TOP 10 must-have reports for any responsible IaaS Service Provider

As the NEW Veeam ONE v11a brings additional RESTful API (preview) endpoints, more and more service providers are getting interested in general product capabilities. The following blog is the first chapter of our series covering Veeam ONE features, which could be beneficial for any Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) running a hosting environment.

In any IaaS infrastructure, one of the critical parts of service implementation is to have visibility over the virtual infrastructure as a key element to run a stable and reliable service. At the same time, being able to protect workloads while meeting SLA requirements and adhering to compliance policies is an essential service our VCSP partners are already providing for their customers. The only product, which can combine monitoring and reporting capabilities for both virtual and backup infrastructures is Veeam ONE.

Veeam ONE is the product built for all types of Veeam customers — small or medium businesses, enterprises or service providers — certainly, there is something for everyone. Once the product is deployed, you may find yourself overwhelmed with a countless number of reports, alarms, and dashboards, wondering “which ones are actually useful for my IaaS business?”

In this blog post, I’ll navigate you through the most useful reports to help you get started, and possibly, even find a few hidden gems in the process.

Virtual infrastructure reports

First, let’s talk about virtual Infrastructure reports, which our service providers tend to find the most useful for their hosting environment. Veeam ONE has a full integration with VMware Cloud Director (VCD), which means that certain reports, alarms and multi-tenancy capabilities can be used with a VCD scope or hierarchy in mind.

Undersized VMs/Oversized VMs

Do you encounter IaaS customers, complaining about applications and VM performance?

This report is the easiest way to find out if there are any VMs running out of available compute resources (vCPU/RAM) and, moreover, it can provide resource allocation recommendations.

Use case

Help your sales team identify compute resources upsell opportunities within the hosting environment. In addition to that, Oversized VMs is extremely beneficial in finding out overprovisioned VMs to help you optimizing the resource usage across the internal workloads.

Detailed overview: VMware / Hyper-V

Guest Disk Free Space

Once you are done with analyzing compute resources, what’s the next big thing that often gets overlooked

That’s right, it’s VM disk free space. This report provides information about the VMs running out of space, equipping you with a breakdown report for each VM disk within monitored environments. Additionally, it shows trends and days to reach 100% disk space utilization, which is handy to resolve free space issues proactively.

Use case

Both for your internal VMs or if you’d like to create a better experience for your IaaS tenants, run this report and inform your customers about VMs running out of space.

Detailed overview: VMware / Hyper-V

Active/Orphaned VM snapshots

What is the quickest way to find all of the snapshots in the IaaS environment?

Indeed, ever since VM snapshots were initially introduced, the problem when someone creates snapshots and then forgets to delete them exists. The Active Snapshots/Checkpoints report shows a list of all the VMs with snapshots, including the oldest and the largest snapshots in the virtual environment. The Orphaned VM Snapshots report helps to find all the snapshots not visible in the Snapshot Manager, including potential leftovers from the third-party software, e.g., backup solutions (for Veeam backup process, it’s taken care of by Snapshot Hunter, running in a background).

Use case

Have a quick and easy way to track down snapshots that are no longer needed and still consume valuable datastore space and impacting performance. Worth mentioning that these reports are also handy for MSPs, who performs an initial assessment of the customer’s on-premises infrastructure.

Detailed overview: Active Snapshots / Active Checkpoints

VM Change Rate Estimation

How do you provision enough repository space for newly added VMs? If you got hit by a ransomware attack, how could you detect the time when it happened?

This report helps to find out how much data is written on virtual disks of VMs over a certain timeframe and predicts the number of changed blocks in the future. Quick tip: the chart and VM list is clickable and allows to see a drill down with change rate statistics for each VM disk.

Use case

Pick a suitable datastore for a VM performance-wise, allocate enough space on the repository for VM incremental backups. Also, this report could be an additional ransomware detection layer, helping you figure out the timeframe when the change rate increased rapidly.

Detailed overview: VMware / Hyper-V

VM Growth

Do you know how many VMs were added to your cloud infrastructure over a period of time?

While running IaaS, new VMs are constantly provisioned, this report shows daily changes and focuses on VM count, vCPU, and RAM resource allocation.

Use case

Control VM sprawl and optimize resource utilization across the hosts. Provides an easy to communicate high-level overview of the state of environment(s) for the upper-management team.

Detailed overview: VMware / Hyper-V

Backup infrastructure reports

Once you’ve got some insights on your virtual hosting infrastructure, the next step is to get more insights on your backup Infrastructure. Veeam ONE can report on plenty of data points, including protected VMs, backup size, RPO and audit. Let’s highlight several reports, which service providers use very often.

Protected VMs

How do you find out about VMs without backup in your infrastructure? Do all backup jobs meet the required RPO?

This report shows VM name, size, number of restore points and when the latest restore point was created. The scope can be based on any part of the virtual infrastructure including, VMware Cloud Director.

Use case

Keep track of backup job results in a single report and make sure all tenants’ VMs are protected and meet the required RPO. Leverage VCD scope or Business View functionality to create reports tailored to specific business function, custom SLA requirements for a subset of workloads, etc.

Detailed overview: Protected VMs

Data Change Rate History

How much space should I provision for a backup job on a repository? How can I detect a suspicious incremental backup size?

Similar to the VM Change Rate Estimation report but from the backups perspective, the information in this report helps with provisioning the required repository based on VM/Agent backup data change rate.

