Backup

Earlier this year I wrote a few posts ( here, here, and here) where I collected a bunch Veeam Repository Best Practices; the purpose of those posts were somewhat two-fold at the time: a) I needed something to present at my first SWOVUG meeting, and b) I desperately needed a new repository at work. Despite being several months later, I still seem to be getting questions about what repository I went with and how I like. I figure if I at least blog about it I can point future questions here. ...

Hands-down, one of the new features I was most excited about with Veeam’s Next Big Thing announcement was the Office 365 integration. I know I’m not alone in this one either, as doing a quick Google for terms like ‘Veeam Office 365’ shows that this has been a demand from customers for a while now. To be specific, Veeam is introducing a backup product that will protect your hosted Exchange Online email. ...

Veeam’s ‘Next Big Thing’ announcement did take some flack as far as how ‘corporate’ it was to start things off. To their credit, I did receive a survey within a couple of days asking me to review the event, and there were a lot of questions focusing on the content. I think that their overall vision may have been lost due to the fact that folks got bored with the ‘business stuff’ and just took the product announcements at face value. ...

Today Veeam held their ‘Next Big Thing’ event, and it was chock full of information. There was a lot of background and business info to get things going (not uncommon), but the product announcements did start flowing. So, what was actually announced? Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud One of the big points covered was more of a road map as to where Veeam is going. Looking at the image presented, it is clear that Veeam has big plans that span across both on and off premises. The plans include both private partners, in the form of service providers, as well as public partners, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. ...

With Part 1 and Part 2 in the bag, it’s time to wrap up this series. In Part 3 we’ll be covering some optimal settings for your backup jobs, as well steps that you should take to protect your repository from real-world dangers. I will also touch on the new Scale-Out Backup Repository feature towards the end of this post. Backup Jobs Veeam Backup Job Advanced Settings Knowing the difference between the backup job types is imperative. I was in a situation a little while back where my backup speeds dropped dramatically (like down to the single digit MB/s). In the end, it turned out that the storage was being hammered due to some recent changes. In my case, the jobs were older and were using reverse incrementals. Switching it to a forever forward (Incremental) job instantly increased the speeds and shrank the backup window. ...

In Part 1 of the series I covered off some of the basic hardware recommendations along with best practices for interacting with your storage. In Part 2 we are going to look at using Windows as a repository, along with RAID best practices. Using Windows as a repository If you are using Windows as the OS for the repository, there are some specific considerations to pay attention to. ...

After much anticipation, Veeam V9 was released earlier today. Normally I would hold off before installing a new upgrade, however after using Veeam for years now, I know they have some great QA, and in this case the benefits of the new features outweigh the risk for my environment. There are lots of places to find details about what is in Veeam 9 (including this blog), but I wanted to highlight a handful of the features that will have an immediate impact on my environment. ...

I’ve been a long time user of Veeam, and something that sold me on it almost immediately was its Instant Recovery feature. For those of you who are unaware, Instant Recovery allows you to mount a VM from a backup (while writing changes to a delta file, thus leaving the backups ‘pristine’) without the need to copy the full VM back into production. This means that you’ll get a pretty quick turnaround on recovery - think minutes instead of an hour or more for larger VMs. ...