Veeam Community Editions

by Rick ByrneMarch 27, 20191 Comment

Veeam has always offered free software to the IT community. The switch to community edition is not just a name change, but offers much more! These editions can be used in your home lab, your production environment, or for any situation where you see fit.

Let’s get our free on!

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

It now comes with all the features of Standard Edition with the ability to consume up to 10 standard Instances, and leverage VeeamZIP in an unlimited fashion.

What do you get?

Backup a VM, cloud instances, physical servers or workstations.
VM replication
Forever incremental backups
backup scheduling
Secure restore
Ability to restore directly to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack
Tape support
It’s FREE forever

Get Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Veeam ONE Community Edition

Monitor up to 10 instances of your VMware vSphere, or Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure, and one Veeam Backup & Replication server at no cost.

What do you get?

24×7 real-time monitoring
Easy documentation and management reporting
Resource optimization
Backup infrastructure auditing
Heatmaps, agent monitoring and reporting
Backup compliance reporting
more….

Get Veeam ONE Community Edition

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition

Veeam’s protection of O365 is where the community edition’s started. You can protection up to 10 users at no cost.

What you get?

Securely protect your O365 data
- Exchange Online (10 users)
- SharePoint Online (1TB of data)
- OneDrive for Business (10 users)
How is a User defined?

Get Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition

Edition Comparison: Details on what you get in Community Edition’s

Instance Licensing: Find out what you can do with 10 Instances.

Veeam Cloud Backup Edition

by Rick ByrneFebruary 13, 2013March 13, 20134 Comments

I have had a little bit of free time the last couple of nights….. that I enjoyed every minute in the Lab looking at the new product release from Veeam. Veeam Cloud Backup Edition is a new product from Veeam that gives you the ability to move your Veeam Backup’s off to 15 Cloud Storage providers, any that support OpenStack, and even Local/Remote File Shares. What does this give us? An Affordable solution for off-site backup of our Virtual Environment with no re-design of our local backup processes. Make sure to head over to the Veeam website and get more great products to help manage and protect your Virtual Infrastructure.

Key Features

Cloud-Agnostic – Support for 15 different public storage clouds

Encryption – Up to AES-256-bit encryption this is done on the server before transmission.

Compression – Saves time and Money! Data is compressed before sending to the cloud.

Cost Estimation – You can set limit by GB or Dollar, Makes sure you don’t go over your Storage Budget.

Job Notifications – email to keep you informed on your backups copied to the cloud

Bandwidth scheduling – Control bandwidth in real time, and based off of Local or WAN locations.

Licensing

All components of Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition use the same license file. The license file should contain a Cloud backup option. If you use a license without the Cloud backup option that you previously obtained for Veeam Backup & Replication, you will not be able to use Veeam Cloud Backup. When you go to launch the application you will get the following error.

System Requirements

Veeam Cloud Backup Console

Specification	Requirement
Hardware	CPU: any modern x86/x64 processor (minimum 2 cores recommended) RAM: 4 GB HDD: 25 MB Network: 1 Gbps
OS	Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the following operating systems are supported: · Microsoft Windows XP SP3 · Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 · Microsoft Windows Vista SP2 · Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 · Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 · Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 · Microsoft Windows 8 · Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Note that Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 are not supported for the file-level restore from the cloud scenario.
Software	.NET Framework 4.0 (included in the setup)
Cloud Storage	A registered cloud service account.

Installation

The installation of the this product is very fast, and painless. That is one of the reasons I enjoy working with Veeam products. You need to keep in mind when installing Cloud Edition, it has to have all of its components installed on the same local machine as the Veeam B&R SQL Database. The reason is to get all the integration working correctly, with the integration you will see the History of the Cloud Jobs from within the Veeam B&R Console.

Prerequisites

– Of course make sure it meets the System Requirements

– Make sure you have the proper license file

– From above highly recommended to install Cloud edition on the same machine as the SQL Database.