Use case

Understand when you need to increase repository size or migrate the backup data. This is helpful when you want to get some grasp on the backup data, its trends and enable infrastructure engineers to detect ransomware attack early on, as such activity often results in a much higher change rate on a VM or physical server.

Detailed overview: Data Change Rate History

Job History

How do you get an overview of all jobs, get insight on average backup duration, transfer rates, bottlenecks?

Of course, you can open the backup server and manually check the status for each job. However, it could be much more convenient to generate this report and see statuses for all jobs and include several charts like Top Jobs by Average Duration and Transferred Data, Successful Backup Ratio by Day. Click on a particular job to see a detailed breakdown, which includes job bottlenecks and data transfer rates.

Use case

Quickly get a performance overview of all jobs, compare metrics between different days and perform some basic troubleshooting.

Detailed overview: Job History

Database Protection History

How do you check if SQL and Oracle databases log backup always meets SLA?

This report is the easiest and quickest way to ensure that all SQL and Oracle log backup jobs meet the required RPO. By clicking on a specific VM/Agent, get a breakdown of all its databases protection history.

Use case

By its nature, SQL/Oracle log backup jobs are constantly running, so by running this report, you can quickly identify issues with protection strategy of the databases.

Detailed overview: Database Protection History

BONUS: Infrastructure Overview

Do you have up-to-date diagrams of your IaaS infrastructure? Do you create documentation for your customers’ deployment projects?

Veeam ONE can automatically build a set of Visio diagrams based on your virtual infrastructure — VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. The topology will include:

• Configuration inventory
• Storage inventory
• Network inventory (available for VMware vSphere only)
• Datastore Utilization (available for VMware vSphere only)
• vMotion (available for VMware vSphere only)

Use case

Simplify the process of creating documentation for your IaaS environment or, if Veeam ONE is deployed, on customer site and get a better insight of their infrastructure.
Here is an example of a configuration inventory diagram:

Detailed overview: Infrastructure Overview (Visio)

To sum it up, Veeam ONE has something to offer to all service providers. It’s not just about monitoring and reporting for your hosting and backup environment, it’s an ability to improve an overall quality of service for your customers as well as a powerful tool to provide actionable information to all business units, including sales and engineering departments.

In this article, I have only scratched the surface of what Veeam ONE has to offer, so stay tuned for the next chapters of the series, where we are going to focus on how to build a value-added service with Veeam ONE. Specifically, we are going to touch on capacity planning, chargeback and audit capabilities, utmost beneficial for IaaS providers and MSPs. In addition to that, we are going to discuss multi-tenant access capabilities and respective services.

Also, make sure to check out our technical webinar, Powerful Monitoring & Analytics for Cloud & Service Providers (Thursday, Oct. 28, 11 a.m. CEST), where Artem Philippov and Yury Lichman will provide a deep-dive of Veeam ONE use cases for service providers, including core features and NEW RESTful API capabilities. It’s a great chance to ask questions as well as give feedback right to the Solution Architects team!

The post TOP 10 must-have reports for any responsible IaaS Service Provider appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/must-have-reports-for-iaas-service-providers.html

3 new capabilities of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform v2

Veeam has been hard at work this month releasing multiple new versions of its cloud products. Today we are going to look at Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform version 2. This new release brings some exciting capabilities to further enhance the ability to protect GCP workloads.

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform is a cloud-native backup solution that delivers enterprise-grade backup consistency to the GCP public cloud. Packed full of features and capabilities, Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform is a component of the Veeam-centralized data management suite.

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform v2 has three new capabilities that provide customers with the expected capabilities needed when protecting workloads in the cloud.

Centralized data management

More and more customers are finding themselves living in a multi-cloud or multi-platform world. This is becoming complex for backup administrators to navigate with multiple products being used to protect different cloud environments and different on-premises platforms. Being able to centrally manage all the different backup polices across different platforms is key to delivering a successful business continuity solution.

With Veeam Backup & Replication v11a and Veeam Backup for for Google Cloud Platform v2, you can now manage your cloud backup policies directly from Veeam Backup & Replication. By simply adding in the platform to the managed servers of Veeam Backup & Replication, you can then manage all the backup policies, snapshots and backups from within the Veeam Backup & Replication console. This also allows a backup operator to manage multiple platform backup policies all from within that same console.

Integration with Veeam Backup & Replication provides the ability to create and manage backup policies, perform restores from snapshots and backups, and restore workloads not only to the existing GCP platform, but also to other cloud platforms, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and on-premises platforms like VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

This centralized data management experience is an important tool in customers building on the benefits of the multi-cloud world and delivering a true enterprise grade data protection solution.

Cloud Archive storage

Due to the uptake in cloud usage, more and more focus is being put on the costs of implementing these platforms. As ransomware and security demands increase on these implementations, backup operators are being forced to store more and more data for longer just on the off chance a critical event impacts the data being protected. With Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform v2, it is now possible to leverage Google Cloud Platform Archive tier to help reduce the long-term data retention storage costs. It’s extremely easy to implement this feature. Simply create an object storage repository using the archive storage class and turn on archiving in the scheduling wizard when creating a backup policy.

Once backup data has been stored for longer than 365 days, it will be moved to the Archive Tier and kept for the number of years defined in the policy.

Automation and the RESTful API

This release of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform has included a full public RESTful API. All the operations are available via API calls, which provides customers and service providers with the ability to build and integrate Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform into their solutions.

Using a Swagger UI, anyone can build a fully automated backup solution and integrate that into any pre-existing solution they may have.

