for Windows-based computers (desktops & laptops). It is a standalone product and is not part of Veeam Backup & Replication nor the Veeam Availability Suite.

What is it?

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free is a product that allows you to backup your windows based computers to an internal or external hard-drive, a NAS share or a Veeam Backup Repository. With this solution, you will be able to protect files, volumes or your entire computer based on your own schedule or at logon or logoff.

The possibilities to recover range from simple files (overwrite or keep the originals), volume restore or a bare metal recovery.

Veeam Endpoint Backup free will have great features such as pausing the backup when the system is busy (automatically, with the option Backup I/O control selected), automatic update notifications, auto-recognizing of the external hard drive that has your backups stored, finding and adding installed drivers to the recovery bootable media (and the possibility to add specific drivers yourself) and much more.

When creating recovery bootable media, you will also automatically receive additional tools such as the possibility to check your memory, try and fix startup and administrator password reset.

And all of this, as the name states, for free!

When is it available?

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free will be released in Beta in November and the GA (generally available) date is targeted early 2015.

Does free mean no support?

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free will be supported through Veeam’s free product support policy. This means that Veeam will attempt to provide support for users of Veeam Endpoint Backup Free but does not provide response goals or response guarantees for this service.

Conclusion

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free will solve the IT Pro’s challenges to protect their endpoints at NO cost. And because of this, they will lower down their risk of data loss.

For those who missed it, roundup of the day #1, roundup of the day #2

We’re still here, in amazing Las Vegas, and just came from the closing keynote of the first ever VeeamON. Just in case you were unable to join us today, I wanted to take a minute to tell you about day #3 with Veeam!

A Tour of the Modern Data Center

Even though it was an exciting (and exhausting!) night at the VeeamON 2014 party, the third day of VeeamON 2014 still launched on schedule and without a glitch. Well, not for everyone….

One group of early risers went on an excursion to Cobalt’s Cheyenne Data Center. It was a rare opportunity to see a state-of-the-art facility up close and personal. This data center operates in the sweltering desert of Nevada and is a sight that we will always remember. A second group of lucky VeeamON attendees will get to tour the facility pretty soon.

Imagine this: 7-level authentication security checkpoint, utility service of 5.5 MVA with (6) 7.5 MVA generators, 450 cabinets with chimney air returns, N+2 HVAC redundancy, a capacity of up to 600 watts per sq.ft. and much more. Overall, an amazing facility!

Quote of the day: “The data center tour was actually cool. I could spend hours watching the Norse cyber attack monitor” by Ian Hardie.

Technical Sessions

At the conference, attendees enjoyed another round of cutting-edge sessions by technical experts from leading companies. The speakers all shared knowledge they’ve gained through years of hands-on practice and discussed their personal expectations for upcoming technologies. Sessions included:

Protecting Data of Small Government Organizations with Veeam Availability Suite, by Jim Jones
Storage &Networking Best Practices for vSphere Environments, by Chris Wahl
Designing Hyper-V, the Right Way, by Dave Kawula
Using Veeam Backup & Replication in an IaaS-Environment with vCAC, Nutanix &NSX, by Joep Piscaer
Server-Side Storage Intelligence with PernixData & Veeam, by Todd Mace & Luca Dell'Oca

Since I wasn’t able to attend all of the sessions personally, I asked a few attendees to share their impressions. Everyone I spoke to was pleasantly surprised by how much vendors really understood about the problems and needs of their customers. Attendees were also impressed by the many practical solutions and instruments vendors suggested to help eliminate obstacles and resolve issues that often made life unbearable for customers. All of the sessions were recorded, so stay tuned to hear when these recorded versions will be available.

Business Sessions

There were several business breakouts at this day as well. IT industry leaders talked about many of the challenges they’ve recently resolved, the methods they used to resolve those challenges and their vision of the overall future for modern data centers. A short list of topics is listed below:

Veeam Customers Deploy Veeam Worldwide, Manage Rapid Growth Rate &Meet Aggressive SLAs, by Ray Ciscon &Brent Dunington
Cloud OS: Microsoft’s Vision of the Unified Platform for Modern Business, by Symon Perriman
HP + Veeam: Revolutionizing Data Protection for the Virtualized World
Redefining Data Protection in the Virtualized World (NEXSAN),by Gary Watson
Availability for the Modern Data Center with Nimble Storage &Veeam, by Sheldon D'Paiva

As you probably know, IT trends today focus on modern data centers. Unlike old datacenters, data in modern data centers is available 24x7 and user data is protected ALL of the time, including during a disaster. According to these IT leaders, developing cloud technologies, storage appliances and protection software solutions are all helping companies meet their goals of reliability and fault tolerance.

