Veeam


Veeam has a bit of a history with releasing products or enhancements that once seemed unlikely. Two recent examples that come to mind are support for tape and support for physical machines (both Windows and Linux machines). Now, without much fanfare, Veeam has conjured up another surprise announcement with their new addition - Veeam For DOS. As odd as it sounds, this is actually a sector of the market that is often overlooked. There are many business out there that have old code running on even older machines. In the event of an accident, this could spell instant disaster. Given that Veeam is all about data availability, Veeam stepped up to the challenge to product DOS-based workloads. ...

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. ...

I have been spending some time over the last little bit trying to put together a new repository for my Veeam backups. Finding a simple set of recommendations hasn’t been easy, though, largely due to the fact that every environment is different. Despite there being no simple ’this is what you should use for every install’, I took the effort to review a lot of material and put some notes together. A lot of the details were from VeeamOn videos, the Veeam forum, or from their various Veeam eBooks. After going through all of that, I think I have come up with a good solution that fits my environment. ...

So the first Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group meeting is in the bag. A big thank you to everyone that came out. Also, a big thank you to all the support that I have received from Veeam. In particular Paula Melvin, David Sayavong, and Bob Scott. I wanted to post a quick recap of the event as there were some folks who let me know ahead of time that they could not make it. In no particular order (largely due to my poor memory), a few of the topics we covered were: ...

Veeam TOVMUG 2016 Today was the annual Toronto VMUG UserCon. I believe it is the largest VMUG event in the Southern Ontario area. This year I opted to stay over in Toronto last night for two reasons: What is typically a 1-hour drive would be closer to 3 during rush hour and I was asked to co-host the Veeam session, so I didn’t want to be late. It also turned out to be a great decision given how bad the weather was. ...

The past few weeks have been one of the longest stretches without a post on here. I’ve been quite busy with work, family, sickness and community commitments. I wanted to toss out some information on the community front, so if you happen to see me at any of these events, feel free to yell ‘Hey, Matt! How you doing’ from across the room and I’ll awkwardly give you a half wave in acknowledgement. ...

Just a quick post: registration is now open for the inaugural Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group meeting on Thursday, March 3rd 2016. You can register for the event here: https://go.veeam.com/user-groups.html I have some basic details in my previous post, but if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to hit me up on Twitter ( @MattThatITGuy), by email (matt AT 42u.ca) or via a comment on this post.

As I mentioned in a post a little while back, I am super excited to get the Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG ?) rolling. It has taken some time to coordinate schedules and locations, but we have our first meeting scheduled for Thursday March 3rd. Full details: Where - Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex / Room 200 Date - Thursday March 3rd, 2016 Time - 11 AM - 2:30 PM (lunch will be provided) ...

One of the newly introduced features in Veeam Backup & Replication 9 is Scale-out Backup Repositories (SoBR), and frankly I have been waiting to try this out. This is a fantastic solution that will be welcomed in a lot of environments, large and small. The concept behind it is that many of us have small ‘islands’ of storage - maybe a SAN, some NAS storage, and / or some direct-attach somewhere. Previously it would have been a real pain to leverage all of these as you would have to setup a separate repository for each ‘island’ and then maintain the jobs to make sure that a) there will be enough space and b) keep track of what is going where. ...