Veeam Backup & Replication v8, part of Veeam Availability Suite v8, has been released and customers and partners are already upgrading their environments and exploring the several new features that have been added to this latest version of the software. There are many enhancements that are not part of the marketing activities, but nonetheless they all contribute to create every time an awesome version of the software.

I’ve created a list of my favourite 8 new technical features, my “gems". In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details. In this second episode, we will talk about Quick Rollback.

Also available in this series:
Part 1: linux certificate-based authentication

Quick rollback

Veeam Backup & Replication has always had a large number of restores options, varying from Instant VM Recovery, full VM restores or single files and application items. This huge list of options is the best solution to solve different restore needs that a user could face.

When it comes to virtual disk restores, regardless the usage of Instant VM Recovery, the final activity still involves the complete copy of the entire virtual disk from the backup storage to the production storage. For sure, with Instant VM Recovery this is not an issue since the migration happens in the background while the virtual machine is already up and running, but what if you need full I/O capacity immediately upon VM recovery? Or if your deduplicating backup storage simply cannot provide any decent IOPS to run the VMs off it?

This can be now achieved in Backup & Replication v8 thanks to this new feature. Quick rollback can be invoked everytime you are restoring a full VM or a VM hard disk into the original location. What it does is an incremental restore: instead of restoring the entire virtual disk, Veeam Backup & Replication recovers only the needed blocks to revert the VM to the state that is stored in the selected restore point. Restore times are reduced drastically because only blocks changed since last backup are copied back.

To identify the changed blocks, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the same Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology that is used to perform incremental backups. With VMware, Veeam Backup & Replication queries vSphere API to get this information, while in Hyper-V (yes, we do it for Hyper-V too!) it retrieves the same informations by quering Veeam’s proprietary CBT engine. By obtaining the list of changed virtual disk blocks between the required restore point and the current VM state, Veeam Backup & Replication knows exactly what data blocks has been changed since then, and must be restored back to virtual disks to roll the VM state back to an earlier point in time.

While it is as simple and easy as it sounds, there are many use cases for it. One of the best actual uses I’ve read so far on the Internet after we released v8, is from a user whose virtual desktop got infected by a trojan horse. Instead of trying to remove the malware and wasting hours to do so, he decided to try Quick Rollback – and the recovery completed in seconds!

In the console, you can start for example the restore of the entire virtual machine. In the “Restore Mode” step of the wizard, if the default option to restore to the original location is selected, Quick Rollback can be requested by simply flagging the corresponding option:

The wizard shuts down the original VM if it’s still running, and starts restoring only changed blocks. You can immediately note the benefit of Quick Rollback if you compare the same operation side by side with a regular full VMrestore (on the left):

Out of 20 GB of the VMDK disk, 2,2 GB are effectively used. The restore of the entire VM had to restore the whole 2,2 GB and it took 68 seconds, while quick rollback only restored 29 MB in 12 seconds. As you can imagine, the difference on a real production VM with multi-TB virtual disks will be much bigger of course.

So, what’s the catch? As said, Quick Rollback uses CBT information. However, CBT data cannot be relied upon in many disaster scenarios. For these reasons, we disable this option by default, and we highly recommend to only use Quick Rollback when restoring a VM after a problem that occurred at the VM guest OS level. Do not use Quick Rollback option if the issue causing you to perform a restore was caused by host or storage hardware issues, or due to a power loss. CBT data in these cases could be corrupted, and you risk to restore the wrong blocks and damage the virtual machine disks permanently.

Finally, there are some limitations that you need to remember before using Quick Rollback. First, you cannot perform two incremental restores subsequently. After you perform a first incremental restore, the CBT on the original VM is reset. You must perform at least one incremental backup to be able to perform incremental restore again. Second, in VMware environments, incremental restore can only be performed in Network or Virtual Appliance transport modes. The Direct SAN Access transport mode cannot be used for this particular restore type.

But even with some limitations, Quick Rollback I’m sure can become another great tool in your restore arsenal!

Also available in this series:

Part 1: Linux certificate-based authentication

Part 2: Quick Rollback

I’ve created a list of my favourite 8 new technical features, my “gems". In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details. In this third episode, we will talk about Quick Backup.

Quick Backup

What you do when you need to quickly create a point in time copy of one of your virtual machines before a modification you are going to do? Usually, I’m pretty sure, you take a snapshot. Snapshots are indeed a good solution for this use case: they can be taken in few seconds, and if something goes wrong you can quickly revert to the previous state of the virtual machine. But at the same time, in more than one situation snapshots also have negative effects: the snapshot itself grows in size for the duration of testing. Not only the performances of the virtual machine I/O is degraded, but also the space on the datastore starts to be consumed excessively, and if for any reason the snapshot is forgotten, this can lead to serious issues. Finally, large snapshots may impact availability of production workloads due to excessive datastore I/O and VM stuns during snapshot commit.

For testing purposes, we definely suggest to use Veeam Virtual Labs capabilities, but this does not removes the need to take quickly a protection copy of a virtual machine. I hear you: a backup cannot even be compared with a snapshot in terms of execution time, and for daily operations you cannot afford to wait minutes or even hours before having a protection copy created, for example, with VeeamZIP. And you cannot even run an incremental backup, because maybe the job where that virtual machine is saved is comprised of many VMs, so it means you need to snapshot and save all of them just to protect one.

But Quick Backup is designed exactly to overcome these limits!

Here is how it works: when you start a Quick Backup, Veeam Backup & Replication searches through its catalog if there’s at least one restore point of the virtual machine, regardless the backup file where it is saved, alone or together with other VMs. If there’s even at least one restore point available, we are able to use this as the starting point for the Quick Backup, which creates an incremental backup of only the one or more virtual machines that you want to make a new backup of, among all VMs that might be present in the job. If the virtual machine is protected by multiple backup jobs, the one with the most recent restore point is selected: the final result is a really quick operation, like the name implies.

The incremental backup produced by Quick Backup contains only the changed blocks ot the selected virtual machine. No destination folder or other paramenter is asked, as the existing job’s settings are used, and once the command is invoked the new incremental backup file is created in the same backup repository folder used for that Backup Job. And the best thing is when you run Quick Backup, your retention policy for the given job does not become skewed. Running Quick Backup will effectively add an extra restore point for the VM in question so that is not accounted by the retention policy settings of the corresponding job. The restore point will be removed as a part of normal retention policy processing, along with the restore point it is dependent upon.

There are two ways to invoke a Quick Backup. The first is via Veeam Backup & Replication console:

You browse the Virtual Machines node, select the virtual machine you want to protect, and on the contextual menu appearing with a right click you select Quick Backup.

Integration in vSphere Web Client

If Quick Backup is to be an alternative to a snapshot, it also needs to be as easily accessible as a snapshot command. So, in addition of having this option in the Veeam console, you can use Quick Backup directly from the VMware vSphere Web Client, making all protection operations extremely quick and easy like you would do with snapshots. Once you have configured Veeam to be integrated with the vSphere Web Client (you can learn how to accomplish this configuration by reading the corresponding section of the User Guide), the related Veeam commands will be directly available into the Web Client itself:

As soon as you hit the Quick Backup command, the backup operation I described before starts, and you can directly track its progress from the Web Client tasks panel on the right:

Meanwhile, in Veeam Backup & Replication the most suitable backup job is selected and used as the source for Quick Backup:

But you can easily stay on the vSphere Web Client, and do other activities while the Quick Backup completes. In fact the same Tasks area will report the successful completion of the backup:

Now, with the new restore point created containing the most recent VM state, you will be able to work on the virtual machine with peace of mind, since you have a restore point available to revert to. And for the entire duration of your activities on this virtual machine, there will be no snapshot slowing its performances or consuming disk space on your datastores, or causing commit issues later. Win-win situation!

Veeam recently won another award for Veeam Management Pack (MP) for System Center.

On November 20^th, Techworld.com announced their winners in different categories and Veeam MP won in the category Virtualization Product of the Year.

More information can be found here: http://awards.techworld.com/

Does it matter?

You can ask yourself: Does winning another award really matter? Well, let’s be honest here, at Veeam we always love it when we win an award, and over the last couple of years, we’ve added quite a few of them to our shelf—but that is not the reason behind the question.

Why would a management / monitoring / reporting solution win in this category? Shouldn’t Veeam MP have been in another category with this solution? Does it surprise anyone? Aren’t there other fantastic solutions out there that are completely focused on virtualization?

At Veeam, it doesn’t really surprise us, as it proves something we have been saying for years. Management is critical to virtualization and should be looked at from the start of any virtualization project or strategy.