The post 3 new capabilities of Veeam Backup <em>for Google Cloud Platform</em> v2 appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/gcp-backup-v2-new-capabilities.html

3 key features of Veeam Backup for AWS v4

Recently, Veeam brought a new release of its AWS backup solution, Veeam Backup for AWS v4. Veeam is constantly innovating and developing new features to help customers deliver on the promise of cloud-native data protection.

Veeam Backup for AWS is a cloud-native backup solution that delivers enterprise-grade backup consistency to the AWS public cloud. Packed full of features and capabilities, Veeam Backup for AWS is a component of the Veeam-centralized data management suite, leveraging Amazon S3 object storage and other AWS services to integrate and provide a seamless data protection experience.

With Veeam Backup for AWS v4, we have included three key features that deliver on that promise of providing enterprise data protection.

EFS volume protection

EFS volume protection provides the capabilities to back up and protect all your AWS EFS volumes and restore either the entire EFS volume, or individual files. By creating an EFS volume protection policy in Veeam Backup for AWS, you can specify a local EFS backup vault and have the option to copy the backup to a different vault in a different region.

When restoring an EFS volume, a number of different capabilities exist including file-level restore and full-volume restore.

When performing a restore of either the full volume or individual files, these can be restored across different AWS accounts, to the original location or to a new location with different settings. This offers a powerful way to carry out restores, giving granular control to the restore operator. Whether recovering production data directly to the environment, or to a staging or recovery environment, possessing these different options is critical in a production environment.

KMS Support

With Veeam Backup for AWS, you can now use AWS KMS (Key Management Service) keys to encrypt the backup data at rest in an object storage backup repository. These keys are created in the AWS console and then used to encrypt the backup data at rest. This provides secure backup storage of the data in the object storage repositories within AWS.

When a KMS encryption key is selected, all backups stored within that repository will then use that key for encryption. Veeam Backup for AWS also checks that none of the keys being used for encryption are marked for pending deletion. If this is the case, a notification will be displayed giving the backup operator seven days to select a different key. Enabling encryption for data at rest is an important tool for fighting against data theft, meeting compliance regulations for certain industries (healthcare, financial, etc.) and protecting against unauthorized access. Leveraging AWS KMS keys provides a simple way to manage the encryption on your backup repositors.

Archive Tiers

With more and more data being stored in the cloud, longer-term data retention costs have been coming to forefront of administrator’s minds. With the latest version of Veeam Backup for AWS, different tiers are now supported when creating object storage backup repositories. Three different tiers are supported:

• S3
• S3 Glacier
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Once the different repositories are created and configured, you define which backup repository and archive repository you want to use from within the backup policy configuration wizard.

When the backup archiving is enabled, Veeam Backup for AWS will use the selected archive for longer-term data storage costs. Enabling longer-term data retention on specified archives is done through the monthly backup scheduling wizard by simply toggling the “Send backups to archive” switch. Any backups stored for longer than 180 days will be sent to the backup archive.

This automatic policy option helps reduce data storage costs when keeping backups for longer durations.

Summary

Veeam Backup for AWS v4 contains some significant new feature capabilities to help bring true enterprise data protection to the AWS public cloud. With Veeam Backup for AWS, you can manage data protection for EC2 & RDS instances, protect and restore VPC configuration data, and now protect your EFS volumes all from within one centrally managed location. Additionally, with Veeam Backup & Replication, you can manage all your cloud platforms from within one management portal.

The post 3 key features of Veeam Backup <em>for AWS</em> v4 appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/aws-backup-v4-key-features.html

NEW Azure backup and recovery for Azure SQL and more!

Veeam has just released a new version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure v3. In this release, a great number of features and capabilities have been included to deliver on the promise of true cloud-native data protection.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure is a cloud-native backup solution that delivers enterprise-grade backup consistency to the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Packed full of features and capabilities, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure is a component of the Veeam-centralized data management suite.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure v3 contains many new features and key enhancements.

Azure SQL

More and more customers are turning to managed database services to provide capabilities to their businesses. Simplifying the deployment and management of traditional SQL environments, Azure SQL is a fully managed database service. While simplifying the management of these databases is key to the uptake of these services, protecting the data contained in these databases has become a challenge. With any cloud service, the data protection is always the responsibility of the consumer, and while the provider may provide an SLA for uptime, the data itself is always the concern. Corruption, ransomware attacks, or even accidental deletion of this data must always be protected against.

With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, you can now protect your Azure SQL data. Simply creating an Azure SQL backup policy allows you to configure backups of the managed Azure SQL databases. With in-built staging capabilities to process backups, greater control is handed to the backup operators. Staging servers configured in Microsoft Azure can be used to process the database backups more efficiently.

Data retention can be configured for a different number of configurations, from daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, and additionally, backup archiving can be configured to lower the storage costs for longer-term data retention. As with all of Veeam’s cloud products, the in-built cost estimation wizard gives guidance on the cost of the backups, including giving guidance on storage costs and suggesting alternatives.

Azure Key Vault support

With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, you can now use Azure Key Vault keys to encrypt the backup data at rest in an object storage backup repository. These keys are created in the Microsoft Azure console and then used to encrypt the backup data at rest. This provides secure backup storage of the data in the Azure Blob storage repositories.

Azure Archive Storage

Cloud-based object storage is an easy low-cost way to store backup data. With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, support for Azure Blob archive has been included in this release. Providing low-cost, long-term data retention for backup data being stored in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. It is easily configurable from within the backup policy scheduling wizard by selecting an archive tier repository and defining the retention periods.