In addition of that, we had a couple of “most demanded sessions” which were basically repetitions from previous days. Everyone had another chance to learn best practices of Veeam Backup & Replication and VeeamONE deployments.

Endpoint Protection by Veeam

A special announcement came from Veeam CEO and President, Ratmir Timashev who said that Veeam would give everyone Veeam Endpoint Backup Free, a free solution to back up Windows-based desktops and laptops. Yes, you read that correctly: physical desktops and laptops! For more details about acquiring this free solution, read the blog post by @Mike Resseler.

Closing keynote ceremony

Even though VeeamON 2014 will continue for one more day to finish up the training for 200+ people preparing for their Veeam Certified Specialists (VMCE) exam, today is the final day for the majority of attendees.

During ceremony we announced the results of the LAB WARZ. 10k dollars went to Ideen Jahanshahi from Oklahoma who, from now on, should be considered as a best Veeam engineer in the world! Congrats to Ideen, you’ve deserved it but, remember, that we might challenge you next year!

The closing keynote finished with a very inspirational speech from co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, who shared funny facts from Reddit history and gave us a boost of energy in order to "make the world suck less".

That’s it, folks! It was a pleasure! We will need some time to evaluate this amazing event, but I have a very strong feeling that we will decide it is definitely worth repeating. If so, I hope we will see YOU at VeeamON 2015!

Tweet with #VeeamON to discuss these updates or share other VeeamON 2014 thoughts with us.

Hyper-V has quietly moved into the hypervisor marketplace. I think the reason for the lack of pomp and circumstance around Hyper-V is that it doesn’t introduce some grand new sexy feature set that no one else in the market place has ever seen. Instead Microsoft gives every IT Pro and CIO what they really want, a free product that just works!

How is Hyper-V Free?

Windows Server 2012 R2 comes in a couple of different flavors, specifically Standard and Data Center Editions. There is NO functional difference between the editions! They both do the same things. The operating system, roles and features are exactly the same in each edition. They have the same feature sets, capabilities, options, everything. The only difference between the editions are the virtualization rights included with the edition purchased. The Standard edition gives the rights for 2 virtual machines included with the cost of the license while the Data Center edition includes unlimited virtualization rights. Unlike past versions of the Windows Server Operating system there is no such thing as Windows Server 2012 R2 that does not include Hyper-V.

If you have to buy a Windows Server License to get Hyper-V then how is Hyper-V free? Well you have to think about this from a different perspective. Every business wants to virtualize their infrastructure. In order to do so they will need a hypervisor. There are several in the marketplace and most cost money. At this point the business is faced with a decision to buy a Hypervisor or not to buy a Hypervisor. Over the past decade most businesses bought VMware (and it’s an amazing Hypervisor.) The next choice you will have to make is what operating system you are going to run in your VMs. Statistics tell us the vast majority of VMs run Windows Server. SO at this point you are going to purchase your Windows Server 2012 Licenses to run on your VMware virtual infrastructure. In a strange twist of financial fate since you bought the Windows Server License it also includes the Hyper-V hypervisor. You have effectively purchased both VMware and Hyper-V. Every CIO, CTO, and technology manager out there just had a light bulb come on in his mind. Does this mean you could skip the initial acquisition costs of the Hypervisor and just pay for the Windows Server licenses? It does indeed. That’s why Microsoft says that Hyper-V is free! It’s a compelling argument for Hyper-V.

Ok it’s free but will it support my virtualization needs?

Short Answer: Yes!

Hyper-V has enterprise class capabilities in storage, networking, memory, disk allocation, and every other core facet of Virtualization. It’s incredibly easy to manage and operate and like the title of this blog post “It Just Works!” One of the things that you will love about Hyper-V is that it does amazingly well in heterogeneous hypervisor environments running beside VMware. Many businesses are choosing to run both their existing VMware implementation and saving cost on new workloads by running them in Hyper-V.

