Tag Archives: VCSP

Update 4 for Service Providers – Tape as a Service

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When Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 went Generally Available a couple of weeks ago I posted a What’s in it for Service Providers blog. In that post I briefly outlined all the new features and enhancements in Update 4 that pertain to our Veeam Cloud and Service Providers. As mentioned each new major feature deserves it’s own seperate post and today I’m kicking off the series with what I feel was probably the least talked about new feature in Update 4…Tape as a Service for Cloud Connect Backup.

As a reminder here are the top new features and enhancements in Update 4 for VCSPs.

Tape as a Service for Cloud Connect Backup:

When we introduced Cloud Connect Backup in version 8 of Backup & Replication we offered the ability for VCSPs to offer a secure, remote offsite repository for their tenants. When thinking about air-gapped backups…though protected at the VCSP end, ultimate control for what was backed up to the Cloud Repository is in the hands of the tenant. From the tenant’s server they could manipulate the backups stored via policy or a malicious user could gain access to the server and delete the offsite copies.

In Update 3 of Backup & Replication 9.5 we added Insider Protection to Cloud Connect Backup, which allowed the VCSP to put a policy on the tenant’s Cloud Repository that would protect backups from a malicious attack. With this option enabled, when a backup or a specific restore point in the backup chain is deleted or aged out from the cloud repository. The actual backup files are not deleted immediately, instead, they are moved to a _RecycleBin folder on the repositories.

In Update 4 we have taken that a step further to add true air-gapped backup options that VCSPs can create services around for longer term retention with the Tenant to Tape feature. This allows a VCSP to offer additional level of data protection for their tenants. The tenant sends a copy of the backup data to their cloud repository, and the VCSP then configures backup to tape to send another copy to the tape media. If there is a situation that requires recovery if data in the cloud repository becomes unavailable, the VCSP can initiate a restore from tape.

VCSPs can also offer a tape out services to help their tenants achieve compliance and internal policies without maintaining their own tape infrastructure. Tapes can be stored by the service providers, or shipped back to tenant as shown in the diagram below.

To take advantage of this new Update 4 feature VCSPs will need to configure Tape Infrastructure on the Cloud Connect server. What’s great about Veeam is that we have the option to use traditional tape infrastructure or take advantage of Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) which can then be backed by Object Storage such as Amazon S3. I am not going to walk through that process in this post, there are a number of blogs and White Papers available that guide you on the setup of an Amazon Storage Gateway to use as a VTL.

Once the Tape Infrastructure is in place, as a VCSP with a Cloud Connect license when you upgrade to Update 4, under Tape Infrastructure you will see a new option called Tenant to Tape.

A tenant backup to tape job is a variant of a backup to tape job targeted at a GFS Media Pool which is available for Veeam customers with regular licensing. What’s interesting about this feature is that there are a number of options that allow flexibility on how the jobs are created which also leads to a change of use case for the feature depending on which option is chosen.

Choosing Backup Jobs will allow VCSPs to add any jobs that may be registered on the Cloud Connect server…though in reality there shouldn’t be any configured due to licensing constraints. The other two options provide the different use cases.

Backup Repositories:

This allows the VCSP to backup to tape one or more cloud repositories that can contain one or multiple tenants. The can allow the VCSP to backup the Cloud Connect repository in whole to an offsite location for longer term retention.

The ability to archive tenant Cloud Connect Backups to tape can help VCSPs protect their own infrastructure against disasters that may result in loss of tenant data. It can be used as another level of revenue generating service. As an example, there could be two service offerings for Cloud Connect Backup… one with a basic SLA which only has one copy of the backup data stored… and another with an advanced SLA that has data saved in two locations…the Cloud Connect Repository and the tape media. 

Tenants:

This option offers a lot more granularity and gives the VCSP the ability to offer an additional level of protection on a per tenant level. In fact you can also drill down to the Tenant repository level and select individual repositories if tenants have more than one configured.

Again, this can be done per tenant, or there can be one master job for all tenants.

It’s important to understand that all tasks within the tenant backup to tape feature are performed by the VCSP. Unless the VCSP has created a portal that has information about the jobs, the tenant is generally unaware of the tape infrastructure and the tenant can’t view or manage backup to tape jobs configured or perform operations with backups created by these jobs. There is scope for VCSPs to integrate such jobs and actions into their automation portals for self service.