Screenshot of Install

For this installation I already have a version of Veeam B&R already running, I am only showing the Veeam Cloud Backup Install.

You can now choose your User Mode. To sum it up all users can have the same settings and plans, or they can have different plans and settings for their own account. I am going with the Common Setup. But you could see the use case for this.

You can change your install location, I’m moving mine to my D Volume. I just find it easier to manage. You can go ahead with the defaults.

Time to watch the progress, but you won’t be waiting long.

Took all of 3 Minutes from the point I launched the installer.

First Launch

The Welcome Tab is your first landing spot where you can go ahead and setup your backup plan. All the other tabs are practically empty right now until you create a Backup Plan and start running them.

Under the File Menu you will get to see all your Cloud Storage Vendors. I don’t think anyone will be displeased with the choices. If you do not have a Cloud Storage Vendor at the moment you can start your shopping now. You can even select Amazon Glacier, and start to use that for very low cost storage for archive data.

From the Screen Shot above you will also see Export configuration and Import Configuration. This gives you the ability to export your Backup Plans and restore them on another server.

From the tools menu you can select “Change Service Account” this will allow you to run the Cloud Console under a different service account, if you need to change authentication for a Backup/Restore. Network Credentials gives you the ability to use different credentials for different network paths, very handy option.

Now we get into the options. You can set Application preferences, connection attempts, bandwidth schedule, Global Purging settings, proxy, logging and advanced settings.

Create a Backup Plan

I do not have a Cloud Storage Vendor Account. For my testing I am going to be using a Shared folder that is not part of my Lab Domain.

The first thing I am going to do is setup network credentials for that path.

Time to complete the Backup Plan Wizard.

Next setup is select your Cloud Storage “In my case I will select File System” and create a new account. From the Advanced link, you can choose a Backup Prefix that will allow you to have more than one Job go to the same bucket but be able to identify it easily.

With our Storage defined we now need to give the Plan a name, and decide if we want to store the plan configuration in the Storage. The default is yes. I agree that it is a good choice, this way if the server you are running the Cloud Backup’s from is no longer with you, you have the configuration for the job saved offsite.

Backup Mode

You have two main choices

Advanced Mode – You can use Encryption and supports Versioning of Files. But you can only access your files with Veeam Cloud Edition manager.

Simple Mode – You can use any file manager to access your files, however encryption and versioning is not supported.

Really the choice is yours, but I like the Advanced mode where I can use Encryption to protect my data, and also the ability to keep versions of files. Custom Mode basically does a vanilla replication. You may be very interested in the last option to force using VSS, this will be quite useful if another process is accessing your files.

Now it is time to go ahead and select your Backup Source. I am going to select a Veeam Backup folder called Critical VM_s.

The Advanced Filter is just that, it lets you choose exactly what you want to replicate or what you don’t want to replicate. Along with the ability to skip folders, and choose files that were modified within a certain date/time.

Now we get into Compress and Encryption. I am going to select compress all files, and do AES 128 Bit Encryption *** Please do not forget your Encryption Key, that could turn into one bad day when you need it to restore *** You can also select to encrypt your file names.

Purge Options can be pulled from the Global settings in the options, or you can set different ones per Job.

Schedule gives you a few options. You can do it manually, specific date, recurring, or real-time. With real-time it will monitor the folder and check it every 60 Sec for any changes. It will store the Changes locally, and every 10 Minutes move it to your cloud storage.

Pre / Post Commands will allow you to execute a command before or after the Job. Depending on the result of the command the job will continue or fail.

Notifications can send off Email alerts, and can also generate a Windows Event log entry.

look over your summary and make sure all looks as you had planned.

Now with a Backup Plan in place the Welcome Screen has changed. It now shows our new Storage, and Backup plan. The Backup Plan tab is the place to go if you want to run a Job, view it’s progress, or make changes.

The Backup Storage Tab gives us a view into our Storage, and gives us the ability to restore files from the location, or delete them.