**Note: It is essential that you understand that Hyper-V is focused on the core VM and supporting that VM. Hyper-V does not emulate other devices such as routers, network switches, etc. Not very Sexy right! But Free and it just works.

Recommendations:

1. Hyper-V is a true type 1 hypervisor which means you have to feed it hardware. Don’t think for a second that just because it’s installed through Window Server that you can try the old stand-alone server hardware model from the client server days. Use the same generous resource pool model that you would use with any other type1 hypervisor. Lots of CPU, RAM, fast disks, and lots of network connectivity and you will love Hyper-V.

2. If you are going to run more than 11 VMs in your infrastructure it’s probably best to purchase the Data Center edition.

3. Hyper-V does not have a built in data protection or monitoring so you will want to use the Veeam software you already use with VMware and use it to protect your data on Hyper-V as well. (Yes it is Sexy, and it Just Works!)

4. Use advanced feature sets offered in Hyper-V. Use .vhdx instead of .vhd. Use gen 2 VMs instead of Gen 1. Use Dynamic Memory allocation. Enable high availability for networking resources.

5. Structure workloads with availability in mind and distribute vms across hosts to maximize performance.

6. Read the Overview of Hyper-V as well as the following interesting articles

What’s New in Hyper-V for Windows Server 2012 R2

Top underestimated features of Windows Server 2012

Today we are very pleased to announce the general availability of Veeam Availability Suite v8! With this release we define Availability for the Modern Data Center and bridge the availability gap found in many companies.

Leveraging the technologies of the Modern Data Center, including virtualization, modern storage, and the cloud, we provide five key capabilities that enable the Always-On Business: High-Speed Recovery, Data Loss Avoidance, Verified Protection, Leveraged Data, and Complete Visibility.

High-Speed Recovery

Building on top of well-known features such as Instant VM Recovery™, Instant File-Recovery and our Explorers for Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, we now provide you with brand new Explorers for SQL Server and Active Directory and a new Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots for HP and NetApp.

More information about these new features can be found here: High Speed Recovery

Data Loss Avoidance

So you want to avoid data loss by enabling a low recovery point objective (RPO)? We deliver not only backup, but also replication, built-in WAN acceleration, and native tape support. We’ve also updated our solution with Backup from Storage Snapshots for NetApp & HP, EMC Data Domain Boost support, Veeam Cloud Connect, End-to-End Encryption and several new Replication Enhancements.

For more information: Data Loss Avoidance

Verified Protection

Everybody can do backup, but what about restoring your data? Reliable restores, automatic backup testing and virtual labs designed so you can be assured that your backups have succeeded and that you will be able to use them whenever you need them.

By leveraging our patented SureBackup & SureReplica technology you will be able to automatically verify the recoverability of your backups and replicas straight from the backup file without interfering with your production environment.

For more information: Verified Protection

Leveraged Data

On top of verified protection, you can use the same technology to test out your patch cycles, upgrade projects or train your administrators in an environment that matches your production environment. And all of that with minimal effort.

More information about Leveraged Data

Complete Visibility

Having the right monitoring tools to gain complete insight into your virtual environment including your backup & replication infrastructure is crucial in maintaining your always-on business. Improved centralized management, vCloud Director integration, vSphere web client plug-in and complete visibility of your virtual infrastructure are just a few features that we offer in this area.

More information about Complete Visibility

Wait, there's more!

If all of the above isn’t enough, we have much more in stock with this release. Great features such as Backup I/O Control which lets you specify how much latency is allowed on a VMware or Hyper-V datastore so that your can maximize backup performance without impacting your production environment; Snapshot hunter, which will discover and attempt to consolidate stuck snapshots; a new backup mode and 200+ other new features and improvements (shared VHDX support, quick rollback, multi streaming on restores and much more…). For more information, read the What’s new documentation.

Conclusion

At Veeam, we always have been proud what our development teams bring to the market, and so are our customers. With the GA release of the Veeam Availability Suite v8, we continue to innovate and offer you, again, a whole new set of capabilities that will benefit your modern datacenter.

