Backup & Replication

How to automatically remove VMs from backup

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It’s been some time since my last blog post in general, and a lot of time has passed since my last Veeam blog post in particular. I just recently stumbled across something in Veeam Backup & Replication that I wanted to share with you. When you check my latest home lab generation (I did a rebuild and also exchanged some coins for refurbished hardware), you can see that there was something going on.

But why am I talking about Veeam Backup & Replication? Well, because I’m using it in the free “Community Edition” for my homelab. And because I still love Veeam. And when I read social media posts like this one, then I get watery eyes.

What is this Community Edition?

With this free gift from Veeam, you can protect up to 10 workloads. No matter if on VMware or Hyper-V, you can protect Windows and Linux servers, laptops, NAS, and more. You can enjoy (more or less) all the awesome features of the Enterprise edition, like:

  • Effective protection for virtual and physical workloads on-premises
  • Restore VMs quickly and get fast granular file and application-item restores with Veeam Explorers for Microsoft applications
  • Create bootable copies of workloads onsite or in offsite locations for migration and disaster recovery
  • Restore and/or migrate on-premises Windows/Linux VMs, physical servers, and endpoints to AWS, Azure, and Azure Stack
  • Verify that backups are free of malware before restoring them to production
  • Simple and powerful file protection of unstructured data through an easy-to-use wizard-driven approach
  • And many things more!

Sure, some really cool stuff is limited to the Enterprise edition (like various storage integrations, etc.). But still, it’s an awesome piece of software that’s free forever (the Community Edition), and fits perfectly for homelabs.

But enough marketing, you know the good stuff anyway. Let’s get back to the topic.

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Veeam Webinar – “Virtual Labs: Für Anfänger und Fortgeschrittene”

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Veeam Webinar

Wir alle kennen das doch. Für das Buchhaltungsprogramm oder den Exchange Server ist ein neuer Patch erschienen. Bevor man den installiert will man ihn aber erst noch testen, damit sichergestellt werden kann, dass auch alles so funktioniert wie es sollte. Also mal schnell einen weiteren Server installiert, die Applikation eingerichtet und den Patch eingespielt. Zeitaufwand: im schlimmsten Fall mehrere Tage. Dass es für das soeben erwähnte Szenario, aber auch für den automatisierten Test von Backups oder um Sicherheits-Tests ohne Risiko durchzuführen, einen einfacheren Weg gibt, möchten wir Ihnen an unserem nächsten Veeam Webinar zeigen.

Veeam bietet mit Virtual Labs, SureBackup und SureReplica grossartige Funktionen an, um genau die eingangs durchgespielten Situationen ohne grossen Aufwand einfach abzuwickeln. Sie nutzen für diese Aktionen einfach die bestehenden Backup-Daten. Dabei spielt es keine Rolle ob Sie wöchentlich die Backups Ihres Datenbankservers prüfen möchten, oder für Ihre Helpdesk-Abteilung ein Virtual Lab für Software-Tests einrichten möchten. Das können Sie alles mit Veeam und den vorhandenen Backup-Daten machen. Gerne zeigen wir Ihnen in unserem Live Webinar wie das funktioniert.

Auch gehen wir etwas näher auf die Best Practices ein und was man machen kann, sollte es mal zu Problemen kommen. Die Best Practices sollen zeigen was sich gemäss unserer Erfahrung bewährt hat, seien das Funktionen oder Einstellungen, oder ganz allgemein das Vorgehen. Falls es unerwartet zu Problemen kommen sollte, sollen Ihnen unserer Troubleshooting-Tipps weiterhelfen, hier schnell wieder zurück aufs richtige Gleis zu kommen.

Registration / Anmeldung fürs Webinar

Folgen Sie dem unten stehenden Link und registrieren Sie sich für das Webinar:

https://www.veeam.com/de/videos/webinar-virtual-labs-backup-11287.html

Das Webinar wird aufgezeichnet. Sollte es Ihnen also nicht möglich sein daran teilzunehmen, Sie den Inhalt aber nicht verpassen möchten, dann registrieren Sie sich bitte trotzdem. In der Regel erhalten Sie innerhalb einiger Tage nach dem Webinar eine E-Mail mit dem Link zur Aufzeichnung, sodass Sie diese in aller Ruhe schauen können, wann immer Sie Zeit haben.

Vorgeschmack zum Webinar

Wenn Sie unabhängig vom Webinar etwas mehr über SureBackup erfahren möchten, dann lade ich Sie herzlich ein um noch einen Moment auf meinem Blog zu verweilen und den passenden Beitrag zu lesen: Veeam – Automatic backup tests with SureBackup. Wenn Sie SureBackup ausprobieren möchten, und es bei der Konfiguration zu Problemen kommen sollte, hilft Ihnen vielleicht dieser Blogbeitrag weiter: Veeam SureBackup – Ping-Test Troubleshooting.

Veeam – Using Starwind VTL with AWS S3 in Veeam

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StarWind Cloud VTL

I wanted to test this use case for a long time. Now it’s finally done and i’m happy that everything worked at the first try. Or should i be worried? Well, as Veeam always says “It just works (TM)”. So it did also during the write up of this guide.