Backup Plan Execute

Now that I have my plan configure, and just finished doing a full backup of two VM’s. I am going to move that to my backup storage.

This is going to be a fairly small transfer of about 14.3 GB’s. To start the Backup Plan launch the Cloud console and go to the Backup Plans Tab, and click the link “Run”

click the down arrow on the right to get more details

The Backup has completed

The Email Notification

From the Backup Storage Tab you can view your files

From within the File Share this is what you will see. D$ are where the files reside in an encrypted format, meaning from this location I can look at the files, but can’t do anything with them. CBB_Configuration is where the configuration for the Backup Plan is stored.

Command Line Trigger Backup Plan

You may be asking yourself, well….. I want to run a backup job from Veeam B&R, then have it automatically run a Cloud Backup to my Off-Site Storage? That you can! Veeam Cloud Backup has a little tool called cbb.exe it is located at the install location for Veeam Cloud (C:\program files\Veeam\Cloud Backup\cbb.exe) To learn more about it just go ahead and run the command with no arguments or the ?. Also Veeam Cloud Backup Help from within the console has a full section related to the CLI.

But all we want to do is trigger a Cloud Backup after the Veeam Backup is complete. To get a list of Backup plans run cbb.exe plan –l the plan I want to trigger is VM Different-Storage.

The command that trigger this pan would be as follows

We now know the command we will need. Go ahead and open up notepad, paste the command, and save it as a bat file. Lets go edit our Veeam Backup Job. As you can see we can enter in a post command from the Advanced options from the Storage settings. I’m going to go ahead and save the changes.

Going to start the Job again with the new post command.

Once the Job is completed the post command runs and then we run the cloud backup.

Restore Time

Time to test the restore, no point replicating this data if we can’t restore it.

First thing I am going to do is delete two files.

Let’s restore them. Go to the Cloud Backup Console and go to the Backup Storage Tab. Expand your location where the files should exist.

You will see the two files I deleted from my Backup Folder. I have selected them, right clicked and now going to restore them to their original location.

Just going to do this once, no need to save

I’m going to restore the latest version. This is where Versioning comes into play if you did the advance mode.

In this case I want to restore to the original location.

These files were encrypted and still are, we need to have the password to complete the restore.

Make sure all is as it should be.

The progress of the Job

It took all of 30 secs, but again this is local storage and no compression needs to take place.

You can check now under the History Tab to see the two files that were restored.

My files are back where they should belong.

Take Away

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed something amazing about the new Cloud Backup……. It can replicate any file, I didn’t go into detail on it, but I have done other Job’s of just random files, without an issue. Veeam could have built this product to block any other type of replication that wasn’t a Veeam Backup, but they didn’t. Which I thank them for that, it makes my business case that much easier. I think when I put this in my environment I am going to find many more uses for it. For what this product is going to cost in the overall picture of data protection and security, I am getting… What about you?

To find out all the details, have a look here

“Veeam Quick Migration” how do you use it?

by Rick ByrneFebruary 2, 2013February 2, 20132 Comments

You may ask yourself if I have all the proper configuration and vCenter in place why do I need Veeam Quick Migration. Well….. I do have all the proper configuration, licensing and vCenter, and I use Quick Migration a couple of times a week.

What do I use it for? In my production environment I don’t like to put any unknown’s in the mix. But we all need unknown’s from time to time. We need to test product’s, application upgrades, Security patches, Service packs, and many other things. I do this all within my Company Lab, it’s a totally isolated infrastructure with it’s own hosts, Shared Storage, and networking Stack.

The problem I used to have was, my production host, and storage couldn’t see my Lab host, or storage. To move the VM’s from the production to the Lab or vice versa was not always an easy task. It involved using VMware converter, performing backups and moving them across the wire, or with USB media, Attaching my Lab Host to the SAN for a short period of time. But since using Veeam Quick Migration I don’t need to do that anymore.