Restores:

VCSPs can restore tenant data from tape for one tenant or more tenants at the same time. The restore can go to the original location or to a new location or be exported to backup files on local disk

Wrap Up:

Tenant to Tape or Tape as a Service for Cloud Connect Backup was a feature that didn’t get much airplay in the lead-up to the Update 4 launch, however it give VCSPs more options to protect tenant data and truly offer an air-gapped solution to better protect that data.

References:

https://www.veeam.com/wp-using-aws-vtl-gateway-deployment-guide.html

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/08/backup-and-archive-to-aws-storage-gateway-vtl-with-veeam-backup-and-replication-v9/

Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 – What’s In It For Service Providers

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For ten plus years Veeam has continued to develop new innovative features and enhancements supporting our Cloud and Service Provider partners. As I posted earlier this week, there is a proven track record built upon a strong foundation of Veeam technology that backs up our strong leadership position in the Service Provider space. This accelerated in v7 with vCloud Director support…continued with Cloud Connect Backup in v8, Cloud Connect Replication in the v9 release and even more through the Backup and Replication 9.5 releases and Updates.

In my initial v9.5 Update 4 Top New Features post I covered off new core features and enhancements that are included in Update 4. Specifically there are a number of new features that VCSPs can take advantage of…

Over the next few weeks I am going to deep dive into each of the features listed above as they all deserve their own dedicated blog posts. With a release as huge as this, there is no shortage of content that can be created off the back up Update 4!

Beyond the core enhancements, there are also a significant number of general enhancements that are referenced in the What’s New Document. I’ve gone through that document and pulled out the ones that relate specifically to Cloud and Service Provider operations for those running IaaS and B/R/DRaaS offerings.

  • Maximum supported individual disk size and backup file size have been increased 10 times. With the default 1MB block size, the new theoretical VBK format maximums are 120TB for each disk in backup. Tested maximum is 100TB for both individual disks and backup files.
  • Optimized backup job initialization and finalization steps, resulting in up to 50% times faster backups of small VMs
  • Added experimental support for block cloning on deduplicated files for Windows Server 2019 ReFS
  • vPower NFS write cache performance has been improved, significantly improving I/O performance of instantly recovered VMs and making a better use of SSD drives often dedicated by customers to write cache.
  • vPower NFS scalability has been improved to more efficiently leverage expanded I/O capacity of scale-out backup repository for increased number of VMs that can be running concurrently
  • Support for Paravirtual SCSI controllers with more than 16 disks attached
  • Added JSON support
  • Added RESTful API coverage for viewing and managing agent-based jobs and their backups
  • Added the ability to export the selected restore point of a particular object in the backup job as a standalone full backup file (VBK)
  • Added ability to instantly publish a point-in-time state of any backed-up database to the selected SQL Server for dev/test purposes by running the database directly from the backup file
  • Added the ability to export a point-in-time state of any backed up database to a native SQL Server backup (.BAK file) to simplify the process of providing the database backup to SQL developers, BaaS clients or Microsoft Support
  • Added the ability to schedule Active Full backups on a particular day of the month, as opposed to just weekdays
  • Instant recovery of agent backups to a Hyper-V VM now support Windows 10 Hyper-V as the target hypervisor. This is particularly useful for managed service providers by enabling them to create low-cost all-in-one BCDR appliances to deploy at their clients’ premises.

What I pulled out above is just a small subset of all the general enhancements in Update 4. For Cloud Connect, there is a Post in the Veeam Forums here that goes through specific new features and enhancements in greater detail as well as fixes and known issues.

Stay tuned for future posts on the core new features and enhancements in Update 4 for Veeam Cloud and Service Providers.

References:

https://www.veeam.com/kb2878

http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_whats_new_wn.pdf

http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_u4_release_notes_rn.pdf

Veeam for Service Providers…Ten Plus Years of Innovation!

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I remember the day I first came across Veeam. It was mid 2010 and I was working for Anittel at the time. We had a large virtualisation platform that hosted a number of high profile sites including a well known e-commerce site. There had been a serious data breach on one of those site and we were required by the Australian Federal Police to restore the website logs from a couple weeks back when the breach had first taken place.

We were using a well known product at the time to backup our vSphere platform and from the outside everything seemed ok. All backup reports where green and we thought the backups where verified. To cut a long and painful story short, when we came to restore the website logs we found that the backups had not worked as expected and we couldn’t retrieve data off a secondary partition due to a huge unknown bug in the software.

