Today i’d like to provide you another one of my straight-forward walk through guides. Everybody is talking about cloud. Is it either a private cloud or a public cloud, or probably something between (a hybrid cloud, you don’t say…). So many people and companies want to have their stuff migrated to the cloud or are already using cloud technologies.
Microsoft Office 365 is also one of these cloud technologies. It’s your mail hosted in the cloud. It is available in different sizes and versions, combined with powerful office and collaboration applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Skype for Business and Sharepoint Online and so on) or just the mail part of it. You can choose whatever you need, and at very attractive pricing conditions.
Compare the Microsoft Office 365 business plans here:
But today we don’t talk about how cool and great this Office 365 stuff is. We wanna talk about how you backup your mails. Your mails are stored somewhere in the cloud (actually a physical datacenter located somewhere). I don’t know if Microsoft does backups for YOUR mails. It’s always better to do that by yourself. Then you know it’s working and you can recover in case of a user deleted something, or whatever can happen with these mails.
So let’s talk about Veeam Backup for Office 365.
This nice piece of software from Veeam is now available since a few days. It’s working very fine, and it is simple to install as you know that from other Veeam software. As mentioned above, this post should guide you through the simple setup and configuration of Veeam Backup for Office 365. When i don’t count the time it took to take screenshots, then the installation is done in a few minutes. Promise. Let’s dig into that.
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 few days ago one of my co-workes asked me if, and if yes, how i test the backups of my customers. I answered him that i don’t do that personally, but let it test automatically. He asked me how i do that, and so i showed him one of the coolest features in Veeam Backup & Replication. It’s called SureBackup, and it makes your life as a sysadmin a lot easier. Believe me.
It's always good when you can share your (#Veeam) knowledge with your co-workers. Teaching is also a good way to learn. #VeeamVanguard
SureBackup in Veeam Backup & Replication (available in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus versions) is a great feature to test your Veeam backups automatically. So you can make sure that a VM is working if you really need to restore a whole VM and not only single files or folders. But it’s not only automatic backup tests. With Veeam SureBackup you can also easily create lab environments. Leverage your backups for patch testing, development and other stuff. You don’t have to deploy new virtual servers for patch testing. You don’t have to deploy new virtual servers only because of a new software release. Test all that stuff with your SureBackup lab to see if everything works as it should. The todays blog post is all about SureBackup. I’ll show you how you set it up and try to give you some hints about it.
The challange
Your daily backups are running fine. You receive the success mails after backup and / or replication and you know it’s all good. But how can you be sure if a restore of a whole virtual machine will work if you really need it? Most of the companies test their backups once a month. It is like an insurance. It’s good to have one, but it’s better you don’t need it. Your backup job checks the health of the backup file. And SureBackup checks if your VMs really can boot and all the necessary services come online. Veeam SureBackup is like your insurance.
The solution
With just three simple steps you can be assured that your backups really work when time comes to restore a complete VM or business critical applications.
Today there is no special topic dealt with but i’ll provide you some general helpful things. Veeam Backup & Replication is the best availability software i know. In our company we install it at every customer who’s using either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. We love it and our customers too, they don’t even know that there was something. We can handle any issues in minutes.
Anyway. Today i’ll provide some general helpful things, like a collection of links, some specific infos about files and many other helpful stuff. I hope that there is something for you, helping you solving problems. In case you miss something, please drop me a comment or a mail so i can add it to this post. Thanks!
If you’ve ever asked how to do things as best practice, then this guide is helpful for you for sure. Veeam updated their best practices guide to Backup & Replication v9 with Update 2. The guide covers everything, starting from ressource planning and sizing, deployment, configuration and various other topics.
Veeam recently published a blog post about the all known Backup Copy Job. All known yes, but many people did not know that this kind of job can do more than just copy. A very good read for better understanding how backup copy works and how you can make use of it.
How to collect logs for a support case
As mentioned in a previous post i created a small guide which shows you how to collect the logs as part of creating a support case at Veeam support. An english version will follow. At the moment the post is only available in german language.
Helpful other things (not only but also Veeam related)
The following information are not only related to Veeam but could help you find some answers when you have questions regarding your infrastructure.
Restore point simulator
A cool and helpful online tool is the restore point simulator. With this tool you can calculate how much space is needed in a repository to meet your needs.
Another cool tool to estimate the needed infrastructure ressources is the virtual architect. Give some data and input to the tool and you receive as output the estimated amounts of proxies, repositories, recommendations for data streams etc.
These two words you read often when backup and restore is the topic. Let me explain those two words.
RTO
The recovery time objective (RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.[1]
It can include the time for trying to fix the problem without a recovery, the recovery itself, testing, and the communication to the users. Decision time for users representative is not included.
The business continuity timeline usually runs parallel with an incident management timeline and may start at the same, or different, points.
In accepted business continuity planning methodology, the RTO is established during the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) by the owner of a process (usually in conjunction with the business continuity planner). The RTOs are then presented to senior management for acceptance.
A recovery point objective, or “RPO”, is defined by business continuity planning. It is the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.[1] The RPO gives systems designers a limit to work to. For instance, if the RPO is set to four hours, then in practice, off-site mirrored backups must be continuously maintained – a daily off-site backup on tape will not suffice. Care must be taken to avoid two common mistakes around the use and definition of RPO. Firstly, business continuity staff use business impact analysis to determine RPO for each service – RPO is not determined by the existent backup regime. Secondly, when any level of preparation of off-site data is required, rather than at the time the backups are offsited, the period during which data is lost very often starts near the time of the beginning of the work to prepare backups which are eventually offsited.
Today i was working in my homelab. I installed an availability solution. It was a quick thing, no complex setup and configuration, but a straightforward installation. Even if its “just” my homelab, i want to know that my VMs are safe and secure and that i can see trends about space utilization and other parameters. How do you achieve that? With installing Veeam Availability Suite v9.
Just to clarify, the time to create the screenshots took longer than the actual setup of this availability solution. The setup assistant will guide and help you through the setup, it’s really easy, and after few minutes you are ready to go and take the next steps.
What is Veeam Availability Suite?
With this software suite you receive to main components. First of all you will get the very well known Veeam Backup & Replication. This is the doing-backups-part of this suite. Furthermore you get the second component which is Veeam ONE. With Veeam ONE you will get the monitoring, reporting and capacity planning part of this software suite.
Why not only creating backups?
There is for sure not just one simple answer, but let my try to explain. With Veeam Availability Suite you will ditch your legacy backup solution and get real availability for your servers, your data and your business. Veeam Backup & Replication is used to setup the backup of your virtual infrastructure. Through Veeam ONE you get the whole monitoring, reporting and capacity planning. In a single pane of glass you get instant reports, you can monitor your infrastructure and get some insights in the capacity. With this you will find out some trends (for example when a specific data store runs out of space), even before it actually happens.
How do i install this software?
As i already mentioned it’s a really easy process. The setup assistant will ask you some things, but more or less it’s next, next, finish. For sure you can specify the setup steps and configure other ports as the recommended ones for example. The setup assistant gives you this ability if you want. If you are fine with the standard settings, you can leave them and go on.
The following guide line will show you how easy the setup process is. I did an easy deployment, all stuff centralized on one server because my lab is not that big (at the moment). I will discover the points mentioned above, for example the extended screens of the setup assistant, to cover all your needs.
Today there is no special topic dealt with but i’ll provide you some general helpful things. Veeam Backup & Replication is the best availability software i know. In our company we install it at every customer who’s using either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. We love it and our customers too, they don’t even know that there was something. We can handle any issues in minutes.