To make sure that Veeam could access my Lab Infrastructure I configured a backup proxy on a VM in the Lab. If you are using the licensed version of Veeam this does not add to your license hosts, it is also available in the Veeam Backup Free Edition.

Below is a more technical details on Quick Migration, and screenshots of a Quick Migration being performed.

Quick Migration

Veeam Backup & Replication analyzes your virtual environment, its configuration, the state of VMs and selects the most appropriate relocation method. Whenever possible, Veeam Backup & Replication coordinates its operations with vCenter Server and uses native VMware vCenter migration mechanisms: vMotion and Storage vMotion. When VMware vCenter migration methods cannot be used (for example, if your VMware vSphere license does not provide support for vMotion and Storage vMotion, or you need to migrate VMs from one standalone ESX(i) host to another), Veeam Backup & Replication uses its proprietary SmartSwitch technology to relocate VMs.

Veeam Quick Migration provides means for fast background migration of VMs ensuring continuous uptime of your virtual environment. Quick Migration supports hot VM migration (with SmartSwitch) and cold VM migration (with cold switch).

Migration of a VM is performed in several stages:

1.Veeam Backup & Replication copies VM configuration (.vmx) to the target host and registers the VM.

2.Veeam Backup & Replication triggers a VM snapshot and copies VM disk content to the new destination.

3.VM state and changes made after snapshot creation are moved to a new location. Veeam Backup & Replication uses different approaches to move the VM state between hosts with compatible and non‑compatible CPUs.

•If you move a VM between two hosts with compatible CPUs, Veeam Backup & Replication uses SmartSwitch (that is, it suspends a VM to move its state file and changes made after snapshot creation). The VM is then resumed on the new host. This ensures minimum downtime, and completely eliminates any data loss during migration.

•If you move a VM between two hosts with non‑compatible CPUs, Veeam Backup & Replication stops the VM to move changes made after snapshot creation, and then starts the VM on the new host.

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-backup/help-center/vsphere/index.html?quick_migration.htm

Quick Migration Architecture

Quick Migration architecture in a VMware vSphere environment comprises the following components:

•Source host and target host with associated datastores

•One or two backup proxy servers

Similar to backup, Quick Migration uses two-agent architecture: the source‑side agent interacts with the source host, and the target‑side agent interacts with the target host. To perform onsite migration, you can deploy one backup proxy for data processing and transfer. This backup proxy must have access to the source host and to the target host at the same time. In this scenario, the source‑side agent and the target‑side agent are started on the same backup proxy.

quick_mig_1proxy

The common requirement for offsite migration is that one Veeam agent runs in the production site (closer to the source host and datastore), and the other agent runs in the remote target site (closer to the target host and datastore). During backup, the agents maintain a stable connection, which allows for uninterrupted operation over WAN or slow links.

For offsite migration, you need to deploy at least one local backup proxy in each site: a source backup proxy in the production site, and a target backup proxy in the remote target site.

quick_mig_2proxies

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-backup/help-center/vsphere/index.html?migration_architecture.htm

Migration Demo

Go to the “Virtual Machines”

Locate the VM you want to migrate. You can also do this with a powered on VM, for my situation powered off is fine.

Right click and select “Quick Migration”

At this point just select “Next” unless you wanted to add another VM to the Migration.

I then go ahead and pick my Lab Host for the Destination. Pick a resource pool if you would like, choose your folder to place the VM, and select your Datastore. Click “Next”

Now you can pick your Backup Proxy. I like to choose mine but you select auto if you would like. Just takes a step out of troubleshooting if it was to fail for some reason. I go ahead and tell it to force the Veeam quick migration no matter if vMotion was support or not.

Go ahead and verify your settings, if all looks good go ahead and select finish. You may also choose to delete the VM after Migration if successful. Myself, I like to go ahead and do that myself. Especially if I just want to clone the VM.

You will now see the status of the Job.

You can see from the screen shot below that it completed in 25 Minutes, and is ready to use.

If you click on the VM Name it will show more details. No different than any other Veeam Status report.