That was the end for that backup application (and interestingly enough they went out of business a few years later) and that afternoon we downloaded Veeam Backup & Replication v4 and went to work pushing that out into production. We (and I have) never looked back from there. Veeam did in fact Just Work! At that stage there were enough features in the software to cover all of the requirements for a VMware based hosting platform, and over the years as v5 and v6 were released more and more features and enhancements were released that made Veeam even better service providers.

By the time I left Anittel and headed to Zettagrid, Veeam had introduced more innovative features like Instant VM Recovery, vCloud Director Support, Cloud Connect Backup, the Scale Out Backup Repository just to name a few. In fact Veeam impressed me so much with their Service Provider features that I joined the company where I now focus my time on working with Service Providers as part of the Veeam Product Strategy Team focusing on our cloud and service providers products and features.

While I could bang on about all the features that Veeam has released over the years to enable us to become a significant player in the Cloud and Service Provider space, a picture tells a thousand words…and an interactive timeline showing just how innovative and focused Veeam has been on enabling our Cloud and Service Provider partners to succeed is priceless!

No other vendor has this track record of producing specific Cloud and Service Provider features and enhancements over the years and as you can see over the last three to five years we have moved with the industry to continue innovating in the cloud space by accelerating feature development and bringing great technology to the market.

If you are a Cloud and Service Provider and not using Veeam…what are you waiting for?

https://anthonyspiteri.net/veeam-vcsp-reverse-roadmap/

What Services Providers Need to Think About in 2019 and Beyond…

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We are entering interesting times in the cloud space! We should no longer be talking about the cloud as a destination and we shouldn’t be talking about how cloud can transform business…those days are over! We have entered the next level of adoption whereby the cloud as a delivery framework has become mainstream. You only have to look at what AWS announced last year at Re:Invent with its Outposts offering. The rise of automation and orchestration in mainstream IT also has meant that cloud can be consumed in a more structured and repeatable way.

To that end…where does it leave traditional Service Providers who have for years offered Infrastructure as a Service as the core of their offerings?

Last year I wrote a post on how the the VM shouldn’t  be the base unit of measurement for cloud…and even with some of the happenings since then, I remain convinced that Service Providers can continue to exist and thrive through offering value around the VM construct. Backup and DR as a service remains core to this however and there is ample thirst out there in the market for customers wanting to consume services from cloud providers that are not the giant hyper-scalers.

Almost all technology vendors are succumbing to the reality that they need to extend their own offering to include public cloud services. It is what the market is demanding…and it’s what the likes of AWS Azure, IBM and GCP are pushing for. The backup vendor space especially has had to extend technologies to consume public cloud services such as Amazon S3, Glacier or Azure Blob as targets for offsite backups. Veeam is upping the ante with our Update 4 release of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 which includes Cloud Tier to object storage and additional Direct Restore capabilities to Azure Stack and Amazon EC2.

With these additional public cloud features, Service Providers have a right to feel somewhat under threat. However we have seen this before (Office 365 for Hosted Exchange as an example) and the direction that Service Providers need to take is to continue to develop offerings based on vendor technologies and continue to add value to the relationship that they have with their clients. I wrote a long time ago when VMware first announced vCloud Air that people tend to buy based on relationship…and there is no more trusted relationship than that of the Service Provider.

With that, there is no doubting that clients will want to look at using a combination of services from a number of different providers. From where I stand, the days of clients going all in with one provider for all services are gone. This is an opportunity for Service Providers to be the broker. This isn’t a new concept and plenty of Service Providers have thought about how they themselves leverage the Public Cloud to not only augment their own backend services, but make them consumable for their clients via there own portals or systems.

With all that in mind…in my opinion, there are five main areas where Service Providers need to be looking in 2019 and beyond:

  1. Networking is central this and the most successful Service Providers have already worked this out and offer a number of different networking services. It’s imperative that Service Providers offer a way for clients to go beyond their own networks and have the option to connect out to other cloud networks. Telco’s and other carriers have built amazing technology frameworks based on APIs to consume networking in ways that mean extending a network shouldn’t be thought of as a complex undertaking anymore.
  2. Backup, Replication and Recovery is something that Service Providers have offered for a long time now, however there is more and more completion in this area today in the form of built in protection at the application and hardware level. Where providers have traditionally excelled at is a the VM level. Again, that will remain the base unit of measurement for cloud moving forward, but Service Providers need to enhance their BaaS, R/DRaaS offerings for them to remain competitive. Leveraging public cloud to gain economies of scale is one way to enhance those offerings.
  3. Gateway Services are a great way to lock in customers. Gateway services are typically those which a low effort for both the Service Provider and client alike. Take the example of Veeam’s Cloud Connect Backup. It’s a simple service to setup at both ends and works without too much hassle…but there is power for the Service Provider in the data that’s being transferred into their network. From there auxiliary services can be offered such as recovery or other business continuity services. It also leads into discussions about Replication services which can be worked into the total service offering as well.
  4. Managed Services is the one thing that the hyper-scalers can’t match Service Providers in and it’s the one thing that will keep all Service Providers relevant. I’ve mentioned already the trusted advisor thought process in the sales cycle. This is all about continuing to offer value around great vendor technologies that aims to secure the Service Provider to client relationship.
  5. Developing a Channel is central to be able to scale without the need to add resources to the business. Again, the most successful Service Providers all have Channel/Partner program in place and it’s the best way to extend that managed service, trusted provider reach. I’ve seen a number of providers not able to execute on a successful channel play due to poor execution, however if done right it’s one way to extend that reach to more clients…staying relevant in the wake of the hyper-scalers.

This isn’t a new Differentiate or Die!? message…it’s one of ensuring that Service Providers continue to evolve with the market and with industry expectation. That is the only way to thrive and survive!

VCSP Important Notice: 9.5 Update 4 RTM Is Out…With vCloud Director Replication Support and more!

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Today, Veeam has made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Update 4 for Backup & Replication 9.5 (Build 9.5.4.2399). Update 4 is what we term a breaking update, meaning that if a Cloud Connect tenant upgrades from any previous 9.5 version before VCSPs this will break backup or replication functionality. With that in mind the RTM has been made available for our VCSP partners to ensure it is installed and tested before being pushed out to production before the GA release.

Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 9.0 (build 9.0.0.1715) can write backups via Cloud Connect to a cloud repository on 9.5 Update 4. For Cloud Connect Replication, existing Hardware Plan based replicas can go to a cloud host on 9.5 Update 4. To take advantage of the new vCloud Director based replication, tenants need to also be on Update 4.

As I detailed yesterday, there are a number of updates that need to be applied to Veeam ONE, Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

VCSP Features and Enhancements:

Update 4 is a very significant update and contains a number of enhancements and known issue fixes with a lot of those enhancements aimed at improving the scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of. One important note is around the new Instance-based licensing model that all VCSPs should be aware of. There is an initial guide here, information in the VCSP Forums and there will be emails sent to explain the changes.

  • vCloud Director support – Massive Feature Enhancement! Simplifies setting up Veeam based DRaaS for Service Provides with vCD, and enhances tenants experience with additional capabilities provided by vCD
  • Capacity Tier – Move tenant’s backup files as they age out of operational restore window to a cheaper storage – AWS S3, Azure Blob or on premises object storage
  • Gateway pools – Create and assign pools of cloud gateways to the tenants
  • Tenant to tape jobs – Cloud Connect backups can be written to tape with the hand of GFS media pool and Backup to Tape jobs
  • Tenant-driven password change – Tenants can now change the password they use to connect to the service provider by editing one on the registered service provider
  • Platform Support – vCloud Director 9.5, VMware 6.7 Update 1 and Windows 2019 (1809) support.

There has also been a lot of work to improve and enhance scalability in the Backup & Replication Cloud Connect functionality to accomodate the increasing usage of Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux of which there is a new version (3.0) coming at the same time of Update 4 GA. For Veeam Availability Console, Update 4 will be taken advantage of fully in the upcoming major release a little later after the Update 4 GA.

Conclusion:

Once again, Update 4 for Veeam Backup & Replication is an important update to apply for VCSPs running Cloud Connect services in preparation for the GA release which will happen in about two weeks at our Velocity event. Once released I’ll link to the VeeamKB for a detailed look at the fixes but for the moment, if you have the ability to download the update do so and have it applied to your instances. For more info in the RTM, head to the VCSP Forum post here.

Enhanced Self Service Restore in Backup for Office 365 v2.0

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Earlier in the year I gave an overview on the Self Service recovery capability of Veeam Backup for Office 365 which gave Veeam Cloud and Service Providers the ability to offer self service to their tenants for the recovery of Exchange data that’s been backed up on their platforms as a service.