When I was a consultant, I saw too many projects that were designed and deployed by a group of engineers, architects and others. Don’t get me wrong, they were all smart people who could design a great solution and get every resource out of the hardware that they had to work with. But I have seen too many implementations that have been left alone after they went into production. And if you have worked on a service desk or as an IT operator, you know that a running project needs to be managed, maintained, monitored—the entire IT lifecycle.

That’s why we have been saying for years that management of that virtual infrastructure should be a critical part of the entire project (as well as data protection and recovery, but that’s for another post…). Without a good management solution, you can be working blind in your environment and before you know it, you run in some serious trouble. We all know how bad it can be when you suddenly lose one host running multiple workloads.

For some of us this is common sense, but unfortunately, I still see too many implementations where management isn’t a critical part of the solution.

Virtualization certainly can solve a lot of IT business problems, and it brings a lot of value to the table, but it also brings new challenges—and management is one of them.

So before you start any virtualization project, make sure that management and protection are on the table as critical parts of the entire solution!

And that is the reason Veeam won in the right category J

You can get a free license for up to 100 Hyper-V sockets of Veeam Management Pack v7 Enterprise edition. This offer ends December 30, so act now!

Veeam Availability Suite v8 has been released and customers and partners are already upgrading their environments and exploring the several new features that have been added to this latest version of the software. There are many enhancements that are not part of the marketing activities, but nonetheless they all contribute to create every time an awesome version of the software.
I’ve created a list of my favorite 8 new technical features, my “gems". In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details. In this fourth episode, we will talk about the support for vSphere tags.

Also available in this series:
Part 1: Linux certificate-based authentication
Part 2: Quick Rollback
Part 3: Quick Backup

Towards a policy based datacenter

Modern datacenters are becoming complex, and regardless the efforts of their managers and operators to reduce their complexity, the only way to effectively manage these large environments is through automation. Automation is not just about scripting repetitive tasks; the proper way to automate a datacenter is by creating policies to describe a desired state, and then have a smart software in place capable of applying “automatically” those policies against different components of the infrastructure. In this way, an administrator has to take care of the policies and their assignments, instead of “baby sitting” the different components. As a fundamental part of any environment, data availability could and should be managed via policies. And today I’m going to explain you how you can do it with Veeam Availability Suite v8 and VMware vSphere.

Data Protection policies instead of Backup Jobs

One of the coolest features of VMware vSphere in its latest releases are tags. With it, you can “tag” different objects of the virtualized environment, being it virtual machines, folders, resource pools and others, and then filter and group these objects based on common tags. The advantages over simple folders are immense: one object can have multiple tags (while a virtual machine for example can only be in one folder at a given time), tags can be removed and added as needed, and you can create as many tags as you want in order to better classify your infrastructure. Once your tag configuration is in place, and every virtual machine is properly marked with one or more tags, it's time to use those tags for data protection activities! When configuring a new job in Veeam Backup & Replication v8, you will note the new "Tags" view in the infrastructure browse dialog:

Once you populate a job with a tag, each virtual machine with the selected tag will be added to the list of processed virtual machines automatically at each job execution, and properly protected. The possible use cases are endless, but let me give you some example, to better understand the power of tag support into Veeam Backup & Replication.

For example, you may want to leverage the new v8 SQL Server transaction logs backup functionality for your most important SQL Servers. You configure a backup job to include all virtual machines with “T1SQL” tag with the Logs Backup option configured to backup transaction logs every 15 minutes, and then you just tag your important SQL servers virtual machines with the "T1SQL" tag. By using this setup, each tagged SQL Server will be protected with the RPO of 15 min or less automatically.

Another example: your security policy requires all servers belonging to the Finance department to be saved in encrypted backups. You don't want to encrypt all your backups, just this one. You can create a new backup job where encryption is enabled and configured, and then you simply select the tag "Finance" in the "Department" category as the dynamic scope of virtual machine selection. All virtual machines with this tag will be protected by this job, and the backup files will be encrypted.

And last example: you have some virtual machines you want to replicate in your Disaster Recovery site every 4 hours. Tags are supported in Replication jobs as well, so again you create a Replication job populated with a "4 hours replication" tag, and the job will automatically pick up the virtual machines tagged with the corresponding tag.

The beauty of tags is that they are truly dynamic in nature, and so are queried each time a job is executed; in this way, each virtual machine that was just tagged is immediately added to the correct job without any job editing required. Say you have two tags like "24 hours RPO" and "4 hours RPO": with the former you select virtual machines that are saved once a day, and with the latter machines that are saved every 4 hours. After some time, your company realizes that a virtual machine has become too critical to be protected with a daily backup. By simply removing the former tag and applying the latter, immediately the virtual machine starts to be protected with the job running every 4 hours. And all of this without ever modifying any backup job that you initially created.

As you can see, with tags you are effectively not creating simple backup jobs anymore, but Data Protection policies. Each job and its parameters defines a policy, and with tags you define to which policy any virtual machine belongs too. Depending on your data protection policies, you can now create all required jobs with all the desired options in place right away, and manage the actual job’s content by simply tagging your existing and new virtual machines. By the way,

How do I tag a virtual machine?

One option to quickly start with tags is to assign tags to an object by simply browsing the vSphere Web Client and apply a tag:

In this way, an Application Owner could tag his own virtual machines running Microsoft SQL Server for example. This is a quick and effective way to start creating categories and groups that can be later used in other activities.

However, if you have a lot of virtual machines to manage, tagging itself can be the issue. It wouldn’t be really automation if you’d have to configure tags manually for each and every new virtual machine. And we felt we would not be giving our larger customers the complete solution, if we did not also provide the ability to automate virtual machines tagging. So, we also added the ability to…

Apply tags to virtual machines using Veeam ONE

What about setting tags automatically based on business classifications? Veeam Business View is a FREE component of Veeam ONE, and instead of depicting your environment in IT terms, it's designed to describe your infrastructure from a business point of view. Here you can configure and map resources to departments, locations, defined or required SLAs and so on. And once you have created rules in Business View, and populated it, Veeam ONE can automatically add tags to virtual machines, without any manual intervention. You can map and synchronize Business View categories and groups to vCenter categories and tags, or you can use directly its own grouping schemes, as you like:

And if you already have used extensively vSphere tags, there's no reason to do the job twice: Veeam ONE has a wizard to map tags created in vSphere to corresponding categories and groups in Business View.

Pretty cool capability! In fact, I am not aware of any other product out there that can provide such a comprehensive vSphere tags management story. Please correct me in comments if I am wrong.

Thanks to vSphere tags integration in both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE –regardless if you are a service provider, or your department is acting like an internal provider for your different lines of business, you can now offer advanced data protection services with proper separation of duties. Data protection administrators can setup and manage policies, while application owners can independently decide the best policy for their workloads.

It’s no secret that modern datacenters are moving towards a policy-based management; with Veeam Availability Suite v8, now you can have a real policy-based data protection of your vSphere virtual machines in place.

The release of version 8 of Veeam Backup & Replication is adding new important features that can be used in the Modern Data Center. Veeam Backup Free Edition will also be adopting some of these new features that can be used in a production environment. Veeam Backup Free Edition will gain NetApp integration, Veeam Explorer for Active Directory, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server, and Encryption. Here is a rundown for what’s new for free.

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (For NetApp)

The release of version 8 of Veeam Backup & Replication has added integration with NetApp Storage Snapshots. This feature is included in the free edition and can be used to recover from any snapshots (not limited to those created by Veeam) and supports any level of recovery from both primary storage SnapShot, SnapMirror and SnapVault! Storage snapshot allows you to take copies of the state of a storage volume at a point in time with minimal impact on production environment and as often as you like (offering the best RPOs), and with the Veeam Explorer you can instantly recover from those snapshots for the best RTOs. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots has a variety of restore options including instant restore of an entire VM, restoring VM guest files, restoring Microsoft Exchange mailbox, and Microsoft SharePoint documents, SQL Server databases and Active Directory objects. Indeed, this powerful feature is included for free! Check it out below!

Veeam Explorer for Active Directory

To ensure for high speed recovery of critical application items, Veeam has introduced Explorer for Active Directory. Like the new Veeam Explorer for SQL Server (explained next) this explorer is launched from the File Level Recovery wizard that looks inside of the file system of the VM that has been backed up with VeeamZIP (the backup taken with Veeam Backup Free Edition). This feature allows you to look through the Active Directory Database and restore users, groups, computer accounts, and Organizational Units. You will be able to restore user and computer accounts (including their password hash values associated with the object!) easily with this feature as well. Veeam Backup Free Edition will let you restore from the Active Directory Database whether it be containers or objects. When you are looking to restore, in the backup browser, click on Application Items and choose Active Directory. The Explorer will launch and mount the database allowing you to choose the users or items you are looking to recover. The screenshot below gives you a look inside the Explorer. You can easily see the different users and restore options available. The restore options are listed at the top of the window.