Most of you will know this kind of backup media type. And some of you will not only have good memories of them. I’m talking about tapes. Tapes we’re once used for backups. Daily incremental and weekly full backups. It took ages the more data you had. You’ve been happy if a full backup fitted in a 8 hour window throughout the night. You know that. But tapes are coming up more and more again. If you heard about the recent ransomware WannaCry then you know what it means to airgap your backups. Even Google has it’s tape backup system. Yes, Google. And there are reasons why some companies still invent and develop new tape technologies like new LTO standards, new drives and libraries.

To be honest, most of us homelabbers don’t have a tape drive nor a tape library neither. And that’s the point where a Virtual Tape Library comes in very handy! You can emulate a complete tape library with software and even use this emulation in a availability software like Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Availability Suite! But that isn’t awesome enough. We want more awesome and that’s the reason we go to the next level.

To make it clear, i’m not only talking about homelabbers. This software is not a beta or alpha or something other. It’s a rocksolid production version which is available on the market. This guide will show you how to install and configure StarWind VTL for AWS and Veeam.

With StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam you can leverage your backup data for the usage with a virtual tape library to archive your backups to Amazon S3 storage in the cloud. If you want you can even go further and archive your archived data from the Amazon S3 buckets to Amazon Glacier. Isn’t that awesome?

So let’s do this now! I’ll show you how to install and configure this solution, and how to make it work.

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Veeam – Backup Copy “Block is not initialized. Failed to download disk.”

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Recently a customer reported an issue with a backup copy job. At this customer we implemented a new leased line with synchronous 1Gbit/s bandwidth from the main site to a secondary site. That gave us completely new possibilities regarding the backup of data and making it available. There is no need for a WAN Accelerator anymore, we can replicate VM’s with Veeam directly to the secondary site. And also backup copy jobs to this site go now A) directly and B) in a regular manner (what wasn’t possible before because of lack of bandwidth).

By the beginning of the last week, around the 30th of May, one backup copy job started to fail. This job contains all VM’s and should backup copy the data once a day to the secondary location. But one server, the main fileserver, failed with this error message:

Error: Block is not initialized. Failed to download disk. Reconnectable protocol device was closed. Failed to upload disk. Agent failed to process method {DataTransfer.SyncDisk}.

First i thought, ok, that can happen. No worries. After the second failure i did some checks and also opened a support case at Veeam support. If you don’t know how to collect log files for a Veeam support case, please have a look here.

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Veeam – Prepare yourself and your infrastructure against Ransomware

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A little more than a week ago a new ransomware called WannaCry hit various computers and IT systems, private persons and businesses, all around the world. More than 200’000 computers in up to 150 countries, experts say. That’s a lot. It happend fast. And this ransomware created also some serious damage.

ransomware

Yes, the red marked countries are those affected by WannaCry…

(Image by Wikimedia Commons)

Ransomware preparedness and recovery

Not only firewall, even hardware appliances or software firewalls on your computers, should be installed, but also a decent antivirus and anti-malware scanner should be in place. Obviously with daily updates and new signatures at least.

But when desaster strikes, it’s probably to late to update your security systems. The digital pest is on your system, somehow it made it’s way through various security barriers. Probably through security flaws, undetected by any antivirus or firewall, via mail, drive-by downloads or what not. What can you make then? Glad you have a backup of your systems and your data! Oh, did i mention to air-gap your backups? It doesn’t help when you’ve got ransomware-encrypted backup. The air-gap becomes more and more popular, not only for private users but also for big companies.

To have a 1TB external USB drive with your data, which is safely ejected after successful backup (Veeam Agent for Windows FREE does that), is ideal for your home computer, or your laptop. And absolutely recommended to do so. But imagine your 20 or more terabytes in your office? All your virtual (and physical) servers? Mail data? SharePoint and so on?

Veeam recently released some blog posts and white papers about ransomware topics. I’d like to share those valuable bits and bytes and ressources with you.

White paper

Rick Vanouver, Director of Technical Product Marketing at Veeam, created a white paper with the name “Designing Veeam Availability Suite to Protect Against Ransomware Threats”. Get your copy here:

https://www.veeam.com/wp-veeam-availability-suite-protection-against-ransomware-threats.html

…and learn more about:

  • Offline storage, the most effective ransomware resiliency technique
  • Using different credentials for backup repositories
  • The need to have more types of restore points that are more frequent

Blog post

But Rick created not only the white paper but also a comprehensive blog post about “Ransomware resiliency & Availability: The endpoint is a great place to start” which is available here.

This blog posts shows you how you can use both Veeam Agent for Linux and Veeam Agent for Windows in your environment. It doesn’t matter whether it’s installed on a server or a computer, Veeam Agent for Linux and Windows are two pieces of software which are tightly integrated into the Veeam Availability Suite yet, and will be even tighter integrated into the next version 10 of Veeam Availability Suite.

At this point I would also like to refer to the early tipps for some of the early attacks and some practical tipps when using Veeam Backup & Replication.

E-Book

Last but not least, Veeam and Conversational Geek are offering a free e-book about the above topic. This e-book not only gives you an insight into the ransomware threat, but also reviews the fundamentals of top notch ransomware preparedness and recovery, in order to help you protect yourself and your organization.

Download it here:

https://go.veeam.com/ransomware-awareness-education

Learn more about:

  • Ransomware milestones, key capabilities and impact
  • Key layers of ransomware protection and preparedness against attacks
  • Quick and painless recovery from backups
  • And much more!