Since the direct restore to Azure was announced with Veeam version 9.5 i wanted to test that and to get some hands on. But there is always either lacking of time or Murphy, which both are against me. This week I’ve been digging into this topic. I wanted to create a working configuration for a direct restore to Azure. Let me tell you this fairy tale…
I’m not completely new to cloud computing at all. I did some first steps with Amazon AWS and my first website, i tried out Microsoft Azure when it was relatively new, and i had also some tryouts with VMware vCloud Air. But all was just for testing, looking how that stuff works. No big deal at all. Now with Veeam version 9.5 this new feature called “Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure” comes in handy.
Before you try to just configure the direct restore in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 there are some requirements you have to fulfill, otherwise you will do many of the setup assistants twice or more (like i had to do because i didn’t know what exactly are the requirements).
Requirements
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5
Supported in Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus
Microsoft Azure Account
Pay-as-you-go or any other subscription based account
Azure Storage (blob or general storage)
Azure Virtual Network
Hint: if you organize all of this stuff above in the same ressource group on Azure you will have a better overview (at least then if you are already a heavy Azure user and if you’ve got lots of things on your Azure dashboard).
With this basics above configured we are ready to set the things up in Veeam Backup & Replication.
A really cool feature in Microsoft Active Directory is the Group Policy (or Group Policies in general). With Group Policies you can install (small) software packages, set the Internet Explorer start page, set wallpapers, execute scripts on user or computer security context and many things more. You can also deploy specific desktop icons for a user or a user group. Hence this blog post will show you how you deploy simple desktop shortcuts to a users desktop.
The group policy
If you have some specific applications in your company (for example a simple timesheet application) which your users should use, then you can create a group policy or a group policy preference respectively to deploy this desktop shortcut.
In Group Policy Management, create a new group policy object (GPO) in the “Group Policy Objects” folder.
Right click this newly created GPO and select “Edit…”.
Navigate to “User Configuration => Preferences => Windows Settings => Desktop”
Right click the “Desktop” object and select “New => Shortcut”
Now set all the configuration details of your application shortcut in the next dialog box.
Note: Please be aware of the “Target type” setting. If the shortcut has to be an application shortcut, you have to choose “File System Object”. As default it’s set to “URL” and thus creates only a shortcut for a website. Therefore if your user wants to open this shortcut, Internet Explorer (or the default browser) opens with a “cannot display this website” message instead of the application.
On the “Common” tab check if this group policy preference should run in logged-on user’s security context or not.
Note: If you set the „Location“ to „Desktop“ then you should make sure on the „Common“ tab the check box „run in logged-on user’s security context“ is set, because the shortcut will be published on the users own desktop. If you whish to deploy a shortcut to the „All Users“ profile then you have to set the target to „All Users Desktop“ and also uncheck the box to run this group policy preference in logged-on user’s security context. Usually a normal user doesn’t have access to all users profile, but the system account, which runs this group policy preference, has access to it.
Now click Apply / OK and close this dialog box.
As the last step, back in GPO Management, link the created GPO with the Organizational Unit in which your users reside.
Now your users have only to restart the computer or do a single log-off log-on. So they will receive the newly created desktop shortcut.
Since we know Active Directory, we know also that its replication works automatically between the domain controllers. The lowest value of this replication schedule is 15 minutes. You can’t get lower. If there aren’t that many frequent changes, or the active directory site is not large (probably with only one site) then this value should work for you.
But what if your active directory environment is larger? What if you have more than one site, on different locations, with different networks? Or what if you’ve got some remotedesktop services running in your main site and some users working with them in a branch office? What about the “i forgot my password” cases?
Well, there is a solution for you. We can tune-up the Active Directory Inter-Site Replication. The inter-site replication works also automatically, and you can also schedule the replication only for 15 minutes. But there are some settings we can tweak to get the domain controllers pulling the changes made recently. Let me show you how to do that.
First open “Active Directory Sites and Services” on your primary domain controller (that’s the icon with the blue “building”).
Personally i think it’s a good approach to expand first all the items in the tree, so you can make sure you don’t miss any hidden item in this tree.
Let’s start now with the tuning operation. Expand “Sites” and “Inter-Site Transports” (if you haven’t already). Click on the IP folder.
Now right-click (or double-click) on your site link on the right hand side. If you did not rename it it’s just the DEFAULTIPSITELINK. Then click “Properties”. Then click on the “Attribute Editor” tab.
The attribute we should edit is called “options”. You can search for but you won’t find it. All attributes which haven’t actually a value set are hidden. To unhide it click on “Filter” and click “Show only attributes that have values”. The checkmark disappears and now you should find the “options” attribute in the list.
We now have to change this attribute to a specific value which allows us to tweak the inter-site replication.
Decimal Value
Binary Value
Explanation
1
1
USE_NOTIFY
2
10
TWOWAY_SYNC
4
100
DISABLE_COMPRESSION
You can use any combination of these. If your options attribute already has a value you need to perform a BITWISE OR operation on the existing value. If the value is 4, convert that to binary (100), perform an OR operation with binary 1, the result should be binary 101, which you convert to decimal (5) and enter as the value of the options attribute.
Now we have set this option (in my case i’ve set it to 1). That should look like that:
But there’s more. At least in my production site there wasn’t an instant replication after changing the options attribute in the inter-site link, i had to dig a little deeper.
So i searched in every site, site link and server on this active directory infrastructure for this setting and changed it to 1 everywhere. It was some clicking, but it helped.
And don’t forget these naughty bits in the NTDS settings:
Important tip:
Change notification will fail with manual connection objects. That is, if your connection objects are not created by the KCC (Knowledge Consistency Checker).
Conclusion for Inter-Site Replication
It was some clicking and also testing. But after changing the options attribute on every piece the result was a nearly instant replication. I created an active directory user object and it was replicated instantly to any other domain controller. Also with changes and deletion there weren’t any problems or issues. This tip with tweaking inter-site replication should help you if you don’t want to wait for 15 minutes. But think about the bandwith. Yes, bandwith. If you’ve got many changes and thus resulting some heavy active directory traffic you should keep an eye on the bandwith. This tweaking works fine for site links with 20MBit/s and more. If your branch office is connected with less bandwith (like widely used 2 or 5Mbit connections), you should probably let this setting unchanged and work with these 15 minutes instead.
Today i had to change the UPN (User Principal Name) for a whole company. Well, go through each user account in Active Directory, change the UPN the way it has to be, and you’re done. That would be the way if you want to do it manually. And this is a slow way. For sure, if there are only five users or so you’re good to go. But what when there are dozens of user accounts? Perhaps in different organizational units? At the present time, where everything in IT has to be quick and fast and with the least amount of effort, you can do it more clever.
Well, that was some challange to find it out. But as often, Powershell is your friend. With few lines of code, fully customizable, you can change the UPN for all users within an organizational unit. So you will save time, because you just have to change the OU in the script.
The script searches within the organizational unit specified for the user accounts, combines givenname and surename with the domain prefix, and changes then the UPN for all the user accounts withing this organizational unit. In this example the new User Principal Name for a user will be “givenname.surename@driftar.com” (for example john.doe@driftar.com).
Conclusion
To be honest it was some time needed to search for the right script parameters and test it out, to make sure everything works. But you don’t do that every time. You can save this script and customize it every time for the customer you work for. It’s a quick way to change the UPN, and it’s an easy way to save time.
Today i had to change the UPN (