As a bit of a refresher:

Tenant admins communicate with the Service Provider via the Cloud Gateway component which handles flow of data. The Service Provider grants the ability to their tenants so that each tenant can perform self restore operations using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange. By default, tenants are not able to restore anything from the backup without a Service Provider assistance.

The steps above show the self restore scenarios performed by the Tenant:

  • Tenants use Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange to send restore requests via Veeam Cloud Gateway directly to the Service Provider.
  • On the Service Provider side, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 management server detects a proxy server responsible for processing tenant data.
  • Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 management server locates an associated repository that contains a backup file that belongs to the Tenant.
  • Corresponding backup data is then transferred back to the tenant via Veeam Cloud Gateway.
What’s Changed in v2.0:

As mentioned, one of the big limitations in VBO v1.5 was the fact you could only restore the most recently backed up recovery point which limited it’s usefulness for most administrators looking to take advantage of the feature. That’s changed in VBO v2.0 with the ability to now choose a point in time from the Explorers. This is true for both Veeam Explorer for Exchange and Sharepoint (Which also does OneDrive).

Shown below is a Service Provider view of a restore operation for the Sliema organisation. As with the previous versions you have the ability to use latest or go back to a point in time.

As a reminder…the retention is set against the Backup Repository in VBO. Organisations are assigned to Repositories which dictates their own retention.
At the tenant end, once the Veeam Explorer has been launched and the Connect to a Service Provider option has been chosen, you now see similar options to either do the latest, or go to a point in time.

If you go to choose a point in time that precedes the date of the first backup you will get the error below.
Once a correct point in time has been selected the Self Service can begin. Shown below i’m able to go back to the 3rd of May 2018 restore point and perform actions on mail items.
In this case, I was looking for a AWS Bill that I had deleted out of the mailbox and had gone way past my default Exchange retention settings.
Back on the Service Provider end, you can see the active restore job session which is being facilitated through Cloud Connect.
Conclusion:

To reiterate, the market for Office365 backups is significant and we have built in some pretty cool technology into Backup & Replication that works with Backup for Office365 that allows easy, self service capabilities that can be productized by Service Providers out of the box. Not only can Service Providers offer services to backup client Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive Organisations but they can also extend that to offer self service which increases overall operational efficiencies at the provider end while also offering enhanced services to clients.

References:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/vex_sp_add.html?ver=20#pit

Configuring Service Provider Self Service Recovery with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365

Veeam Availability Console now available from Azure Marketplace

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Last week the Veeam Availability Console Azure Marketplace appliance went live. This allows Veeam Cloud and Service Providers to easily deploy VAC into any Azure region. In it’s previous incarnation the Managed Backup Portal was only available as an Azure marketplace appliance and not available to install by a VCSP. Now that VAC 2.0 is out, VCSPs who don’t have the ability to host Cloud Connect or VAC on their infrastructure can deploy it in Azure and have the service up and running within fifteen minutes.

There are some limitations that come along with deploying VAC into Azure and it won’t be for everyone. The biggest caveat is that you can only have one Cloud Connect Server per VAC instance and as part of the deployment, Cloud Connect services is installed on the same Virtual Machine. You can’t offer Replication services from the Azure instance, and if offering Cloud Connect backup you need to understand it’s own scalability and performance bottlenecks. That said, as a remote management, monitoring, reporting, billing and self service platform there is a lot to like about having VAC in Azure.

Marketplace Deployment Steps:

You can start the deployment by searching for Veeam Availability Console in the Azure Marketplace or you can go direct to the product page here.

Click on Create to start the configuration steps.

The Basics includes VM name, hard disks type, username and password as well as selecting the subscription, the ability to use a new or existing resource group and finally the Azure location you want to deploy into.

In Step 2 you need to choose the Size of the Azure instance. The template provides the recommended configurations. The sizes are relative to the amount of agents and/or Backup & Replication instances you are going to be managing from this instance. You can find sizing guides here for larger environments.

I ended up going with an A2 standard for my instance which removes the load balancing functionality from the configuration and offers a little less IOPS.
Step 3 contains some optional extra’s to ensure a higher level of availability for the VM instance and lets you configure the networking.
Once that’s done you can review your configuration settings and start the deployment. It took just over 8 minutes for the deployment to succeed.

If you click on the Virtual Machine object in the Azure Portal you will see an overview of the VM and it’s configuration.