Summary

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure v3 contains some significant enhancements to provide true cloud-native data protection. While these features are extremely significant for cloud-based data protection, for a number of customers who are living in a multi-cloud world, a more centralized approach is needed. Rather than having multiple standalone products protecting different platforms, Veeam provides integration into Veeam Backup & Replication to allow customers to centrally manage all their platforms, whether it be on premises, such as VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, or in the cloud with Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform.

The post NEW Azure backup and recovery for Azure SQL and more! appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/azure-sql-backup-recovery.html

Previewing the Future — Veeam ONE APIs for VCSP partners

Veeam ONE in a service provider world

Veeam ONE has always been a quiet achiever for Veeam and sometimes doesn’t get the airtime it deserves. I remember leveraging certain features of Veeam ONE back in my service provider days, using the free version to monitor our Cloud Connect infrastructure.  The ability to provide monitoring and reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication, vCenter, Hyper-V and VMware Cloud Director infrastructures made it a useful tool for our service providers to leverage.

Put that together with the new features and enhancements that have been added over the past two to three major releases, and Veeam ONE remains one of the best monitoring and reporting platforms out on the market. The one thing it lacked, which was always a top request and much anticipated by our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners was an API… until recently!

RESTful API V2 preview in V11a

With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v11, we unleashed a new modern JSON-based API that was independent from Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager, and was installed by default with Veeam Backup & Replication. This was talked about during the V11 launch wave, however, we also released V1 of the new Veeam ONE API, though at the time there wasn’t much noise being made about it as it only had a few methods focused on providing license management and license usage reporting capabilities

With the release of Veeam ONE v11a, there has been a significant update to that API, which is now in full preview mode. That means, that as of v11a, customers, partners, and more specifically from my point of view, our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners, can start to get familiar with the new API with the end goal of being ready for when full supportability is offered in the next major Veeam ONE release.

Swagger plus a couple of examples

As is the norm with all Veeam APIs, there is a Swagger interface that presents all the V2 endpoints.

There is the ability to pull JSON format data about ESXi hosts in a vCenter

and endpoints that focus on grabbing VMware Cloud Director information.

There are many more endpoints and methods as part of this preview release covering virtual infrastructure, Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure and jobs, workload and data protected by Veeam Backup & Replication, alarm, and business view categories.

Conclusion

Veeam ONE continues to expand its RESTful API coverage, and now provides a preview of the REST API endpoints planned to be delivered in the future major Veeam ONE version. That said, specifically for our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners, it is well worth looking at this V2 release to see what information can be extracted and manipulated with the included endpoints. This addition significantly adds to the value of Veeam ONE for our services providers to leverage in their service offerings.

To learn what method-implemented operations you can perform with Veeam ONE entities, and how to control and sort the data that the REST API returns, see the REST API Reference.

Please leave any feedback on our R&D forums and what you would like to see covered next to help us prioritize!

The post Previewing the Future — Veeam ONE APIs for VCSP partners appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/vcsp-partners-apis.html

Veeam Service Provider Console v6: Hitting the easy button for licensing plus other enhancements

Licensing is never fun

No matter which way you look at it, software licensing is never fun. It is not a stretch to suggest that licensing may be the most hated part of IT. For those responsible for looking after the installation and ongoing management of licenses for both internal and customer use, it is something that is never enjoyable. In the Service Provider and MSP space, the complexities of license management are taken to the next level, with the cutting and management of keys for reseller and/or tenant use pain points being felt at scale.

Veeam has been focused on reducing the pain of licensing in general for a number of years now and specifically in the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) space with the Veeam Service Provider Console (aka The Console). All the while, we have also been hard at work developing a specifically focused tool for our VCSP partners to leverage for licensing called VCSP Pulse.

The simple focus from us was to make licensing easy and as efficient as possible…

Introducing Veeam Service Provider Console v6

Just over six months after the last V5 release of Veeam Service Provider Console, we have released V6 with a number of significant enhancements. None are bigger than the VCSP Pulse licensing integration, which goes a long way in making licensing a lot easier for our VCSP partners. As mentioned above, this is something that has been a focus of the VCSP R&D and Product Management team for a while and V6 delivers a significant enhancement to the way licenses will be managed and reported on moving forward.

Pulse license integration

VCSP Pulse has been pushed out globally for our VCSP partners for some time now, but the endgame was always to look at integrating this with the Veeam Service Provider Console. With The Console becoming the source of truth for license counts, it made sense to be able to have it also play a central role in license management and reporting.

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Starting in V6, service providers leveraging Pulse can take it to the next level. In V6, the ability to create/manage/install licenses can be done natively via the Veeam Service Provider Console UI with on-demand license generation and license management resulting in a complete lifecycle approach to licenses. Service provider administrators can create, install, revoke and update license keys generated via the VCSP Pulse plug-in or be done via automation with updated RESTful APIs. This allows service providers to integrate the new VCSP Pulse plug-in capabilities into existing third-party portals and enhance the customer onboarding process.

In addition to that, resellers now have the ability to provide a similar license management experience as service providers have via the VCSP Pulse plug-in. Reseller administrators can now generate license keys for Veeam products using the portal while service providers can assign points quotas to reseller accounts to be used to generate their own licenses.

Connecting to Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365

One of the big requests from service providers was the inclusion of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and Veeam ONE into The Console. In Veeam Service Provider Console v6, service providers can extend visibility of managed Veeam ONE (available at V11a and later releases) and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 (starting at V6)¹ servers. This also extends to license usage reporting and management, which simplifies the tasks of reconciling multiple Veeam products against customers and partners.

