With Day 2 there’s another day into the history books. It was another awesome day with so much interesting information!
First I have to thank Craig Dalrymple and his friends for yesterday evening. He organized a good tasting of different whiskeys and other good spirits. Thank you, Craig!
Day 2 Summary
Staged Restore
Michael Cade and Dima P. are on the stage today morning to explain us some stuff about Staged Restore within Veeam Backup & Replication.
One use case of staged restore and probably one of the main reason is GDPR and Article 17 (right to erasure). “The Right to be forgotten” is one of many requirements of GDRP. That makes the backup and restore a little more complex. During a staged restore, the VM to be restored will be run directly from the backup files in an isolated data lab, where you can actually make changes to the guest OS or applications before the VM finally will be restored into the production environment. The backup files will remain untouched. The deletions necessary are done by an easy PowerShell script. You can delete users from Active Directory, delete Exchange mailboxes etc. You can develop scripts for each of your application.
The Vanguards had interesting ideas and thoughts on how to do the restore and delete things which should be forgotten, and how you could or should implement that.
When you have to do a Staged Restore, your VM will be run directly from backup files in an isolated data lab, so you can make changes to the guest OS or the application before you restore the data.
Veeam ONE
Kirsten Stoner and Nikita Shestakov are now on the stage to present us some news from the Veeam ONE coming up with update 4.
Veeam ONE has evolved in the most recent update. It’s not only a monitoring and reporting tool anymore. It will be also your management tool for Veeam backups. Depending on the reports of your VMs you can take automatic actions. For example, if Veeam ONE is reporting that some of your VMs are currently not protected by any backup job, you can define actions what you would like to do with these VMs. You can, for example, take the unprotected VMs and put them into an already existing backup job. How cool is that?
All the things which can run or happen automatically can also set to be approved. If you’re uncomfortable with automatic actions, you can set them all to be approved manually.
In Veeam ONE there are lots of improvements! Let’s just have a look at some of them here:
Veeam ONE doesn’t have just some automatic actions for your VMs which aren’t protected by any backup job. There’s also a new feature called…
Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics
This feature will help you find issues in your Veeam Backup & Replication environment and it will help you solve these issues.
Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics searches your Veeam logs for issues, like known exceptions and error messages. It will use signatures from Veeam to detect problems in your backup environment.
You install Veeam ONE on a service and one (or more) Veeam ONE agent on your backup servers.
Veeam ONE will then go and search your logs for issues, and it will try to compare issues found in your logs with the Veeam Knowledgebase upon the signatures delivered by Veeam. The signatures are downloaded automatically from Veeam. In case you don’t like an automatic download of signatures from Veeam, you can do that also manually.
For all of you waiting for some AWESOME news, I have to say that I’m sorry. That’s completely RED content here. I’d like to thank to [redacted] for the great insights into [redacted] and for an interesting outlook into [redactedaswell].
But let’s move on here…
Veeam Agent Management
Dima P. is now on the stage and he will tell us some stuff about the Veeam Agent management.
All newer Windows Server versions are supported, including Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server Core. Also included is the support of Windows 10 October Update. Microsoft Exchange DAG’s are supported as well.
The rescan logic has been reworked. Test credentials for individual computers protection groups are available. You can get granular email reports. Also, granular network throttling options are available. You will have control over FLR functionality. There will be a “Task-based” view. You can now also easily uninstall the installer service with a simple click on a button. It is no longer needed that the Agent “sees” the VBR server through DNS resolution. The reboot option is now hidden.
Managed by Agent
That means that the backup is completely managed by the agent. Schedules, repositories etc. are all managed by the agent, and not by the VBR console. The agent supports wildcard and system environment variables for the backup source. Also supported is now the functions of “Compact” and “Health Check”. Deleted Agent retention is now also a feature which helps you to clean up the backups. With granular email reports, you can get reports from your backup runs depending on the settings you’d like to have, for example only a mail when the jobs run into an error. The managed Agent can also grab the configuration from the VBR backup server before it was pushed from the server to the agent.
Managed by Backup Server
In addition to the above-mentioned features, Microsoft Exchange DAG support (including IP-less DAG’s) is now supported. You will get a single process manager for all agent tasks. There is now also the secondary target options for a job.
The Veeam Agent has added support for PowerShell and RESTful API. Also, it’s possible to use Archive Tiers, to do a Secure Restore and export the backup to VBK.
That’s it folks for today!