Veeam Explorer for SQL Server

Veeam Explorer for SQL Server will be enhanced with additional restore options in Veeam Backup Free Edition. The Veeam Explorer will allow for one-click restores without having to run or extract a VM. When looking to restore, the Explorer will load to the latest restore point (which will be the last full VeeamZIP backup), and restore the database. The image below shows the Veeam Explorer for SQL Server, you can see where you can restore or export an item. Additional restore functions are incorporated in Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Edition or higher and include point-in-time and restore to a specific transaction.

Encryption

Many organizations have data that needs to be protected and encoded for security purposes. With Veeam Backup Free Edition you are able to encrypt your data by just adding a password. The backup encryption feature is found in the VeeamZIP backup window which is shown below. By checking the box, “Enable backup file encryption” and then adding a password, you will be able to make sure your data is encrypted. Veeam uses 256-bit AES which is the standard algorithm for encryption.

Those of you with a keen eye will notice an added dropdown called “Delete this backup automatically”. This is called VeeamZIP autoretention. This feature will allow you to automatically delete your backups after three days, a week, or a month. This solves the problem of having backups you may have forgotten about left on disk. How cool is that!?

Veeam Backup Free Edition includes 13 features that can be utilized in the Modern Data Center, and you can also keep this in your arsenal of tools. These features allow your data center to have a solid backup and recovery process, even if you have a low budget.

Really like free stuff? You can also sign up for the beta of Endpoint : http://go.veeam.com/endpoint and read the blog post: Announcing Veeam Endpoint Backup Free Edition

It’s been a while since we released the A0 poster: Veeam Backup & Replication v7 for Hyper-V. Since that time, we celebrated at our inaugural VeeamON 2014, released Veeam Availability Suite v8 and started sending out our Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE beta.

Even though we have been very busy, we did not forget about our promise. Many of you have been asking if we would create another poster of Veeam Backup & Replication, just related to VMware. We heard you and today we are happy to announce the new poster is complete! This poster is all about Veeam Backup & Replication v8, and how it works with VMware infrastructure. Compared to the Hyper-V poster, we’ve redesigned poster’s layout, changed the color scheme and included lots of different visuals and some new features of v8.

This new poster also includes components, features and deployment methods — something you may have heard about. Use this poster just like that: simply print it and hang at your office, so everyone can get access the useful information.

Here’s a visual so you can see how it looks at our wall:

Download the poster by clicking here. (no registration required)

We have already been anticipating your NEXT question and the answer is YES, we do plan to update the Hyper-V poster very soon! Plus, we plan to design even more posters in the future. Please let us know which posters you think should be at the top of our list! We’d also like to know exactly what you’d like to find out: How Veeam components work with ports? The differences and similarities of backup modes? Something else? Please share your comments below.

Snapshots, love them or hate them

Snapshots are so tightly integrated into any virtualized environments that you cannot really talk about one without the other. Since they first became available, they were, together with vMotion, the best example of why virtualization would have changed the IT landscape.

They are so common that we do not even talk about them anymore, we simply use them. But, stop for a minute and think about what you can do with them, or even better what you would not be able to do without them: creating point in time copies of every virtual machine, and reverting them at will to any of this copies, is something truly amazing, and makes you feel like you can really control time. You applied a patch on a production system just to find out something has broken? There's nothing simpler than hitting a button and reverting the virtual machine at the previous state, like nothing had happened. It's like having a time machine for your IT infrastructure!

We all love snapshots, but the more we use them, the more we find out they also have a dark side. In VMware environments, snapshots are represented in the storage as additional disks were all the writes are committed, while the previous point in time is kept in read-only state. A simple explanation that entails some consequences: the space consumed by snapshots is taken from valuable storage arrays, and because of the I/O now flowing to and from at least two different virtual disks, the performances of the virtual machines can be impacted. As any VMware administrator knows, forgetting a snapshot open on a virtual machine for a long period of time is one of the worst thing that can happen. That’s the reason why administrators monitors their environments for forgotten snapshots. Just to say, the report "Active Snapshots" in Veeam ONE is probably the most used report by any Veeam user:

So there are effective ways to keep snapshots under control and avoid the problems they could create. But is it enough?

Hidden snapshots

Actually, no.

For different reasons, sometimes snapshots are "lost" by vCenter, they are not reported any more in the interface, but they still exist in the underlying storage. Because of this, they are still used by a virtual machine, they can still impact performances, and can lead to serious problems if not discovered like storage space consumption. Additionally, this is one root cause of one of the most popular types of support cases we’ve observed.

This can happen also during Veeam Backup & Replication activities. Any data protection task starts with a virtual machine snapshot: with it, Veeam can guarantee proper quiescence of data stored into the virtual disk, thus insuring the content of the backup is consistent. For this reason, at the beginning of a backup or replication, Veeam Backup & Replication first of all requests to vCenter to initiate a snapshot of a given virtual machine. Once completed, the quiesced virtual disk (or part of it during an incremental backup/replica) is copied, and at the end of the job again Veeam instructs vCenter to commit the snapshot.

Here lies the problem: sometimes, even if vCenter reports a successful removal of the snapshot, in reality the snapshot is still there, even if there is no way from the vCenter interface to be aware of this state. The snapshot keeps growing, unobserved, until something bad happens.

Snapshot Hunter to the rescue!

For this reason, Veeam introduced in Veeam Backup & Replication v8 a new feature, specifically designed to identify stuck snapshots left over after backup and replication activities, and automatically remove them. There's no better name for this than Snapshot Hunter.

How does it work?

As soon as a snapshot commit activity is completed by vCenter, or better by the ESXi server running the virtual machine at that time, regardless the result the commit is reported as successful by vCenter itself

Snapshot Hunter connects to the virtual infrastructure and reads the contents of the datastore hosting the virtual machine. If the snapshot file created during the backup operation is still there, this is first of all notified in the statistics of the job, and the removal process begins.

There is a specific schedule for Snapshot Hunter activities: the first attempt to remove the stuck snapshot is performed as soon as the processing of that virtual machine is finished. Chances are in fact the snapshot file or another file involved was simply locked at the time of commit, and a consolidation can immediately fix the issue.

If the immediate attempt is not successful, Snapshot Hunter retries after 4 hours for 3 times, for a total of 12 hours. For each attempt, the consolidation algorithm has three steps:
1. “soft consolidation” (calling VMware Consolidate method)
2. “hard consolidation without quiesce” – creating and removing a snapshot
3. “hard consolidation with quiesce” – creating and removing a quiesced snapshot

If after 12 hours, the snapshot still cannot be safely removed, Snapshot Hunter notifies the user about the stuck snapshot, because there is a permanent problem preventing the removal that needs to be addressed manually. If you have configured notifications, you will receive an email like this:

"VM <virtual machine name> needs snapshot consolidation, but all automatic snapshot consolidation attempts have failed.
Most likely reason is a virtual disk being locked by some external process. Please troubleshoot the locking issue, and initiate snapshot consolidation manually in vSphere Client."

Most of the time, you will never end up with the notification, and the snapshot will be silently removed, successfully. You can check at any time the specific activities of Snapshot Hunter by opening the History tab, looking at "system" activities and filtering it with the term "snapshot":

Each "VM snapshot consolidation" job is Snapshot hunter removing a stuck snapshot for you.

Snapshot Hunter is completely automated. You do not have to configure anything, "it just works". It searches for and removes any stuck snapshot left over after a backup or replication activity, so it doesn't touch any other snapshot (unless Hard Consolidation is involved), even if we really suggest you to remove all existing snapshots and use instead Quick Backup if you need security copies of your virtual machines without the problems created by long-living snapshots.

Snapshot Hunter is also completely integrated into Veeam Backup & Replication in terms of resource consumption: if for example the maximum number of snapshots per datastore has been reached, it waits for at least a snapshot to be removed before proceeding with consolidation. We don't want Snapshot Hunter to create additional I/O to your storage while removing the snapshots.

How safe is Snapshot Hunter? It follows exactly the same procedures developed and shared by VMware support for snapshot removal, so it does not create any harm to your environment.

On the contrary, let it run and it will be the hero of your virtual infrastructure.

Its official, we are heading back to Las Vegas this year for VeeamON 2015! We’ve just announced that the world’s premier data center availability event will be held at the Aria Resort & Casino from October 26- 29 this year. We’ve added an additional day and will have even more people attending this great event with nearly double the participation! This will be a one-of-a-kind event for customers, partners and prospects to connect for everything Veeam.

2015 will prove to be bigger and better, yet built on the successful elements of last year’s event. We took the feedback from our inaugural event last year very seriously. Everything from conversations with sponsors and attendees, feedback on social networks and the session rankings in the mobile app: we listened.