For the official press release, visit http://www.veeam.com/newsroom.html

For more information, visit http://www.veeam.com/data-center-availability-suite.html

For the release notes, visit http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_8_0_release_notes_rn.pdf and http://www.veeam.com /veeam_one_8_0_release_notes_rn.pdf

For a trial version, visit http://www.veeam.com/data-center-availability-suite/download.html <- Login required

2 weeks ago we proudly announced the general availability of Veeam® Availability Suite™v8.

An essential component of the suite designed to complement Veeam Backup & Replication is Veeam ONE™.

Veeam ONE is a powerful monitoring, reporting and capacity planning tool for Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructures. It is a key component to helping maintain Availability for the Modern Data Center™ by providing complete visibility of your backup and virtual environments.

Complete Visibility

Data protection alone is not enough. Having the right monitoring tools to maintain complete visibility into your virtual environment and backup and replication infrastructure is crucial in maintaining an Always-on Business™. Proper visibility into both layers helps provide efficient detection of potential issues before operational impact.

What's new

Veeam ONE v8 introduces a number of new features designed to enhance your complete visibility.

Infrastructure assessment

Before installing any data protection software, such as Veeam Backup & Replication, you need to be familiar with the current load and performance of your virtual infrastructure, especially production storage. Previously, Veeam ONE provided you a way to analyze VM configurations, but now with v8 we have extended our assessment capabilities with a Datastore Performance Assessment predefined report. This report provides information on datastore performance highlighting potential issues that can be met during the backup process. This is a very important and “must have” report if you want to ensure your production datastores can cope with multiple VM snapshot commit operations triggered simultaneously.

Veeam Backup & Replication configuration assessment

If you want to know how to improve the performance of your backup jobs or to be sure your Veeam Backup & Replication deployment follows all known best practices from Veeam experts and Community forums, then this new report is for you.

Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure assessment report helps you assess your Veeam Backup & Replication configuration and identify potential improvements by taking into consideration all known best backup configuration practices.

Identifying protected and unprotected VMs in real-time

One of the most significant challenges of virtualization is that VMs can be created, deleted or archived on a daily basis. Today, with datacenter automation and self-service becoming more common, properly identifying which of your VMs are protected or unprotected has never been more important. Are you sure that you have protected all of your VMs?

In addition to the existing “Protected VMs” report, Veeam ONE now includes real-time monitoring and alerting for missing the required RPO of your critical servers via a new predefined alarm for backup infrastructures. Veeam ONE also tracks the latest backup state for each VM (displayed on the summary tab of each object) and groups all VMs based on their latest backup date in the corresponding Business View groups. These dynamic groups provide a list of all VMs that have fallen out of the required RPO, saving you time and eliminating the manual process of searching through the backup job session and reports.

Compliance and audit reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication

Compliance and auditing are becoming increasingly more important for every business working with virtualization and data protection.

If you manage a team of backup admins, backup job configuration change tracking is a convenient report designed to help identify changes and if necessary, revert back to previous job settings. This predefined report will inform you which backup admin administered the change, what change occurred and when it happened.

Veeam ONE v8 not only reports on restore operator activity, but also on all types of delegated restore assignments in the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

Another problem that can occur during a daily backup job management is when a VM is no longer backed up, but still present in the backup files and in need of protection. Veeam ONE's Orphaned VMs report conveniently lists all the VMs that are missing in the backup job but have existing restore points in the backup files to properly identify the VMs that need backed up.

Finally, if you're using tape, Veeam ONE v8 provides visibility into your tape backup jobs through predefined tape report templates. You can determine which tapes are protected, how many are about to expire due to retention policy settings, as well identify which tapes are stored in vaults.

vSphere tags

vSphere tags are becoming increasingly popular with vSphere administrators, as they provide much more flexibility than a single dimension of VM folders. In fact, both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE v8 now support vSphere tags. Unfortunately vSphere does not natively allow for tags to be set automatically or dynamically…enter Veeam ONE Business View. Business View provides you the ability to automatically do this based on any amount of static rules or dynamic groups based off VM attributes, such as name, location or resource allocations. Once the rules are defined in Business View, the appropriate tags are then automatically set in vSphere. This means that you can create automatic rules in Business View to tag VM's and then setup backup jobs in Veeam Backup & Replication to use the vSphere tags. This will work with any product that uses vSphere tags! Even better, this functionality is available in Veeam ONE Free Edition!

