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Veeam – Backup your Office 365 mailboxes (on a UNC path)

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Veeam Backup for Office 365

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:

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans

Microsoft Office 365 Business Plans

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.

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Veeam – Configure Azure Direct Restore with Veeam 9.5

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Azure

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.

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Veeam – Automatic backup tests with SureBackup

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SureBackup

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.

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.

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