Addition Azure Configuration:

If you notice in the image above, a DNS name is listed in the overview. This was something that I had to set manually after the deployment. You set this by going into the Networking of the resource pool and click on IP Configuration. Here, you can enter in a DNS name relative to the Azure zone you are in. You can then use this to connect to the VAC Console, Cloud Connect Service and to RDP to the VM and helps in the event of having a dynamic, rather than a static Azure IP.

Speaking of networking and ports, below is a list of the default port rules created during the deployment. Note that WinRM is open as well.

Finalizing Deployment:

After deploying the Azure Marketplace appliance you can RDP into the VM and complete the setup that includes configuring Cloud Connect and VAC it’s self. A few things have been done for us as part of the deployment, however the first thing you need to do is get a license. This is a BYO license situation, so once you have deployed the Marketplace appliance you will need to source a VAC license from the Veeam Licensing Portal and apply.

Head to the VAC Web Portal and Install the License.

Once done the last step is to configure Cloud Connect from the Backup & Replication Console. Again, you will need a valid Cloud Connect license as you are greeted with the Free Edition when you connect to the console for the first time. As per normal with Cloud Connect, you need to configure the SSL Certificate first and then configure a new Cloud Gateway. Configure the Networking as shown below using the DNS name that was created in the steps above.

Once this is completed you can go into the VAC Console and work through the normal Configuration steps. The only thing you don’t need to do is add the Cloud Connect Server to the VAC instance as this has already been done during the initial deployment process.

It’s worth noting that the versions of Backup & Replication (9.5.0.1536) and Availability Console (2.0.1.1343) are up to date and include the latest Hot-Fixes for VAC. The intent is to have the templates as up to date as possible, however once deployed you can upgrade as per usual.

Conclusion:

So there you have it…within fifteen minutes you can have a fully working Veeam Availability Console instance running in Azure and ready to be used to offer all the goodness that VAC offers our Cloud and Service Provider partners. For an overview as to what VAC offers, click here and have a read of my GA post on What’s in It for Service Providers.

Links:

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/veeam.veeam-availability-console?tab=Overview

 

Creating a Custom Cloud Connect Maintenance Mode Message

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Last week I wrote an article on Maintenance Modes in Cloud Connect and also Veeam Availability Console. For Cloud Connect there is a default error message that get’s shown in the Job Status if any jobs are started if the Cloud Connect Maintenance Mode is turned on.

We have the ability to customize that message via a registry key addition as documented in the online Veeam Help Centre.

To create a custom Maintenance mode notification, on the SP Veeam backup server, create the new registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\CloudMaintenanceModeMessage = <message> (String), where <message> is a Maintenance mode notification that you want to display on the tenant side.

Adding the key via Registry Editor is simple enough and this is what you are left with from within the Registry Editor.

And the error message at the tenant end now reflects the custom message.

To make this easier for Service Providers, i’ve written a quick PowerShell script that does a couple of things. The first thing is report on the current registry value for the Maintenance Mode and then give you the option to delete the key and return the message to it’s default state. The second thing it does is prompt you enter in the desired custom message and set that in the registry.

References:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/cloud/cc_maintenance_message.html?ver=95

Quick Look: Veeam Agent for Linux 2.0 – Now With Cloud Connect

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Just over a year ago Veeam Agent for Linux version 1.0 was released and for me still represents an important milestone for Veeam. During various presentations over the last twelve months I have talked about the fact that Linux backups haven’t really changed for twenty or so years and that the tried and trusted method for backing up Linux systems was solid…yet antiquated. For me, the GitLab backup disaster in Feburary highlighted this fact and the Veeam Agent for Linux takes Linux backups out of the legacy and into the now.

Yesterday, Veeam Agent for Linux 2.0 (Build 2.0.0.400) was released and with it came a number of new features and enhancements improving on the v1.1 build released in May. Most important for me is the ability to now backup straight to a Cloud Connect Repository.

Integration with Veeam Cloud Connect provides the following options:

  • Back up directly to a cloud repository: Veeam Agent for Linux provides a fully integrated, fast and secure way to ship backup files directly to a Cloud Connect repository hosted by one of the many Veeam-powered service providers.
  • Granular recovery from a cloud repository: Volume and file-level recovery can be performed directly from a backup stored within the cloud repository, without having to pull the entire backup on-premises first.
  • Bare-metal recovery from a cloud repository: The updated Veeam Recovery Media allows you to connect to your service provider, select the required restore point from the cloud repository and restore your entire computer to the same or different hardware.
Configuration Overview:

To install, you need to download the relevant Linux Packages from here. For my example below, I’m installing on an Ubuntu machine but we do support a number of popular Linux Distros as explained here.