Now, you can use Business View to create a tag for all mission critical VMs and assign special alarms and reports to that group, or configure backup or replication jobs to automatically include any VMs with the given tag. The possibilities of using vSphere tags are basically endless!

Multi-tenant monitoring and reporting

Veeam ONE provides real-time, agent-free and unattended 24x7 monitoring of your backup and virtual infrastructures and with v8, we have taken this functionality to a new level.

Based on a number of requests from enterprise-level customers and service providers, v8 now offers internal customers (private cloud) and tenants (public cloud) an easy and secure way to monitor their own workloads. Multi-tenant monitoring and reporting for VMware enables users to monitor and report on their own cloud resources by using vCenter Server and vCloud Director user permissions already in place. This allows you to empower tenants/internal customers to perform high-level monitoring and basic troubleshooting of their own workloads providing users more control and dramatically reducing your cloud infrastructure's end users support costs. All essential information is provided to the users at a glance, they can even see when their VMs were last backed up. And they will certainly appreciate Veeam ONE Monitor's new, modern look.

But wait! There's much more

v8 adds engine optimization designed to support multiple backup servers, big data and the possibility to add 100+ hosts. New alarms have additionally been added to support Veeam Backup & Replication v8 functionality and alarms for monitoring Hyper-V Datastores, as well as bad logons to Hyper-V Hosts. And a number of existing functions have been enhanced including new alarm suppress options, alarm notification capabilities and much more.

With over 200 pre-set alarms based on advanced analysis, best practices and a deep level of knowledge on both the virtualization and data protection layer, you now have all the data you need to keep your infrastructure running flawlessly, and be proactive rather than reactive!

Veeam ONE now supports performance metrics and configuration data for vSAN datastores, SNMP v2 and v3 protocols for sending SNMP traps to other systems, and a redesigned UI internals optimized for monitoring large-scale infrastructures.

Veeam ONE Free Edition

In addition to our full version, Veeam ONE is also available in a free edition. While the full edition provides complete functionality, the free edition is also very resourceful and can substantially help you maintain and review your infrastructure. In fact, the Veeam ONE Free Edition is the best solution for you to use to assess your environment BEFORE starting a Veeam Backup & Replication project. If you like what you see, upgrading is easy. There is no need to reinstall the full version of the product. Instead, you can simply add a license key which will automatically unlock Veeam ONE's full functionality.

Veeam ONE Free Edition's VM change rate estimation and configuration assessment reports are designed to help you plan backup repositories in advance and inform you when VMs are ready to be protected. Performance reporting (limited to the last 24 hours) is available but the monitoring console will display the data for the last 7 days. Monitoring functionality is available and includes the possibility to receive email notifications. Access to the new custom report builder is also included but limited to one customized report.

While the full version unlocks a wealth of additional information, Veeam ONE Free Edition is also effective at delivering a vast amount of powerful data to effectively assess and review your backup and virtualized environment.

Click here for a detailed comparison (PDF) of Veeam ONE and Veeam ONE Free Edition.

Conclusion

What we have described is just a small subset of the key capabilities included in Veeam ONE v8, but there is much more!

By leveraging Veeam ONE, you will have the complete visibility necessary to maintain consistent data center availability and ensure your business is always-on.

For more information on Veeam ONE v8 visit: http://www.veeam.com/virtualization-management-one-solution.html
For more information on what's new visit: http://www.veeam.com/veeam_one_8_whats_new_en_wn.pdf

Veeam Backup & Replication v8, part of Veeam Availability Suite v8, has just been released and customers and partners are already starting to upgrade their environments and explore the several new features that have been added to this latest version of the software. As in any previous release, in addition to the main new features that have been promoted during the launch campaign, there are many enhancement that are not part of the marketing activities, but nonetheless they all contribute to create every time an awesome version of the software.

This time, again, the Veeam development team was able to “squeeze” an insane amount of enhancements and new exciting features in this release. And as always, trying to pick the most interesting ones was a challenging task for me, even more than in the past. To align with the version number, I tried to pick my favourite 8 new enhancements, but honestly I would have had a better luck if it would have been Veeam Backup & Replication v20 or v30...

