The first of a series of technical white papers I’m writing in these months has been published: Veeam for VMware Cloud Providers. Achieving the best RTOs and RPOs with Veeam Backup & Replication in Multi-Tenant environments. If you want to learn how to operate Veeam in a service provider environment, this paper is for you.
Category: Tech
Everything tech: deepdive on the most important technologies, tips and tricks for everyday’s work, tutorial, step-by-step guides, videos and manuals.
Pre-built Windows virtual machines
Virtual appliances are one of the coolest and most useful little things that you can use in a virtualized environment. Whenever you need to quickly test a new software, a new platform, it’s always nice and welcomed when its creator puts out a pre-configured appliance for it. No time “wasted” to install and configure the underlying operating system and all the needed libraries, the virtual machine is ready to be powered up and used.
This has always been the case for software based on Linux, because its redistribution license has always granted the possibility to easily repackage it and distribute the final appliance. With Microsoft however, this has always been a problem. Software based on Microsoft platform cannot be easily packaged that way.
Lately, however, I found a great solution to have at least the whole operating system up and running in few minutes.
5 blog posts I didn’t write #1: Veeam tips
I always liked the series “7 blog posts MSPmentor didn’t write” from MSPMentor website. It was one of the first examples of blog digest I found several years ago. This is my personal digest: these series is not going to be scheduled; instead, as the title suggests, I will publish a new post everytime my favorite list will reach 5 posts. Also, I’m trying to have a common topic among the blog posts I’m linking, and the first topic is Veeam Backup & Replication.
Solve all your Apple Mail problems… with Airmail
If you are an Apple user like me, obviously you use an email application, and probably it’s Apple Mail. Yes, there are other applications like Microsoft Outlook for example, but Mail is directly available for free in Mac OS X, and in the past has used to be damn good, while Outlook for example is still suffering some problems like the frequent corruption (and needed rebuilt) of its database.
Well, you probably are also really aware that the latest versions of Mail are not that good to say the least, instead they have become worse and worse, especially if you use Gmail or an Exchange Server.
Veeam Extract Utility, quick restores without the Veeam server
One of the biggest misconceptions about Veeam Backup & Replication, often fueled by competitors, is that it requires the complete server installation in order to run restores. So, this becomes a Single Point of Failure, just like many other solutions from competitors. This is completely untrue: there are two main features in Veeam that make restores possible even without the server installation.
Can you clone a VM replicated by Veeam?
Veeam Backup & Replication has always had since its first version the possibility to replicate VMs, together with the backup capabilities. Once a VM is replicated in a secondary site, it could become a great resource for additional activities: from automated recovery tests (called SureReplica in Veeam) to become also the source for cloning activities. Data are already locally saved, there is no need to retrieve anything else from the source site, so any operation is quick an easy. Are there any informations we should be aware of in doing these operations? Let’s find it out.
Hello Veeam Cloud Connect!
When we at Veeam talk about data protection best practices, we recommend that customers follow the “3-2-1 rule”: 3 copies of any data, on 2 different media, with at least 1 copy in a remote location. This is an effective strategy to greatly enhance the availability of their precious data, but requires at least two sites. With Veeam Cloud Connect, there is no need to own the second site; the same solution can be offered by a service provider, so a customer does not incur capital expenses to build and maintain an additional infrastructure, but instead can quickly and easily consume a service with a “pay as you go” model.
This is what Veeam Cloud Connect makes possible, and it’s the meaning of its name: a connection between Veeam customers and service providers to send data offsite easily and in a secure way.
Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 Patch 4: VSAN support!
Veeam just released the new and latest patch for Backup & Replication 7.0, numbered Patch 4. The new patch can be installed on any previous version of 7.0 release, since as usual the patch is cumulative. The final build number after the upgrade will be now 7.0.0.871.
There are as usual many improvements and fixes, and two big enhancements. The first one is the added support for Microsoft SQL 2014, but for sure the biggest news is with no doubt the support for VMware Virtual SAN, unofficially shorten VSAN by many. 