VeeamON is the best opportunity to get complete access to Veeam resources. In particular, the technical content and deep dive sessions are outstanding content. This is very important as our products have increased in their functionality. Additionally, there are many features and use cases that truly need dedicated time to enable next level of availability for the modern data center. Personally, when I present on a Veeam topic in a normal context (say a 1 hour session), I can only scratch the surface of what Veeam can do. VeeamON is the only place to cover technical content and deep dives completely for availability topics. Additionally, VeeamON attendees have an opportunity to dialog directly with the Veeam Research and Development teams. This access is unparalleled.

Here’s a video recap of last year’s event, this should be convincing enough to come this year:

Aside from the content tracks, VeeamON is a great way to take the VMCE course. The VMCE credential has a course and test requirement, you can achieve the course portion during VeeamON. And based on last year’s feedback, we’ll make sure you don’t miss the breakout sessions while sitting in on VMCE training. This will be done by holding the VMCE course before VeeamON starts, stay tuned for specific times and locations for this. Additionally, the VMCE course is heavily discounted when added to the VeeamON registration.

Veeam is also all about our partners. The VeeamON Expo Lounge will have partners of all types showing how their solutions and services can solve your needs for availability in the modern data center. VeeamON also allows attendees to learn about the key technology adjacencies. This can be from user-submitted tracks, partner sessions and broader availability topics.

Also this year, we’ll see the Expo Lounge have the Veeam Expert Bar! Last year that was a great setup with plenty of whiteboard space for excellent knowledge transfer from our top support staff, solution architects and product teams. There also will be plenty of dedicated content tracks for Veeam ProPartners, in particular resellers and service providers.

And then there is the fact that we are hosting in Las Vegas. Which of course means we will find time for social opportunities, including the industry best VeeamON party. I’ve been told that nobody throws a party like Veeam. The ALL GREEN party will happen on the Wednesday night of the VeeamON week and nobody will want to miss that!

What do you need to do now? Well, to get started, Pre-Register today. This will give you first access to early bird pricing, which will be at a great discount. We will have more information soon, including a summary agenda and then a detailed agenda of the content tracks that will be presented.

Until we meet in October, here are some other key resources for VeeamON:

VeeamON Facebook page
Watch the VeeamON hashtag on Twitter
VeeamON web site
Watch for the VeeamON 2015 mobile app

I’ve created a list of my favorite 8 new technical features, my “gems". In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details. In this sixth episode, we will talk about Tape Server.

Also available in this series:
Part 1: Linux certificate-based authentication
Part 2: Quick Rollback
Part 3: Quick Backup
Part 4: Support for vSphere tags
Part 5: Snapshot Hunter

Tape is dead, long live the tape

In Modern Data Center solutions, tape is no more a viable solution as a primary destination for any backup. Even more than the pure speed, it’s completely sequential access is a limiting factor for storing deduplicated backup files - especially when it comes to restore operations involving random I/O. No one will ever dare to run an Instant VM Recovery from a tape! And for the record, it’s not a supported capability.

Disk based solutions have become the de-facto standard for primary backup targets, because they are the only ones able to guarantee the needed RPO and RTO values of an Always-On Business. This, however, does not mean that tape is dead, at all.

Just like storage snapshots are not backups, but rather an effective first line of defense if combined and integrated into a multi-tiered data protection design, so are tapes. Disk storage is expensive, and it's often used to store few restore points as a source for fast recoveries. But nothing beats tapes when it comes to long time archival. If you want to extend your retention, tapes are a really effective solution.

Veeam Tape Server

In Veeam Backup & Replication v8, we added a new dedicated role to our distributed architecture: the "Tape Server" role. The name totally explains its role: this Windows machine is directly connected to a supported tape library (direct attached or via iSCSI/FC fabric) and thanks to the new dedicated component, it becomes a "proxy" that is dedicated to manage reads and writes towards the tape libraries, and to drive automated or multi-tape libraries. As with any of the existing roles, it is up to you which machine to install this role on: a dedicated machine, a server running other roles, or the backup server itself - if you are willing to have an all-in-one deployment.

To set the Tape Server up, connect your tape library to the Windows server designated as your new Tape Server, and check that the tape library is correctly recognized in Device Manager thanks to MTF (Microsoft Tape Format) support. Note that if you see "Unknown Media Changer" or other unknown devices, you must install the Windows drivers provided by the tape vendor.

Then, in Veeam Backup & Replication you go into the Tape Infrastructure and choose to add a new Tape Server.

Once you finish the wizard, and Veeam scans the Tape Server to identify the different components and loaded media, you will see all available tape drives and media directly in the main Veeam Backup & Replication console:

With the dedicated Tape Server role, the Veeam server is now relieved of moving the data to and from tape, or requirement of being physical. Thanks to this, the server can be a control-only machine, maybe a VM protected by the high availability features of the hypervisor like VMware Fault Tolerance, while the Tape Server can be as near as possible to the tape library. Any required tape server hardware can now be easily installed based on the tape library it will have to manage (for example, direct attached FC tape library), and the server itself can be sized accordingly to the expected load in terms of CPU, Memory and bandwidth. An additional benefit of the dedicated Tape Server role is that a single Veeam server can now manage multiple tape drives or libraries from different locations via multiple Tape Servers.

The tape catalog will still reside in the main Veeam server, so if anything would happen to the Tape Server, it could be quickly replaced by a new one without any data loss. Tape information elements are now also protected by the enhanced Configuration Backup functionality, so they are completely safe.

But it's not the only improvement to Tape management! We added for example Tape Vaults, that are logical containers where you can store information about offline tapes. The vaults are created by user and allow to virtually move the offline tapes to a vault, grouping them by any criteria. For example, if you have a number of offsite locations for physical tapes, you can create a media vault for each of them. When you transport the physical tapes to the offsite storage, you can accordingly move the offline tapes to a vault in your Veeam console, mirroring the physical storage unit. This functionality improves RTO by allowing restore operators to easily identify location of the required offline tapes, and swiftly file request for their delivery back to the data center.

Finally, the coolest tape gem in Veeam Availability Suite v8 is Synthesized Full Backup for tape. With this new feature, you can create full backups directly on tape at desired frequency without requiring that primary backup job creates them on disk first!

In the previous version, backup files produced by primary jobs which maintain only one full backup file on disk were not a good candidate for tape out - either because of requiring full backup written to tapes every time (for reversed incremental backup jobs), or due to forever-incremental job nature without periodic full backups (for backup copy jobs). But with this new v8 feature, you can now virtually "split" the existing backup file chain stored in the repository on disk into the smaller chains on tape - by Backup to Tape job synthesizing full backup file on-the-fly! And the best thing is that such synthesized full backup file will be transparently compatible with the following incremental backup files created by the primary backup job!

Tape is an incredible solution for extending the retention and meeting the 3-2-1 rule in any data protection project. It's characteristics of durability, portability and cost efficiency simply cannot be matched by any other solution, especially for the companies who have already invested in the tape infrastructure. This is exactly why we at Veeam continue making major investments into our tape support functionality. Do you agree with our course? Please let us know in the comments!

Veeam Availability Suite v8 has been released and customers and partners are already upgrading their environments and exploring the several new features that have been added to this latest version of the software. There are many enhancements that are not part of the marketing activities, but nonetheless they all contribute to create every time an awesome version of the software. I’ve created a list of my favorite 8 new technical features, my “gems". In this series of posts, I will show you them and dive a little bit into their technical details. In this seventh episode, we will talk about Save As Default.
Also available in this series:
Part 1: Linux certificate-based authentication
Part 2: Quick Rollback
Part 3: Quick Backup
Part 4: Support for vSphere tags
Part 5: Snapshot Hunter
Part 6: Tape Server

A tiny gem

During these series of posts, I talked about some incredible features we added in Veeam Availability Suite v8. The fact they were not used as part of our marketing efforts do not mean they were small additions to the new version of the software: things like tag support or Snapshot Hunter cannot be really considered minor features or small improvements.

There are, however, also many small improvements that are contributing to make Veeam a better and better product for everyone. And sometimes, these improvements are just a new button in the right place.

Save As Default

Default settings in Veeam Backup & Replication are configured to offer, out of the box, a great experience to our users. Most of our customers simply use the default settings because they are fine with them, and they suit well their needs. But we also know that any environment has its own characteristics, and most of all requirements, also in terms of data protection.

Previously, if you wanted to configure a parameter of a Job with a non-default option, you should have done it for every new job you were creating. As the number of jobs increased, additional time was needed to change those parameters, but most of all you would have risked some inconsistency if you forgot at some point to change one of the desired parameter.