Anyway, after sadly kicking out many of the enhancements from my personal list (but I really invite you to read the complete What’s New document as almost any new enhancement is worth a read, and there are more than 200 in this release), I figured out which ones are my favourite 8 gems. In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details.

Linux certificate-based authentication

If you have ever worked in a pretty large Linux environment, you have realized one thing for sure: few administrators login into those Linux servers using usernames and passwords. There are several reasons for this: the first one it that most of the times there is no centralized credential management (some are using Microsoft Active Directory via Kerberos, or other solutions, but it’s not so common in my experience), so configuring and even more managing credentials on many Linux machines can become painful. Also, in order to be secure, passwords should be really complex and changed often. But then password management itself can become a cumbersome activity, and administrators start cheating on their own procedures (simple passwords or password without expiration), thus decreasing the security of their own environment. But there is an even more compelling reason: machine-to-machine communications. In order to automate procedures involving different servers, passwords needs to be saved somewhere so scripts and applications can use them to connect to other servers; and if the password is not stored in a secure way like in a text file, it can be compromised.

For all these reasons, Linux administrators often configure certificate-based authentication and disable interactive logins completely. In this way, a user or a machine that needs to access a remote system via SSH simply has to have its own public key registered into the target machine, that in return is authorized the access without a login. The certificate registration only has to be done once, and after this the access is automatic and seamless. Key distribution can also be automated.

If a Linux server has only certificate-based authentication enabled, when a user tries to login with username and password he receives an error, and the only way it can login is if the local SSH certificate is already loaded into the list of Authorized Keys of the target server that he want to connect to. When configuring a new Veeam Backup Job against the same Linux server, also Veeam Backup & Replication V8 needs to have the same key in place. RSA keys are created with a private/public component: usually you end up with two files, id_rsa for the private key and id_rsa.pub for the public key. The public part needs to be saved beforehand into the authorized_keys file of the ssh server of the Linux machine that you want to index. The private key will be instead used during the Veeam backup job configuration. By the way, in the Veeam installation folder there is PuttyGen to help you create the needed Putty Private Key (PPK) keys for the Veeam backup server. Supported SSH keys formats additionally include OpenSSH RSA, OpenSSH DSA, OpenSSL PEM, Open SSL PKCS#8 and SSH.com.

During the Backup wizard, at the Guest Processing step, once guest file system indexing is enabled (linux indexing is by the way another new feature of version 8), the new wizard allows now to configure a public key:

In the new wizard, you will have to define the user that your key is mapped to (usually is root) and point to the private key you have previously generated:

If you are using a sudo system (like Debian or Ubuntu) you can also configure it during the wizard. Once the key is loaded, you can immediately testing it using the “Test Now” button:

This part of the wizard is really helpful since it also tests the required components that need to be installed in order for the guest file system indexing to work. In my case, I installed my CentOS using the minimal install, and by default it does not have mlocate. The other two required components are gzip and tar. Once the needed software are installed, the test completes successfully and the job configuration can be completed. It’s also important to note that you cannot use networkless connections via VMware VIX libraries in this scenario, Veeam server should be able to connect to the target Linux machine via SSH over the network.

During the backup job, you will see the new linux indexing in action, using the saved private key:

In the Job Statistics, you can clearly see the overall process: first Veeam connects to the Linux VM via SSH protocol, using the private key to login. It then uses mlocate to index the file system, and at the end of the job it uses tar and gzip (the other two required binaries) to create the index file. Finally, the index is published to the Veeam Catalog so a user can search for files during restores operations.

I am sure that if you are into Linux like myself, you will absolute love Linux integration enhancements in v8. But we are just starting here! Look forward to the next gem feature in a week.

We are firmly in the era of the Always-On Business, with users demanding ubiquitous access to data and applications. Yet, it appears that IT is failing to meet users’ demands. With the cost of lost revenue, productivity, opportunity and data exceeding $2 million per year, enterprises need to take control to avoid burning through millions of dollars.