Version 3.2 of the RESTful APIs

Updated endpoints and actions. 80+ updates were made to existing endpoints based on the feedback from Veeam Service Provider Console users. The detailed list and changelog can be reviewed in the documentation. 

Read-only role. Based on the feedback, service providers can now create “read-only” RESTful API keys for integrating with existing portals. The read-only property is not exposed in the UI and can only be configured via RESTful APIs. 

General enhancements

Along with the licensing and security enhancements, V6 comes with additional features linked to Veeam Backup & Replication. We have added support for hosted Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 servers, which are installed within the service provider platform, giving The Console direct access to view the health and status of those servers. There is also supported awareness for Nutanix AHV workloads, as well as the ability to perform actions against Veeam Agent Jobs.

Enhanced agents

To better secure communication between Veeam Service Provider Console and the management agents that are installed on remote systems, these agents are using tokenized security certificates, which replace username and password authentication in previous versions.

In addition to that, Veeam Agents for Windows, Linux and Mac are pre-configured with all the required information to connect back to the VCSP instance, which eliminates the need for end users or admins to enter in specific details about the connection.

Single sign on with SAML

Building on the multi-factor support that came in V5 of Veeam Service Provider Console, in V6 we have continued to improve the login experience by extending support for SAML-based authentication providers. This allows service providers to register the external SAML provider of their choice and map groups or users to enable single sign on. This can be done at the service provider and reseller levels and can avoid the doubling up of user creation for those already leveraging third-party authentication providers.

Remote PowerShell

In addition, the highlight of this enhanced support is the addition of Remote PowerShell access for more direct troubleshooting of remote servers, with the added bonus of being able to create/modify/delete jobs on the remote Veeam Backup & Replication server.

This is an evolution of the remote features we brought into Veeam Backup & Replication to launch a remote Console session or RDP directly into a remote server over a secure Cloud Connect tunnel. Having the ability to now remote execute PowerShell opens a lot more options for help desk operators using Veeam Service Provider Console.

Conclusion

It seems like every new release of the Veeam Service Provider Console we talk about it becoming the single source of truth for complete awareness and control of managed Veeam workloads. With the V6 release, it is clear that we have solidified that and strengthened the call to action to have The Console installed as part of all Veeam Cloud & Service Provider platforms. These new features increase service provider, reseller and customer productivity, making it a single source of truth and a powerful tool to be used.

Check out the What’s New and head to the Veeam.com download site to install or upgrade to Veeam Service Provider Console v6.

¹ _{Compatibility with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will be available at V6 and later releases. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v6 is expected to release later this year.}

The post Veeam Service Provider Console v6: Hitting the easy button for licensing plus other enhancements appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/service-provider-console-v6.html

The Latest and Greatest Veeam Backup & Replication v11

When Veeam Backup & Replication v11 went available in February of this year, I had no idea how much of an impact this release would have on the market. V11 came in my 11^th year here are Veeam, and while I knew it was the biggest release we’ve ever had — call me impressed!

Veeam Backup & Replication v11 overview

V11 ushered in over 200 new capabilities and enhancements. The headlining capabilities that continue to be deployed in the market include Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Hardened Linux Repository, new Instant Recovery capabilities for NAS, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, archive storage support in the cloud and more Veeam-powered Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) options than ever.

We also took V11 as a great way to make the upgrade process easier (Check out my V11 Upgrade Center) by leveraging the Veeam Universal License and by having a cumulative patch after the General Availability (GA) of V11.

Veeam Backup & Replication v11 resources

The innovation doesn’t stop there, however. V11 has been updated yet again to not only incorporate any additional scenarios that have been discovered since GA but also to incorporate new capabilities that were ready. By the way, the best way to know the scoop on what’s going on is to sign up for the Veeam R&D Forums, there you will get a weekly report right from Anton Gostev (senior VP of Product Management) himself on what’s the latest state of products from Veeam. Another great resource to be plugged into is the Veeam Community Resource Hub, which has scripts, discussions and suage scenarios discussed by an active group of Veeam users.

The latest update has been packaged as V11a and brings the latest updates since the GA but also new capabilities. The most notable of those is continued iteration in the cloud providing updates for AWS, Azure and GCP. In addition, begin adopting and testing now with full Windows Server 2022 support. Speaking of deep integration, V11a now has the ability to have Kasten K10 backup storage managed by Veeam Backup & Replication repositories which was previewed at VeeamON. This is a very easy way to let the Veeam backup infrastructure manage the Kubernetes backups provided by Kasten K10 by Veeam.

Veeam Backup & Replication v11 beats ransomware

While all of this is great momentum with new capabilities to be excited about, we have to constantly be on the watch out for threats to data. Ransomware is something we all have to deal with and we have continued to drive innovation in our productst to provide more immutability options than ever. Since GA, two significant white papers have been published to provide you the information you need to be resilient against ransomware:

• Protect against Ransomware with Immutable Backups: a Veeam Guide (Includes SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511 and CFTC Rule 1.31 (c)-(d) compliant configuration) by Hannes Kasparick in Veeam Product Management.
• 5 Ransomware Protection Best Practices – Veeam’s Definitive Guide for Data Protection by myself and Edwin Weijdema in Veeam Product Strategy.

These two resources are the way to ensure you have everything you need against the threats out there today.

What are others saying about V11?

Now that V11 has been out in market a bit, I had a chance to reach out to the Veeam Vanguards and Veeam Legends to see what their favorite V11 features are, here’s what they had to say:

Mildur, a Veeam Legend:

“My favorite feature is the new Linux Hardened Repo, it gives us an additional layer of security for the primary backup repository.