With Save As Default, you can now configure every single parameter you will find in the "Advanced Settings" of the Storage option of a Job, set it like you prefer, and before closing the Advanced view, simply save this set of changed parameters as your new default.

Say for example you want all your backups to be encrypted: encryption is not enabled by default, so once you have configured encryption for a job, the button "Save As Default" will be enabled, meaning at least one setting has been changed in comparison with the existing default settings. If you click on the button, the new configuration will become the new Default, and every new job you will create will have for example encryption enabled.

As I said, every parameter in the Advanced Settings can be changed and saved: the backup mode for example, because you still prefer to use the Reversed Incremental instead of the new and default Forward Forever-Incremental. But you can also set compression level, storage optimization, encryption, notifications, and storage integration as well; say you have one of the supported storage arrays, you do not have to enable the use of storage snapshots in any new job any more.

This is, in my opinion, the perfect example of what a hidden gem is: a small feature, most of the times surfacing into the interface as a simple button, but really powerful and simple to use. Many customers have already written us to say thanks for this: it's one of those small enhancements that can make the work of many people easier.

Veeam Availability Suite v8 has been released and customers and partners are already upgrading their environments and exploring the several new features that have been added to this latest version of the software. Luca was nice enough to ask my opinion about some gems in Veeam Backup & Replication V8 related to Hyper-V. Gem #8 is all about how Veeam makes what would otherwise be complex and challenging data protection scenarios in Hyper-V really easy.
Also available in this series:
Part 1: Linux certificate-based authentication
Part 2: Quick Rollback
Part 3: Quick Backup
Part 4: Support for vSphere tags
Part 5: Snapshot Hunter
Part 6: Tape Server
Part 7: Save as Default

Resource Pools

One of the hallmarks of virtualization is the pooling and allocation of resources on an as needed basis to the virtual machines or applications who need them. A resource pool represents one of the key tenets of virtualization and also one of the biggest challenges when it comes to data protection. Veeam Backup & Replication V8 now provides direct support for the backup and recovery of data stored in a Hyper-V resource pool.

When you backup data in a resource pool Veeam Backup & Replication will create a marker for the location of the data within the resource pool. When it is time for recovery if the data is to be restored to its original location then the markers will be used to reestablish the data in its original location in the resource pool. If the data is to be restored to a different location then the markers can be discarded and the data recovered without incident to a new location.

Support for shared vhdx files

One of the coolest new features to come from Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 is the ability to use a shared vhdx file and build a cluster of virtual machines around this shared vhdx file. Before shared vhdx the only options for clustering in Hyper-V were to build guest clusters in Hyper-V, which did not have any true shared resources, or to cluster the Hyper-V host machines. Clustering Hyper-V hosts feels like a hold over from the days of client server and physical hardware dependence. There is a shared physical hard drive and true high availability (HA) is achieved by defining the nodes and resources in a working failover cluster using Windows Server 2012 R2’s Cluster Manager and Cluster Verification tools. There is no capacity in this scenario to rely on, or make use of, resource pools, or the benefits of scalability and elasticity that are so desirable in virtual/cloud infrastructure designs.

Shared vhdx files give the Hyper-V administrator the option to build a true HA cluster entirely of components that are virtual. The shared vhdx file provides a shared base from which virtual machines can then be clustered around this shared resource and provide true HA without losing the benefits of resource pools, elasticity, and scalability. Once you have the shared vhdx file in place adn the cluster functional how do you protect the data in the shared vhdx cluster?

Veeam Backup & Replication V8 provides direct support for backing up shared vhdx files in a crash consistent state. The restore wizard has also been updated to provide full support for full VM recovery of the shared vhdx files. It’s easy to get a crash consistent backup, and if the time should arise when you need a full recovery of that shared .vhdx file Veeam Backup & Replication V8 makes the recovery a snap.

Differencing VHDX files

Veeam Backup & Replication V8 tackles the complex challenge of backing up differencing vhdx files used in conjunction with multiple virtual machines structured to share a parent virtual disk and then to save all changes that are made to a differencing vhdx disk. This configuration allows for the running of multiple virtual machines that have similar base configurations from a single vhdx file and then each of the individual virtual machines can keep a differenceg disk with all of the changes that make that virtual machine unique from its parent disk. Veeam Backup and Replication V8 has both backup and restore capabilities for differencing vhdx files, and also introduces better performance during backup and recovery of differencing vhdx files on Windows Server 2012 R2.

Support for Cluster Shared Volumes Encrypted with Bitlocker

In the world of Windows Server 2012 R2 it is not uncommon to find a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) that has been encrypted with Microsoft’s Bitlocker Drive Encryption. This is a real challenge when it comes to recognizing changes in the data as they occur and then successfully backing up those changes. Kudos to the R&D team at Veeam. Veeam Backup & Replication V8 can use Changed Block Tracking (CBT) in conjunction with CSV files to effectively and efficiently manage the protection of data even if the CSV is encrypted with Bitlocker.

Veeam is doing great things in what I consider "challenging" data protection and availability scenarios with Hyper-V. If you are using Veeam Backup & Replication V8 to protect your data in Hyper-V we would love to hear about your experiences.

Disruption may be the norm in the IT business, but Piper Jaffray’s recent survey of storage and data protection vendors highlights a similar disruption.

Piper Jaffray’s survey collected feedback from distributors and resellers in North America and Europe. According to this quarterly report released to its clients recently, when a deal is lost 50% of CommVault resellers cited Veeam as the primary competitor they lose to most frequently in Q4 of 2014, and has been the largest competitive challenge for CommVault 5 out of the last 6 quarters.

“For the fourth consecutive quarter, CommVault resellers cited Veeam as the primary competitor they lose to most frequently,” the report said.

In response to the challenge imposed by Veeam, the report said, “In July, [CommVault] management made changes to the company’s pricing structure, allowing resellers to sell individual modules, rather than the complete package. In theory, this was supposed to make CommVault more competitive against vendors like Veeam, which only offer ‘point products’ for backup and recovery. However, we have not noticed any change in the competitive dynamics, suggesting CommVault’s pricing changes have had little impact.”

From a growth perspective, Tintri (57%), EMC (43%) and Veeam (38%) exhibited the strongest increase in demand—well ahead of other vendors such as Symantec (7%) and CommVault (6%.)

The survey doesn’t explain why there’s such a big distance between vendors. However, I suppose fast-growing companies like Veeam have higher customer-satisfaction ratings because they have more flexibility and are generally more innovative and accessible. The report also named Veeam as one of the industry’s next-generation vendors, and that these top companies “are clearly winning at the expense of the legacy storage vendors.”

With the expectation-shattering release of Veeam Availability Suite™ in Q4 2014, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Modern Data Center™ by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) of less than 15 minutes for ALL applications and data. We’re excited to see that Veeam’s innovative approach and award-winning products are paying dividends for Veeam’s North America and European partners, as they continue to leverage Veeam to grow their businesses, gain new customers and increase sales.

We’d also like to thank our amazing partners for their consistent support, loyalty and trust, which has allowed Veeam to continue to grow and deliver innovative solutions for modern data centers.

Read more about Veeam and competing vendors here: http://www.veeam.com/switch-to-veeam.html

Find the full report from Piper Jaffray here: http://www.veeam.com/PiperStorageSurveyQ42014_ds.pdf

Starting the last week of February, I’ll be on a two week tour across the US, with a bunch of activities related to service providers and resellers interested in getting into the cloud services business.

What am I going to do in the US? First week I’ll be in our Atlanta office, where we will broadcast live on 25 February an episode of “Whiteboard Wednesday” completely focused on Veeam Cloud Connect. In the 90 minutes of the show, we will explain what it is, how it works, best practices for its design and deployment, and we will answer all the questions coming from attendees in the livestream. If you want to join us, go here and register. The more people, the more the interaction, the better it will be!

From 26th and the whole next week, we are launching a new event format that I really pushed internally, and I’m so happy it has become real:

A half-day seminar, specifically designed for service providers and resellers interested in offering Veeam-powered services, where I will be joined by our Vice President of Cloud, Mike Waguespack (hence, the “Mike & Luca” in the event title). I will host the morning session about the technical aspects of our solutions, and how they can be used by service providers for different services like managed backup and disaster recovery, and offsite backups with Cloud Connect. In the afternoon, Mike will talk about business topics such as run vs. resell, pricing and packaging, and legal and operational considerations. Mike will also interview an existing Veeam Cloud Provider (VCP) about their experience delivering Veeam-powered services. . In the middle, attendees will enjoy a gourmet lunch and an excellent networking opportunity: between attendees, with our Veeam Team, and with our VCP guest in each city, you’ll get different points of view about starting or growing your cloud services business with Veeam.