Examples of the Always-On Business are all around us. In retail, we have just witnessed the end of the Black Friday weekend, where online shopping and extended opening hours mean total spending could reach $51 billion. Missing out on a share of this through IT downtime would be a huge blow to any retailer. In finance, the UK’s Royal Bank of Scotland was fined £56 million ($87 million) for 2012 IT outages. This latest fine means a single incident has so far cost RBS over £750 million ($1 billion) in fines, compensation, and making the necessary changes to ensure IT availability.

More than 90 percent of CIOs are now under pressure to meet increased availability requirements. The two most common factors driving the Always-On Business are more frequent, real-time interactions with data and applications, and the need to access applications at anytime and from anywhere – essentially, companies now need to deliver a truly globalized 24/7 user experience, or face either user backlash or penalties through, for example, breached SLAs. So how does one tackle this dilemma?

The effect of the Availability Gap

The major barrier to becoming an Always-On Business is what we call the “Availability Gap”, i.e. the difference between the level of availability an Always-On Business demands and what IT can physically deliver. Currently, 82 percent of CIOs admit they cannot meet the business’ demands. This is having immediate, and costly, consequences. We’ve already seen what an inability to guarantee availability cost RBS. Even a small gap can have an impact – a January 2013 outage lasting just 49 minutes cost Amazon.com more than $4 million.

A focus on these large-scale failures can be dangerous for enterprises – creating the impression that “it couldn’t happen here”. Yet Veeam’s Data Center Availability Report shows that the Availability Gap has a constant cost for enterprises. The guaranteed annual loss of more than $2 million is easily increased if downtime strikes at the wrong time, or lasts longer than expected. For instance, if Amazon.com suffered downtime at the same rate as the average enterprise, it would have lost at least $84 million in 2013.

Bridging the Availability Gap

Modernizing the data center is part of the solution to the Availability Gap, but it has to happen in the right way. There is no use in adding server virtualization, storage and OS upgrades, or cloud services to the infrastructure if you cannot guarantee 24/7 availability. For too long, availability has been seen simply as “backup”, a box to tick as part of any IT modernization strategy. Instead, availability needs to be at the forefront of strategy decisions – not a form of insurance in case the worst happens, but a means to guarantee the level of IT services enterprises need.

For the Always-On Business to work, availability solutions should offer five key capabilities. These are: high-speed recovery, recovering services in 15 minutes or less; data loss avoidance, with backups made at least every 15 minutes; verified protection, meaning failing to recover backups will no longer be an issue; leveraging backups to provide a production-like test environment, so that changes of the type that crippled RBS can be avoided; and complete visibility, so that any potential issues are spotted.

Implementing these capabilities would mean real savings. For instance, with high-speed recovery Amazon’s January 2013 outage would have (potentially) cost $1.2 million – a saving of $2.8 million. For the average enterprise, the maximum annual cost from downtime and data loss would be under $500,000; saving at least $1.5 million a year.

The fact that 78 percent of CIOs plan to change their availability product in the next two years gives hope for the future. If they can implement the capabilities that the Always-On Business needs, then the Availability Gap will start to become a thing of the past. Otherwise, enterprises should resign themselves to throwing away millions in lost revenue each year.

The last couple of weeks we have announced the release of the Veeam Availability Suite v8, which combines the capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication v8 with Veeam ONE v8. Our development teams just don’t stop! Today I am pleased to announce R2 of the Veeam Management Pack v7 for System Center.

What’s new

Fast time to value

The Resource Kit is improved and expanded to accelerate and simplify the deployment process. The Resource Kit was already a very popular tool and now it is greatly enhanced.

From now on, the Resource Kit is part of the installation ISO and can be launched from the installer splash screen. The sizing calculators for deployment planning are updated and reflect the new improvements in the R2 version. And the reference documentation is up to date.

Additional scripts are added to simplify the deployment and configuration. There are scripts to create local accounts on a vSphere host for use in vCenter Connection Failover and remove Veeam Run As Accounts from the Secure Reference MP.

Additional management packs are included for advanced customization of your environment. These management packs have been designed based on customer feedback!

Last but not least, samples have been added to visualize the Veeam MP data using Microsoft PowerPivot. The included Veeam VMware PowerPivot Example workbook has worksheets with sample statements that you can use when you want to create SQL queries for important data from your Ops Mgr DW.