My second favorite feature is Linux FLR without the FLR Appliance. We can leverage our management linux VMs to do the FLR restore and don‘t need to add an extra vSphere or Hyper-V host to do the FLR restores. A good feature if you have only Nutanix AHV hosts in your environment.”

Frank Iversen, a Veeam Legend:

“My favorite feature is, without any doubt, the cloud-native backup options in AWS. With immutable backups we have a powerful defense against ransomware attacks.”

Didier Von Hoye, a Veeam Vanguard:

“The Veeam Hardened Repository in Veeam Backup & Replication v11 has improved our on-premises protection against ransomware significantly. No longer is only our off-site capacity tier on S3 object storage in the cloud protected via immutability. In addition, our on-premises Linux SOBR repository performance tiers, for both primary and secondary backups, now also benefit from immutability without 3rd party solution but on our hardware.”

James Kilby, a Veeam Vanguard:

“The Veeam Archive Tier and additional immutability options are excellent ways of protecting against site failure and site compromise.”

Michael Paul, a Veeam Legend:

“My favourite Veeam V11 feature is the expanded integration with Veeam Backup for AWS/Azure and coming in V11a, GCP. It’s time saving and enables new protection dataflows such as cloud to tape and cloud to Veeam Cloud Connect, ensuring 3-2-1 backup compliance.”

BertrandFR, a Veeam Legend:

“My first favourite feature is the Hardened Linux Repository, more security on performance tier.

My second favourite feature is CDP, the RPO at 15s to the second datacenter is awesome!”

Chris Childerhose, a Veeam Vanguard:

“My favourite Veeam V11 capability is the new CDP feature, it has allowed for another option for clients to have for DRaaS services.”

Al Rasheed, a Veeam Vanguard:

“The capabilities built into V11 provide stability, ease of use and peace of mind. With Veeam’s customer support, your modern data strategy is secure with minimal downtime or data loss.”

Geoff Burke, a Veeam Legend:

“One of my favorites is the persistent agent. There was a reg edit for Linux Agents before and it was dealing with those that I noticed how the constant injecting of agents could be detrimental in some cases. Since App aware backups in windows use an injected agent it is good to have the option to just leave it running in the guest OS.”

Joe Meixner, a Veeam Legend:

“My favorite feature is the Hardened Linux Repository. It gives you some more protection against encryption malware.

Second favorite feature is the backup job based on a VMware tag combination. It is a great feature to assign VMs to jobs automatically.”

vNote42, a Veeam Legend and Veeam Vanguard:

“My favorite Veeam V11 capability is the hardened repository. With it you can implement immutable backups on-prem seamlessly. It is used like a regular repository.

Also a great new feature in V11 is Persistent Guest Agent. It can be used to manage backup agents in a more secure way.”

Have you seen Veeam lately?

The reality is that V11 brings so many new capabilities, it’s sometimes hard to start and decide where to start and what to look at. Don’t worry as it is easier than you think to get started. You can download a trial very easily from the website and have a backup running in just minutes. Likewise if you haven’t upgraded to V11 yet, it’s easier than ever to do so. I’ve updated the V11 Upgrade Center to cover V11a and you can download V11a there.

The post The Latest and Greatest Veeam Backup & Replication v11 appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/latest-and-greatest-v11.html

Better cloud protection that you’ll love — No questions asked

Cloud adoption continues to accelerate with more and more organizations choosing public cloud infrastructure and platforms to run their production operations. The list of available services across these platforms is seemingly endless, including cloud VMs, databases, files systems, containers, serverless workloads and more.

We all know that just like with on-premises data, data in the cloud needs protecting, and a solution without comprehensive support for all data on any platform just isn’t modern.

Veeam is the Modern Data Protection platform, paving the way for organizations to rapidly adopt the cloud since 2014, without sacrificing data protection and security. More recently, Veeam has added cloud-native support for the leading public cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Veeam’s strategy for delivering these solutions is very straightforward:

• V1: Provide cost-effective, standalone backup for cloud VMs with in-cloud recovery options (e.g., AWS to AWS, Azure to Azure, GCP to GCP)
• V2: Deeply integrate the solution into Veeam Backup & Replication, providing a single console to protect and manage cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS and Kubernetes data
• V3+: Rapidly innovate and iterate, expanding support for and integrations with new cloud services and native technologies to accelerate your cloud adoption strategy

If you’ve been keeping an eye on these Veeam cloud solutions over the past 18 months, you’ll have noticed we are releasing new versions faster than ever, which include more and more capabilities so you can confidently protect the latest and greatest from your cloud provider of choice.

What’s new in V11a?

Veeam Backup & Replication v11a isn’t just any old alphabetical release. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant cloud releases in Veeam’s history, delivering many new capabilities for the cloud platforms you’re using today. These capabilities enable organizations to accelerate cloud adoption, ensuring data is reliably secured, protected and managed from a single platform that provides unparalleled choice and simplicity. Let’s take a brief look at the major new additions (more blogs to come on these new capabilities soon):

New services. Natively protected: Expand native backup and recovery to Amazon EFS ^NEW file systems and Azure SQL Databases ^NEW. Policy-based automation eases management and eliminates scripts, while fast and flexible recoveries keep you operational 24/7.

Increased security and control: Safeguard encrypted backup data from ransomware and other cyberthreats. Integration with Amazon KMS ^NEW and Azure Key Vault ^NEW and RBAC increases security with streamlined control over who can access what.