The roadshow will visit 6 different cities:

26 February: Atlanta
2 March: New York
3 March: Washington, DC
4 March: Dallas
5 March: Denver
6 March: Phoenix

The Veeam Team has picked some really nice locations, and registrations are already filling up. If you want to join this free event, go the event page and click the link on the city you are interested in, it will bring you straight to the specific registration page.

And if you are not based in the US, don't worry. We have plans to repeat the same format in other regions like APAC and Europe.

Did you know that on Thursday February 26, Veeam Backup & Replication turns 7 years old! It was first previewed publically during VMworld Europe in 2008. Doesn’t that seem like so long ago? Veeam Backup & Replication was announced on February 26, 2008 and then generally available on March 3, 2008. We are now on v8 and 2015 will have some BIG THINGS coming, so get ready!

Back in 2008. Instant file-level recovery works like magic!

Let’s take a look at what between then and now. While myself, this is my fifth year at Veeam; some people have been here since the beginning. Give a look to this YouTube video taken at the Veeam stand in Cannes from that event. The person giving that demo is Max Ivanov and is now in charge of the Veeam.com website. And how about way in the back, did you see anyone familiar? That’s right, it’s Doug Hazelman! VMDoug was Veeam’s very first SE.

I also got a quote from one of our support managers who still remembers the early days. One of the most popular requests was a button to stop a backup job. It sounds funny, but v1 didn’t have a stop button. At the time, the logic was sound. “Why would you not want to take a backup?” or “Why did you run the backup then?”

It’s fair to say that we have come a long way, but v1 brought a lot of good things to the virtualized data center that still enhance availability:

2-in-1: backup and replication
Instant File-Level Recovery
Built-in deduplication
Synthetic full backups
Replication multiple restore points

Bring it on! Veeam puts innovation with every release

Even today when I speak to customers and partners at events and meetings around the world, some of these still make the difference in the discussion. The synthetic full backup, for example, is a very powerful technique that can reduce the impact of taking a backup from a primary storage perspective. Also the fact that the backups are agentless with Veeam since v1 can still make the difference today. You may have seen the now famous “reverse roadmap” but when you look at the changes at the time; it is somewhat interesting to see how fast we’ve moved over the years:

In 2010, the vPower era came and in many regards put Veeam on the map. Instant VM Recovery, Virtual Labs and more came in v5. Instant VM Recovery is a patented and proven high speed recovery technique and it will turn 5 years old in October of this year! I love this Tweet (reproduced with permission) about Instant VM Recovery:

v6.1 brought us Free Edition and has been a great gift to the community, home labs and those who are in the process of doing better things with their data center availability. I love this Tweet (reproduced with permission) from a few years ago when Veeam Backup Free Edition came out:

The Forefront of Availability

Fast forward to today and we have made some significant strides. Personally, my favorite “modern era” feature of Veeam Backup & Replication are the Veeam Explorers. And in particular, Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots is my most favorite. By the way, all of the Explorers are available in Veeam Backup Free Edition. I love how Veeam is committed to having a free edition for Backup. v8 was released in November, and in the 3 months since it has been updated 45,000 customers have upgraded. One of our core values is Veeam Speed (I coined the term, by the way!) and this is an example of our customers moving at Veeam Speed to get to v8 quickly!

By the numbers, Veeam also is doing very well. We recently published the annual growth and company facts for the end of 2014. We’ve now surpassed 135,000 paid customers and 29,000 ProPartner resellers worldwide. If I were to thank 10 customers a day in person, working 200 days a year, it would take me over 67 years to thank everyone. But on behalf of the entire Veeam, we couldn’t have done it without our customers and partners. In fact, the birthday wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for our customers and partners.

Without a doubt, Veeam Backup & Replication is a very powerful product and can define availability for many organizations. Last October we hosted VeeamON 2014; the first event dedicated to data center availability. VeeamON 2015 promises to be an even more spectacular event (hope to see you there!).

2015 will see more incredible capabilities for Veeam Backup & Replication. We haven’t started the promotion cycles yet, but you will like what you see. When did you first see Veeam Backup & Replication? For me it was v3 as an end-user. How did that experience go for you? Share your comments below.

Hey everyone, we've had a lot of questions coming from all directions about vSphere 6 and you likely heard that vSphere 6 is out! A big congratulations to VMware for the release, and we are excited for the new features now available.

However, we are starting to see a number of support cases from customers who have upgraded to VMware vSphere 6. We would like to remind you that according to the official system requirements, generally available (GA) versions of our products DO NOT support vSphere 6. Please, DO NOT upgrade to vSphere 6 until updates to our products that include vSphere 6 support are available.

The current status of our vSphere 6 support efforts is as follows. The vSphere 6 RTM build was made generally available on 12 March, and we have been conducting full regression QC testing of all Veeam^® Backup & Replication™ functionality to ensure that the our vSphere 6 support functionality, developed based on pre-release vSphere builds, is not impacted by the changes in the RTM build—so that our customers can be confident in upgrading to the latest VMware release. Based on our testing, we already determined at least one area in which the RTM build introduces a significant change (when compared to the RC code), and we are now working to address it.

Veeam has consistently been one of the first data protection independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide full support for all new vSphere releases, and as such, we are again committed to bringing vSphere 6 support to market as soon as possible, while meeting our product quality standards and ensuring all new vSphere 6 features, including VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), are supported right out of gate. Taking into account the significant amount of new vSphere 6 features we need to support—and this is subject to change as we continue to evaluate changes in the final vSphere 6 release code— we expect to support vSphere 6 by the end of April 2015 as a part of Veeam Backup & Replication 8.0 Update 2.

When it comes to data protection, we adhere to these guiding principles:

Never rush data protection software, no matter what. Ensuring reliability is paramount, and there cannot be any excuses, No customer wants to be acting as a quality control engineer.
Always do full regression testing against the shipping code. Things may change with the APIs and how core components behave. This has happened before! We never assume that the code that was working with the pre-release versions will continue to work with the RTM build.
Always provide support for all new platform features when claiming platform support. The ability for a customer to protect any and all workloads running on the new platform is paramount. No customer wants to be running into limitations that prevent them from protecting those workloads which do use new platform features.

These details are important to us. We don’t want you to have a false sense of security, and this is why you’ll see that Veeam Backup & Replication explicitly does not support new platforms until its official from us.

More info:

Veeam KB on Twitter: @VeeamKB
Veeam on Twitter: @Veeam
Veeam whiteboard session on vSphere 6
And of course the Veeam Forums (including an active discussion on this topic there now)

The Veeam ProPartner Program affirms our commitment to our partners and helping them to expand their reach in the market. We do this by providing access to the tools and resources necessary to differentiate their business so they may become more profitable. It’s our goal to help our partners maximize profit, increase revenue, and expand their virtualization business by selling industry-leading solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center™.

Veeam is a 100 percent channel company. Our entire ProPartner Program, including program offerings, training and education, sales resources and support, and marketing programs, are built around 4 guiding principles. These principles, Veeam’s Guiding Partner Principles, are at the core of every decision we make. We believe these principles are also why many of our partners choose to partner with us. Veeam’s Guiding Partner Principles are:

Easy
Engaging
Predictable
Profitable

Easy. Veeam is easy to do business with, easy to understand, easy to execute, and easy to deliver and provide value to customers. Our program is designed for maximum benefit with minimal confusion. The low-barrier point of entry and the easy-to-understand pricing models make joining and participating in the program, as well as delivering the solutions customers want, effortless.

Engaging. Veeam is heavily engaged with its partner community. Our channel-friendly sales approach emphasizes building relationships with valued partners. We are 100 percent committed to our partners’ success. We have dedicated sales and marketing employees around the world – each one working to drive sales through Veeam ProPartners.

Predictable. Partnering with Veeam is straight-forward. There isn’t a hidden agenda and Veeam doesn’t have the ability to take a deal direct – ever. Through constant communication, Veeam keeps ProPartners informed on everything happening at Veeam, as well as with our partner program and with the technological community as it relates to the modern data center.

Profitable. The Veeam ProPartner Program aims to reward partners who invest in and grow their commitment around positioning industry leading Veeam Availability solutions. Partners who actively participate in our certification programs, joint go-to-market strategies and activities, and consistently build upon true enablement are rewarded with the greatest benefits. Not only does Veeam offer one of the strongest margin earning potential programs in the industry, Veeam also includes quarterly rebates, accrued co-op funds and reward programs. And because Veeam is a 100 percent channel company, our growth is driven by the growth of our partners.

Veeam has been awarded a 5-Star rating in the CRN 2015 Partner Program Guide!

Veeam has been awarded a 5-Star rating in the CRN 2015 Partner Program Guide! This annual directory is the definitive listing of technology vendors that service solution providers or provide products through the IT channel. The 5-Star Partner Program rating recognizes an elite subset of companies that offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs.