The new management packs

The Veeam VMware High Granularity MP delivers additional performance collection rules for advanced and granular performance monitoring. This is considered an optional management pack and should be deployed only when specific advanced analysis is required.

The Veeam All Objects in Belgium Monitoring MP leverages the monitoring groups of Collectors in the Veeam UI. This allows dynamic tagging of vSphere objects in Ops Mgr, which allows you to use Ops Mgr User Roles for granular control of user views of your environment. In the sample MP, a Veeam Monitoring Group called “Belgium” is used – just search-and-replace to use your own group name.

The Veeam Disable All VM Workflows and Veeam Disable All VM Alerts MP creates a Veeam Unmonitored Group for VMs whose monitoring and / or alerting needs to be disabled. Just add VMs to the group to easily suppress all alerting and data collection.

Enhanced database efficiencies

We all know that the Veeam Management Pack for System Center is the most comprehensive, intuitive and intelligent extension for System Center. It provides detailed information about Hyper-V, VMware and Veeam Backup & Replication. Because of that, a lot of information is stored in the System Center databases. With R2, we have improved efficiencies that boost the performance under large, enterprise loads AND reduce the Veeam MP’s footprint in the System Center database by up to 50% or more—all without dropping any of the existing alerts, dashboards or reports.

Increased visibility

Our app-to-metal visibility is very popular and helps many of our customers gain insight into their entire environment. With version 7 R2, we now include (by popular demand) metal-to-app visibility that will give you visibility in both directions to quickly trace the problems and reduce the business impacts for your end users or customers.

Besides these additional topology views, the relationship between a VM and the Ops Mgr agent is replaced by a new discovery method; therefore the SQL performance issues are greatly reduced. This is a direct result of feedback from our customers (see http://www.systemcentercentral.com/performance-issues-veeam-v7-management-pack/) that we wanted to resolve as soon as possible!

Supporting this new topology method, we introduce two new diagrammatic dashboards, called Apps on this VM and Host for this VM.

Host for this VM – allows you to browse ‘up’ the virtual hierarchy

Apps on this VM – allows you to browse into the Ops Mgr agent and the apps managed there

More heatmaps!

Heatmaps are popular, and we have added two new heatmap dashboards for Hyper-V. The heatmaps will allow you to view virtual machines that run on the host local storage instead of running on a CSV.

VM Storage and Checkpoints (by Host). This dashboard shows allocated storage space and snapshot age for virtual machines grouped by host.

VM Storage and Power (by Host). This dashboard shows used storage space and the state of virtual machines grouped by host.

New reporting

A new version of Veeam Management Pack without new reporting? Of course not. An exciting new report called “Virtual Machines. Right-Sizing – VMs Undersized for Memory and CPU (Ops Mgr agent data)” helps you detect those virtual machines that have less allocated vRAM and vCPU resources than they actually require. This report does require the Ops Mgr agent to be installed inside the guest, but it improves the recommendations for right-sizing.

Support for platform updates

Since the Veeam Management Pack v7 for System Center was released, a lot has changed. There are new versions of Veeam solutions but also updates on the Microsoft System Center side.

Veeam Management Pack v7 R2 for System Center now supports Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager and Update Rollup 8 for System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1. We highly recommend that you install Veeam MP v7 R2 if you want to upgrade your System Center solutions to the latest update rollups.

Veeam Management Pack v7 R2 for System Center now supports Veeam Backup & Replication v8. Those of you who want to upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication v8 as soon as possible but still want to have the best monitoring through Veeam Management Pack can do so as of today.

Non-English locales supported for Hyper-V

Veeam MP for Hyper-V now supports localized versions of Windows Server Hyper-V and Hyper-V servers with Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Swedish locales

Conclusion

With Veeam Management Pack v7 R2 for System Center we are not only delivering support for the newly released Veeam Backup & Replication v8—we are also enhancing the functionality based on customer requests and we made sure that the great enhancements in Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2 are supported also.

Learn more about Veeam Management Pack for System Center.

Find out what’s new in version 7.

Don’t forget about our great promo! Until December 31, 2014, you can get up to 100 sockets of Veeam Management Pack v7 Enterprise edition—it’s FREE for Hyper-V!