Lowest cost archive storage for cloud-native backups: Achieve data-retention goals without blowing up your monthly bill. NEW support for Amazon S3 Glacier, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Azure Blob Archive and Google Cloud Archive storage cuts costs by as much as 50X.

One Platform. Unlimited options: Centralize AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP ^NEW backup and recovery under a single, easy-to-use console. Directly restore ANY Veeam backup to AWS, Azure and GCP for unlimited cloud mobility.

Any cloud, your way

Not all data protection solutions provide reliable, comprehensive support for all private, public, hybrid- or multi-cloud platforms. Lack of support hinders your adoption of one or more public cloud platforms, results in multiple point products from differing vendors, or worse yet, keeps your data stranded on one cloud. Fragmented management and protection always increase cost and complexity.

Veeam provides unparalleled flexibility of choice when it comes to the consumption of solutions within our platform, tailoring protection to your needs today and in the future. This includes:

• As a standalone, modular component for dedicated protection of a public cloud, featuring native in-cloud backup and recovery (e.g., AWS to AWS).
• As Veeam Backup & Replication, a single console for cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS and Kubernetes protection. This also provides ultimate flexibility to backup, recover and migrate data across any platform with no charges
• Backup as a Service (BaaS) from one of 37,000+ expert Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSP) globally, or self-managed

Modern Data Protection is for the cloud-critical, and Veeam is the clear choice and leader to protect your expanding cloud workloads.

To help get you started risk-free and fast with Veeam’s industry-leading cloud solutions, register here for 30 days FREE and $250 in the cloud credit of your choice. You’ll even get 12 months coverage for the price of nine months when you buy!

 

The post Better cloud protection that you’ll love — No questions asked appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/v11a-cloud-continuum-story.html

Veeam Cloud Object Storage Deep Dive – Part Three, Benchmarks

Disclaimer:

Due to the frequency in which the cloud is changing, it is important to note the original publish date for this article is October 4, 2021 and as a result, things may have changed by the time you review this.

Welcome to the final part of our three-part series on Veeam and object storage. In part one we looked at the similarities and differences between the big three “hyperscale” cloud providers, then in part two we looked at how Veeam can be configured to optimise your object storage utilisation and efficiency. Now in part three we’ll look at some benchmarks to provide real results to help shape your object storage designs. Enabling you to accelerate your adoption of object storage in an effective manner.

Basics

To ensure this test was as fair as possible, I created a single VM, installed Windows Server 2019 and shut it down. I then created a backup job with some common attributes detailed below and cloned the backup job three times. Within each of these clones I only changed the block size and the repository (all separate folders within an NTFS 4k partition), ensuring all other settings were identical.

The environmental settings configured were:

• Local repositories were all configured to align backup file data blocks.
• Each repository was configured as a Scale-out Backup Repository (SOBR) with a separate object storage, for my testing I created 4x storage accounts, each one within a different resource group within Microsoft Azure. The SOBR was configured for copy mode in each instance.
• All cloud repositories were hot tier, LRS storage within the same region (UK – South).
• Guest Processing was disabled, with the VM shut down to ensure the blocks were identical per backup.
• Compression Level was set to optimal
• Inline Data Deduplication, Exclude Swap File Blocks and Exclude deleted file blocks were all left to defaults (enabled).
• Jobs were configured as forward incremental
• Job schedule was disabled, ensuring the VM data was identical for each job run.

Full and incremental run

With the jobs configured as above, I ran the initial full backups and documented the API calls generated from Microsoft Azure and the file space consumed on the NTFS partition by the VBK files only. I then proceeded to boot up the VM, download the latest Veeam ISO to its storage and then shut the VM down once more. I then ran the incremental runs from each backup job. Once the job runs were completed, I collated the results.

Results

First, let’s take a look at the API requests:

Graph showing the disk space consumed for backup and incremental job runs relative to the storage optimisation selected. See table below for breakdown. 

Block Type	Full Backup Size (MB)	Incremental Backup Size (MB)	Full Backup Size – Relative to Local	Incremental Backup Size – Relative to Local
Local Large	5842	9445	99.73%	103.43%
Local	5858	9132	100.00%	100.00%
LAN	5862	9055	100.06%	99.16%
WAN	5896	9081	100.65%	99.44%

When running our full backup, the smaller block sizes actually gave us a slight storage consumption penalty in addition to the massive increase in API calls. If you’re wondering why we still have LAN/WAN as target options with these results, it’s because we’ll see the benefit within the incremental backups. At this point we see that Local Large goes from being our overall favourite to suffering its first loss, with an increase in storage of over 3%, whereas we start to see LAN and WAN being more reserved with the storage they require for the incremental backups. Remember that for this example, the changes for incremental backup were generated by copying files to the VM. The increase in storage used based on block size will vary depending on the workload type.

Note that it is also possible to choose a larger block size of 8 MB by enabling a registry key in Veeam Backup & Replication v11a.