To determine the 2015 5-Star recipients, The Channel Company’s Research team assessed each vendor’s application based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support and communication.

The 2015 Partner Program Guide will be featured in the April issue of CRN, and online at www.CRN.com.

See how Softchoice keeps their customers’ modern data centers always-on with Veeam

Softchoice, one of Veeam’s Platinum ProPartners, discusses their partnership with Veeam and the benefits Veeam provides to their customers who require 24/7 availability for their modern data centers.

For more information on Veeam’s ProPartner Program visit: http://www.veeam.com/propartner.html

Join our Veeam ProPartner Network on LinkedIn: http://vee.am/VeeamProPartnerNetwork

Today, Microsoft announced a whole slew of enhancements to Microsoft Azure IaaS backup capabilities. While the announcement is focused on native backups (Azure to Azure), there is one adjacent development that really makes me excited: the new feature called Snapshot Extension. This is designed to allow Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) image-level access into the Azure VM backup snapshot data, which in turn opens up pretty much endless capabilities, including backup of Azure VMs back to your on-premises environment. And I am particularly excited for this, because the functionality looks to be implemented in the exact same way that I’ve been asking Microsoft Azure data protection folks to implement it – so I like to think my feedback was considered during the design.

But let me step back a little and explain why performing backups of your VMs running in the public cloud back to on-premises environment is so important. Some of you may ask – why do so, when all public cloud vendors already provide built-in backup service? Well, here is the story I like to tell in response to that.

A couple of years ago, one leading public cloud vendor experienced a huge data loss, which caused around 100,000 of their customers to lose all of their data. And two weeks later, this vendor reported that the data for 98% of affected users had been recovered. So far so good, great success at recovery it seemed. But not so fast, let’s look what these numbers mean from the impacted customers perspective.

There were as many as 2% – or 2,000 – customers who still did not get their data back even after two weeks. And we cannot know if they all ended up getting their data, or if it was lost forever. The question we all should ask ourselves is whether we want to become one of those 2,000 people one day? Or would we rather ensure this to never happen.
Moreover, this means that around 50% impacted users, which is 50,000 by the way, did not have their data back for almost a week! Just think about this number. This is really not the kind of availability your business will tolerate in the 21^st because honestly, even 30 years old data protection technologies provided much better RTO than one week. And these days, businesses expect availability 24/7.
Finally, 100% of impacted users had ZERO control over the recovery process. They were basically all at the mercy of the cloud vendor, so not only they did not have any ability to accelerate the recovery process – they could not even provide their businesses any estimated WHEN they will be up again. I am sure that many IT heads rolled during those two weeks…

Luckily, most people who seriously considering running production workloads in the public cloud realize these are road blocking and show stopping issues. As I once noted in my discussion with Microsoft Azure team, I strongly believe that lack of robust backup solutions is one of the biggest inhibitor of public cloud adoption – and apparently, most public cloud vendors are not even realizing this!

Now, of course there are ways today to backup data from VMs running in the public cloud to on-premises using the old-fashioned agent-based backup approach. In fact, we had plenty of our Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE beta testers using the tool to protect their Azure VMs. This can certainly be done, but requires playing around with networking to the Azure VM to get the produced local backups back to your data center, and of course these copies require lots of bandwidth and time to be performed.

But, even bigger issue are the agents themselves. In 2015, few people need to be educated why agent-based backups just do not play well with virtualization in the private cloud, and why host-based backup is the way to go. Aside from agent management nightmares, those thousands of agents kicking in to do their job steal tons of CPU from production workloads, reducing the VM consolidation ratio dramatically and thus increasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of such a solution. But in public cloud the same issue is multiplied by the fact that you will also be paying for all these activities, so TCO of such a backup solution goes through the roof.

Last but not least, customers want availability of VMs no matter where they run – whether in their own data center or in the public cloud. They want to ensure their data is protected in the way that ensure RTPO < 15 min for ALL data and applications. Yes, we have spoiled our customers as much. And they realize that the easiest way to achieve this is to ensure that all their workloads are being backed up into a Veeam backup file, no matter where are they running. Only this way are you able to leverage wide variety of recovery methods and options provided by Veeam, no matter where and how this backup file was produced. In fact, same backup file format is one of the features of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE our beta testers totally loved.

All these reasons are why we keep hearing requests from our customers and partners to support backup of public cloud workloads to on-premises with efficient and scalable host based backups. The need is definitely there, and Microsoft has just made a huge step in meeting this need. As a Microsoft MVP, I was recently briefed on Snapshot Extension capabilities, and I firmly believe that this technology will revolutionize Azure VM data management. Further, I feel these new capabilities will have a similar impact as the introduction of Changed Block Tracking (CBT) by VMware once had on vSphere backups. And ultimately, this will come back to Microsoft in the form of a huge increase of Azure IaaS customer base! Just think about Veeam customer base along, which we expect to exceed 200,000 companies next year! Bravo, Microsoft – what a smart move yet again to enable your partners to deliver value based on your platform!

Of course, the next question all of you will have is WHEN Veeam will have the solution I am talking about, and what will it be able to do? While as always, we cannot share our roadmap for competitive reasons, you can be sure that we have been waiting for this capability to be introduced for a very long time, and have some exciting capabilities to play along already implemented, or at least prototyped – and even more ideas in our minds.

As I like to say, backup is really easy – its other things that make it hard to deliver an availability solution that will meet modern data center needs. And due to their specifics, public clouds present many new unique challenges around backup and recovery that we never had to face in regular data centers. Which means that the potential for innovation here is absolutely immense. And there is nothing more exciting for me than to get out on this huge new field of opportunities along with the most innovative R&D team in the world. This will definitely keep us busy for the next few years

World Availability Day? What the heck is this? We've been touting Availability for the Modern Data Center for a while and stake the claim that March 30 is World Availability Day. Last year we blogged about wishing the world a Happy World Backup Day on March 31, and don’t be caught on the wrong side of an April Fools’ Joke the next day! Availability is one better than just having backups. Sure, backups aren't going away and are an essential part of the Modern Data Center; but the main benefit of the full strategy is availability.

The question then becomes, “How does one achieve higher levels of availability?” The good news is we can help, including a number of ways that are free for IT professionals. We’ve long had a commitment IT pros to provide tools to make their lives easier. Here’s a rundown of two main ways we can help even for free:

NFR Program for IT Professionals

The Not For Resale (NFR) license program of Veeam Availability Suite is a great tool for your labs and a taste of what can happen with the paid editions. This 2 socket license is fully functional for both Veeam Backup & Replication as well as Veeam ONE.

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is a new product designed to protect Windows desktops and laptops. While currently in beta, we will be seeing Endpoint become generally available very soon. It’s also important to note that this product in the beta functionality will exist for free forever! Unlike Veeam Backup Free Edition for VMs, Veeam Endpoint Backup Free does have a scheduler for backup jobs!

Transitioning to Availability

Companies who have switched to Veeam know that while backup is part of the strategy, availability is where it is at. High-speed recovery and avoiding data loss are why many arrive at a backup product. But the hard parts come afterwards. Capabilities such as leveraging that data to having verified protection and being able to sleep at night having complete visibility. That’s the transition from backup to availability and Veeam can help with that! If you would like to identify what pitfalls exist and how you can deliver more availability from your data center, I recommend you look into the Veeam Data Center Availability Report based on our 2014 survey. This report does a great job of identifying why companies invest in the modern data center to achieve those higher levels of availability. For example, the figure below shows the key reasons why companies invest in the modern data center:

Backup is no longer enough!

Backup isn’t going away, but the modern data center demands more. The expectations are high today, you know that. What we do here at Veeam is helping with that and we’ll go at it tirelessly until we all get there. What does availability mean to you? Share your comments below, but enjoy World Availability Day!

If you have been following Veeam over the years, you know that we move at Veeam Speed! It is one of our core values and applies to the technologies in which we work with as well as the spirit of Veeam employees. One of the key and most strategic technologies from VMware is vCloud Air, and we are happy to announce that Veeam Backup & Replication is now listed in the vCloud Air Marketplace. Additionally, Veeam Backup & Replication is designated as VMware Ready for vCloud Air. Let’s explain what this is and what it means to Veeam partners. vCloud Air is a versatile cloud platform; so it’s very important to know what you can do with this great news.vCloud Air, as you may have heard, is a public cloud platform built from vSphere and creates an opportunity to extend the capabilities of an on-premises data center to a hybrid cloud architecture. vCloud Air has a number of built-in services as well (see the vCloud Air page).

Veeam Partners: Let’s offer a new line of business on vCloud Air!