Once installed you want to apply a Server License to allow backing up to Cloud Connect Repositories.

Before configuring a new job through the Agent for Linux Menu you can add Cloud Providers via the agent CLI. There are a number of cli menu options as shown below.

From here, you can use the cli to configure a new Backup Job but i’ve shown the process though the Agent UI. If you preconfigure the Service Provider with the cli once you select Veeam Cloud Connect Repository you don’t need to enter in the details again.

Once done and the job has run you will see that we have the backup going direct to the Cloud Connect Repository!

From the cli you can also get a quick overview of the job status.

Wrap Up:

I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time and with the amount of Linux server instances (both physical and virtual) that exist today across on-premises, partner hosts IaaS platforms, or hyper-scale clouds, I hope that Veeam Cloud & Service Providers really hone in on the opportunity that exists with this new feature.

For more on What’s New in 2.0 of Veeam Agent for Linux you click here.

References:

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_agent_linux_2_0_whats_new_wn.pdf

VCSP Important Notice: 9.5 Update 2 RTM Is Out…With Remote Access and more!

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Last Friday, Veeam made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Update 2 for Backup & Replication 9.5 (Build 9.5.0.1038). Update 2 for Backup & Replication is what we term a breaking update, meaning that if a Cloud Connect client upgrades from the 9.5 GA (9.5.0.711) or Update 1 (9.5.0.823) this will break backup or replication functionality. With that in mind the RTM has been made available for our VCSP partners to ensure it is installed and tested before being pushed out to production before the GA release. Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 8.0 (build 8.0.0.817) can write backups to a cloud repository on 9.5 Update 2, and any release from 9.0 (build 9.0.0.902) can write replicas to a cloud host on 9.5 Update 2.

Update 2 is a fairly significant update and contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes with a lot of those enhancements aimed at improving the scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of. The biggest and most anticipated update is for the support of the upcoming Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, but we also pushed out an awesome feature for our VCSPs to help manage their client or tenant Cloud Connect jobs or in fact manage their remote Veeam Backup & Replication instances with Remote Access.

VCSP and Cloud Connect Features and Enhancements:

Below are the main VCSP related features and enhancements included in Update 2. For a full list, head to the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider channels of the Veeam forum. For VCSPs with more than 300 connections there is a post regarding tweaks for improving performance at scale.

Core

  • Veeam Backup Remote Access: Full remote management of Veeam Backup & Replication installations at customer sites with a Veeam backup console or Microsoft RDP client over the existing Cloud Connect tunnel.
  • Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows integration: Full support for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0, including direct backup to a cloud repository backed by Veeam Cloud Connect. This includes the introduction of separate workstation and server counters for Cloud Connect Backup
  • Usage reporting enhancements: Usage reports are now saved in two formats, CSV and PDF.

Cloud Connect

  • Major scalability improvements: In light of support for direct agent backups, numerous optimizations to the Cloud Connect framework on both the service provider and the tenant sides have been introduced to significantly increase its scalability (including number of concurrent tenant jobs per Cloud Connect server) and reliability large at scale. The release was tested with 1000 concurrent agent backups per single Cloud Connect instance. Reaching this number may require applying additional tweaks, please refer to this post for more information.
  • Improved reporting and monitoring: Better visibility from the service provider side into Cloud Connect tenant jobs, including current job activity and statistics such as current rate and amount of data sent and received.

Cloud Connect Replication

  • Improved failback performance: Failback to the original location can now optionally leverage VMware changed block tracking information, instead of scanning the entire VM disks to determine the difference, improving failback performance up to 20 times.
  • Hardware plan enhancements: Added the ability to increase a number of networks assigned to the Hardware Plan after it has been created.

Important Note for Veeam One Users:

As mentioned in the VCSP forum digest this week, there is a patch available for Veeam One which enables compatibility with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 2. This hotfix must be deployed to any Veeam ONE server that is monitoring Cloud Connect services…it doesn’t need to be installed on instances not monitoring Cloud Connect services.

Conclusion:

Once again, this is an important update to apply for VCSPs running Cloud Connect services in preparation for the GA release which will happen in about two weeks. Once released I’ll link to the VeeamKB for a detailed look at the fixes but for the moment, if you have the ability to download the update do so and have it applied to your instances.

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