Cost

Whilst it’s been intriguing to review all these numbers, what really matters is what this will cost you. So let’s take a look at the end result, as prices vary month to month, here’s a snapshot of what the costs were at the time:

Storage Per GB: £0.015 per month

API Calls: £0.44 per 10k operations

 

Block Type	Total Storage Required (MB)	Storage Cost Per Month	Total API Calls Required	API Costs	Total Cost:
Local Large	15287	£0.23	5270	£0.02	£0.25
Local	14990	£0.21	19590	£0.09	£0.30
LAN	14917	£0.21	38660	£0.17	£0.38
WAN	14977	£0.21	76140	£0.33	£0.54

Closing comments

Whilst the test sizes here are small, they scale. Collating this data together gives us this table:

Block Type	API Calls Per MB
Local Large	0.34
Local	1.31
LAN	2.59
WAN	5.08

Veeam’s average expectation varies from this and is used in lieu of specific workload testing, if in doubt refer to this table:

Block Type	API Calls Per MB (Average)
Local Large	0.25
Local	1
LAN	2
WAN	4

Now you can calculate an approximate cost for creating a backup by using these tables and the formula below:

CODE - Backup Size * Block Size (0.25 for Local Large | 1 for Local | 2 for LAN | 4 for WAN)

Conclusion

We now have reached the end of part three, where we see these metrics in practice. To summarise, in part one we compared the “Big Three” main hyperscale cloud providers and reviewed what made them similar and different, in part two we reviewed the settings available within Veeam to optimise our object storage utilisation and the different scenarios we should plan for when working with object storage. Finally, in part three we created a benchmark against which we now have realistic expectations as to the costs associated with the clouds.

As with all backup data sets and cloud use cases, your mileage may vary. This is a point of view for one deployment as shown but gives you a perspective on how cloud storage can be used for Veeam backups.

Thank you for reading and please let us know if you have any questions or comments regarding this series.

The post Veeam Cloud Object Storage Deep Dive – Part Three, Benchmarks appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/cloud-object-storage-benchmarks.html

#1 Office 365 Backup Guide

In this blog, we’ll be focusing on a new easy-to-read technical guide we recently released called, #1 Office 365 Backup by Veeam. You can download it here, or read an overview of the excerpts below.

Since the inception of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam has made it our mission to educate the IT community on the importance of protecting data in Office 365. Fortunately, as time has gone by, more and more organizations understand the “why” of SaaS backup and want to focus on the “how”. So, we have created a new easy-to-read technical guide on Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 which explains everything from what the components are, to how get up and running creating your first backups and restores. Let’s cover a few important aspects of deploying Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Installation package

The Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 installation package consists of the following four MSI files:

1. Veeam.Backup365.msi

Installs Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 with the following services:

• Control global configuration settings
• Manage backup proxy servers
• Process REST commands. (This component is disabled by default and can be enabled)

2. VeeamExplorerForExchange.msi

Installs Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange.

3. VeeamExplorerForSharePoint.msi

Installs Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft OneDrive for Business.

4. VeeamExplorerForTeams.msi

Installs Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams.

You can download the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 installation package from the official Veeam website.

Infrastructure components

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is a comprehensive solution that allows you to back up and restore data of your Office 365 organizations, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams data, as well as data of on-premises Microsoft Exchange and on-premises Microsoft SharePoint organizations.

There are three core components of this solution — backup server, backup proxy and backup repository.

Backup server

The Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 server is the central configuration and control component. It is responsible for setting up and managing other components, job scheduling, task coordination and more.

The server can be installed on a physical or virtual windows-based machine. The server includes access to Console UI. RESTful API and PowerShell are also components.

Backup proxy

The Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 proxy is the workhorse behind the scenes which conducts all the read and write activities, and intelligently converts objects to smaller, manageable items.

Backup proxies provide an optimal route for backup traffic and enables data transfers to happen efficiently.

Backup repository

The Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 repository is the location where Office 365 data is stored. Repositories can also store important metadata used during backup and recovery operations. Backup repositories are supported on the following types of storage: object storage (on-premises and cloud), directly attached storage (DAS), SAN, SMB (Server Message Block 3.0).

Simple versus advanced deployments

With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you can use both simple and advanced deployment options. Find out which one will work best for you.

Simple deployments

Simple deployment includes the installation of all components onto a single server. This machine can be either virtual or physical. Specs should follow configuration maximums. In this scenario, all the major components (i.e., the server, proxy and repository) are installed on the same machine.

A simple deployment scales out by adding multiple repositories that are operated by the same built-in proxy server. Simple deployments are suitable for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to have a local backup copy of their Office 365 data on-premises. This applies to public cloud deployments like Azure Cloud, AWS and other offering too. In this case, backup data can be stored on disk/file-based repositories attached to the servers, as well as object storage repositories sitting in the public cloud and on-premises.

Advanced deployments

Advanced deployment gives the option to scale out installations by adding proxy and repository components to meet demanding business requirements. The process of adding these components is handled by the main server. When scaling out to an advanced deployment, the server installs the necessary components onto the required servers. It works by deploying the main veeam.archiver.proxy service along with a copy of the infrastructure configuration.

This newly added proxy benefits from the view of the entire infrastructure and provides the option to configure backup jobs by using additional repository targets. This entire process is wizard driven. Full automation is also possible using native PowerShell commands and RESTful APIs. As of v5, servers and proxies can be part of the same domain, a separate domain (with trust relationship) and even part of workgroups.

Infrastructure planning

Typically, the size of an environment dictates the deployment model. The size of an environment is not necessarily related to the number of Office 365 users to protect. Instead, it’s based on the number of objects to protect.

Getting started with sizing is easy: you can size your environment with the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Capacity Calculator!

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably interested in the full technical guide! Download here to keep reading!

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Additional resources:

• Still not convinced you need an Office 365 backup? Read about the Office 365 Shared Responsibility Model
• Download a 30-day FREE trial of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
• Join a technical demo by a Veeam Systems Engineer

The post #1 Office 365 Backup Guide appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Published first here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/office-365-backup-guide.html