Partners can leverage vCloud Air to offer a new line of business, helping customers meet or enhance their availability requirements. Specifically, how many times have you heard customers inquire about moving backups off-site and not had a very modern architecture as an answer? Well Veeam Cloud Connect running on vCloud Air is something to consider, especially if you don’t want to invest in building a data center to run services. Veeam Cloud Connect is a partner-centric technology allowing Veeam Cloud Providers to offer storage for their customers to store Veeam backups off-site without having to manage the complexity of setting up and maintaining a remote repository, or VPN connection to it. For Veeam ProPartners (resellers), Cloud Connect can be a natural addition to the sales process where you install hardware, storage, and VMware and Veeam software for your customers. You can offer the ongoing business of providing a place to host their backups for enhancing availability off-site in vCloud Air. The following diagram further illustrates this example:

Here a Veeam Cloud Connect provider has set up infrastructure in vCloud Air to hold customer backups.

In this configuration, the Veeam Cloud Connect provider can also manage component usage in vCloud Air. When Veeam ONE v8 was released last year, it included a new capability in the free edition built specifically for partners running Veeam Cloud Connect. This can help partners manage the offering with regards to capacity, load placed on components and provisioning. The figure below is a view showing the usage of the cloud gateway of Veeam Cloud Connect running in vCloud Air:

Having an ability to manage a cloud offering is critical.

If you are a Veeam ProPartner and considering offering Veeam Cloud Connect, see this datasheet for more information. If you are an end user and interested in hosting your backups in Veeam Cloud Connect, you can find a provider here.

vCloud Air for everyone!

As you can see, leveraging vCloud Air for enhanced availability is very easy to do. As a VMware partner, Veeam continues to work with VMware to enhance current and introduce new capabilities – so stay tuned. vCloud Air is a new technology and very strategic for VMware; and I frequently get the question of how can vCloud Air and Veeam be used together in the modern data center. If a customer has interest in embracing a cloud strategy, then new technologies from VMware and Veeam provide a great solution by leveraging vCloud Air with Cloud Connect.

Here are some resources regarding vCloud Air and Veeam Backup & Replication:

vCloud Air Marketplace

Veeam listing in the vCloud Air marketplace

Veeam ProPartner portal

Like these diagrams? Download the free Visio stencils

Veeam Backup Copy Job documentation

A couple of months ago, we announced a new solution called Veeam® Endpoint Backup FREE™. In December, we released the beta version of this software to the world. The interest in this beta software was overwhelming and we had a huge amount of testers, with more than 22,000 registered users and almost 20,000 downloads of our beta.

Today, we are proud to announce the GA (general availability) of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE!

The solution

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is a standalone solution that helps you protect Windows endpoints. It is a data-protection and disaster-recovery solution for physical machines (endpoints). Protecting an entire endpoint, protecting specific volumes or individual folders are all possibilities with Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE. As always, though, while protecting your data may be one thing, it’s the restore and the restore possibilities that matter!

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE supports Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or later, and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or later (up to Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 R2).

And the best part? It is completely free!

Backup

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is an image-level backup tool that stores backups in the VBK format already familiar to Veeam Backup & Replication™ users. What makes it unique though, is being able to perform a forever incremental backup without requiring a changed block tracking (CBT) file system driver. This really helps with stability for typical endpoints, which usually have tons of potentially conflicting third-party software installed, while still providing great incremental backup performance.

There are two backup types available in Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE. A volume-level backup, which can be the entire endpoint, or selected volumes and a file-level backup. Volume-level backup protects all data or content on specified volumes and is generally faster than backing up the same data at a file-level. File-level backup, however, allows you to select individual files and folders to backup and includes the possibility of adding file masks for exclusions or inclusions. Regardless of which option you choose, the resulting backup will be in the form of an image that contains the data you’ve selected for protection.

You can save your backups to different type of locations such as removable storage devices, network shares or a Veeam Backup repository. NOTE: You’ll need Veeam Backup & Replication v8 Update 2 for this option which will be available in April.

There are a few more settings that you can define while configuring your backup policy through the wizard. One of the important items is how long you want to keep your restore points. NOTE: The wizard will keep your restore points during the chosen amount of days, but only when the computer was powered on. This means that if you decided to keep 5 restore points, but took a vacation and shut down your computer for 10 days, your previous restore points will not be removed because they were older than 5 days! You will always have 5 days of restore points, which could be far more than 5 restore points, depending on your schedule and if your computer was turned on!

And speaking of schedules, they are very flexible. First, we support a daily backup (and we will even wake up your computer to take one, and then put it back to sleep – or shut it down – if you chose to do so). Additionally, Veeam Endpoint Backup provides a unique ability to execute backup at specific events such as at lock, at log off, and when backup storage is connected. You can also limit the frequency of backup, as some of the triggers– such as computer lock – can happen a few times every hour.

After configuration, your first backup will be a full backup, and every other backup will be an incremental backup (unless you chose the standalone full backup option to perform an ad hoc backup).

It’s all about restore

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE supports a huge variety of granular restore options. First, you can perform volume-level restore or file-level restore. Note that you can always use file-level restore, even when you have performed a volume-level backup, BUT you can’t perform a volume-level restore when you have selected a file-level backup.

Volume-level backup will allow you to restore an entire volume to the same or new location, but it has a few limitations. You cannot restore the system volume to its original location when the windows operating system is running. To restore the system volume or an entire computer, you will need to boot into the recovery environment first (read on).

File-level restore will mount the backup and open the built-in Veeam Backup Browser so you can restore your files easily.

On top of that, integration with Veeam Backup & Replication adds even more restore options:

You can export physical disk contents from your backup into VMDK, VHD and VHDX disk files.
And, when backing up a server, you can even restore application items from backup files with Veeam Explorers™ for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server

What about Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) though, especially to dissimilar hardware? Yes, we do that too with the help of an important component:

Veeam Recovery Media

Whether you are protecting volumes or your entire computer, you will certainly benefit from the recovery appliance. Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE allows you to create a recovery image of your computer on different kinds of media such as USB flash drives, SD cards, CD, DVD, BD, ISO images and more.

Veeam Recovery Media can then boot your computer with a Windows RE running from the bootable media, and NOT the one on your computer. At that time, you can restore an entire computer or specific volumes from your backups.

The coolest part about this Veeam Recovery Media is that it includes the drivers installed on your computer when creating the media and that you have the possibility to add drivers whenever necessary. The network and storage drivers will be then automatically loaded when starting the recovery environment, which will make the restore process as smooth as possible. If the recovery media does not include your required drivers, you can, of course, manually load drivers as you go.

But Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE doesn’t stop here! We’ve included the image-based recovery tool to allow you to restore a computer system image that’s been created with the built-in Microsoft Windows tools and an entire section with handy utilities for advanced computer administration. These are tools such as the local-user account password-reset tool or a memory diagnostic utility.

Support

We already said it is a free product, but that doesn’t mean there is no support at all. Every free product from Veeam comes with the free product support policy, which you can read here: http://www.veeam.com/files/veeam_software_support_policy.pdf

And on top of that, we have included a very simple procedure to submit an issue: you can do that with just a few clicks within the product’s control panel. After registering your email the first time (only need to do this once), you can start submitting your issues and our system will also automatically collect and upload the Veeam Endpoint Backup logs for your convenience.

Veeam Backup & Replication integration

If you are running Veeam Backup & Replication, you will be able to choose a Veeam Backup & Replication repository as a backup location. This unlocks some great functionality.

Through the Veeam Backup & Replication server, you will be able to perform monitoring of all incoming endpoint backup jobs, and receive email notifications for your endpoint job statuses. We also provide basic endpoint job management capabilities, such as enabling or disabling certain endpoint backup jobs, or managing access to your backup repository by setting the permissions on the corresponding repository for individual users and groups.

Storing backups in Veeam backup repositories also adds a few important features related to data loss avoidance. For example, you can encrypt your backups stored in a Veeam backup repository, or send your endpoint backups to tape or offsite through Backup to Tape and Backup Copy jobs, respectively.

And if you want automated offsite protection, but do not have your own DR site, Veeam Backup & Replication v8 U2 fully supports Backup Copy of endpoint backups to a Veeam Cloud Connect partner of your choice.

Conclusion

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is a great standalone solution to protect Microsoft Windows endpoints. It gives you the possibility to protect files, folders, volumes or your entire computer very easily, at an unbeatable price (FREE!) and with the very same reliability you’ve come to expect from Veeam, which is something we would never be able to achieve in v1 without the huge involvement of our 10,000+ beta testers. (Thank you!)

In the next few weeks, we will be releasing more in-depth information about the different features of this great solution on our blog!

To download the solution: http://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free-download.html

For more information, join us on April 30th or watch the video: http://www.veeam.com/videos/veeam-endpoint-backup-free-6071.html