The VM on the old host will be renamed with a _migrated appended to the end of the name.

On the new VM it will be named the way it was originally.

Before you power up the VM you may have to go in and assign the VM the proper Network, if you have network’s consistent across your Host you will not have to assign the network.

Here is the VM all running and happy. Once I see that I go ahead and delete the Migrated VM from my Production host and storage.

How do you use Quick Migration?

Windows Server 2012 RC Install

by Rick ByrneAugust 19, 2012August 19, 2012Leave a comment

Been fairly busy lately, haven’t had a whole lot of time to play in the LAB. Today decided it would be a great day to sit and relax and catch up on some things. Following screen shots are just from a base install of Windows Server 2012 RC with GUI. Nothing fancy at all Smile or advanced.

I’m using my lab to run W2k12 as a VM, the lab is running ESXi 5.0.0 768111 anything less and you will get issues trying to install the RC version.

Once you have the VM configured, which I have only assigned 1 CPU/2 RAM/60 GB Disk this VM is just to look at the install and have a browse at some new features and the GUI

This is the first screen you will see when you power on the VM and load the ISO

At this point you will get to pick your regional settings.

At this point you are prompted to install the OS, or repair your OS if there is problems.

With the RC version you have to options to Chose, either Server Core Installation or Server with a GUI. For this install I am going to chose GUI, another blog I will go ahead and just pick the core version.

Of course the “License Terms” Accept and on your go.

As you can see the install is very similar to Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7/Windows 8 which we all expected.

Pick your drive to install on.

At this point you can walk away. But don’t go for very long, the entire install process took only 25 Minutes.

In total I counted 2 Reboots that occur, but they are very quick.

Go ahead and chose a password. One new feature I noticed on this screen is that you can show your password, this allows you to make sure you are typing the correct information in both boxes. In the dialog box, when you have it selected there will be a little Black Circle with a half Circle underneath it. To display your password click and hold, if you do not click and hold you will not be able to see your password.

You can also use accessibility options, and change the keyboard layout.

the install is complete. As you see from below the screen for logon is different. But not in a bad way.

Type in your password

Wait for your profile to setup.

Once your profile is complete you are brought to the Server Manager.

As you can see the install is very straight forward. This is all I am going to show in this post, but I plan to show more as I play more with Windows Server 2012 RC.

ESXi 4.1 u1 WhiteBox Home Lab

by Rick ByrneJune 5, 2011June 15, 20112 Comments

This all came about from the amount of testing and learning I have been doing from home. Decided I needed to create a better environment for this but on a very small budget.

Before this I used VMware Workstation for all my testing needs (which is great by the way) and will still use it, but it started to get more and more difficult to accomplish my testing with this limited setup, and multiple systems running VMware Workstation. I wanted a more centralized setup where I could manage all and with some ease.

System Information x2

Model: OptiPlex 755 SFF
CPU: Intel Q6600
Memory: 8 GB of RAM, upgraded from 2 GB’s
Nic: Onboard Intel 82566DM, PCIe Intel Pro 1000 CT
PSU: 275 Watt
Hard Drive: 80 GB SATA

These systems take up very little room and consume a small amount of power.

Shared Storage: OpenFiler, NAS Appliance.

Network: NetGear ProSafe GS108, 8-Port, which supports Jumbo Frames, and VLAN’s.

Software

Installed ESXi 4.1 U1 on both systems, and for 60 Days (vCenter Evaluation) get to enjoy a HA/DRS Cluster, which will make this setup very green with full DPM support which allows one system to go into Standby when not needed.

This setup provides me with 16 GB’s of Memory, and 19 GHz of processing power. It will provide me with the ability to run several VM’s at once, without affecting my Desktop System, which in turn will give me a much better lab experience.

This solution allowed me to stay in a limited budget, with being able to source the Dell OptiPlex systems for very cheap, and only having to add extra memory, network cards, and a switch. I got this all up and running for less than $400.00.