Tech

Security for your virtual machines: backup of vSphere encrypted VMs

Luca Dell'Oca,

In my previous post of this small series, titled Security for your virtual machines: what is KMIP?, I talked about the new generation of the main hypervisors, VMware vSphere 6.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, and how they both introduced new encryption capabilities for virtual machines. I described the underlying technology used by VMware, KMIP; it’s not time to implement it in my lab and see how it interacts with data protection, specifically backups.

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Tech

Security for your virtual machines: what is KMIP?

Luca Dell'Oca,

The latest generation of the main hypervisors has shown, among other things, a renewed and increased focus on security, with the most visible feature being VM encryption. It’s amazing to see how both VMware vSphere 6.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, both released in the same year, introduced this feature at the same time. But it’s less of a surprise if you think about all the security issues that IT admins and users are facing lately, with things like ransomware, cryptolocker and other threads.
In this first of a series of posts, we’ll look at the different solutions and some deep dive into the used technologies, and how operations like backups are impacted. In this first post, let’s talk about KMIP.

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Tech

ReFS cluster size with Veeam Backup & Replication: 64KB or 4KB?

Luca Dell'Oca,

There has been a lot of discussions about ReFS 3.1 after Veeam released its version 9.5 with support for the block clone API. With this integration between the two product, users can now design a repository that combines the speed of a non-deduplicated array, with some important space savings that usually belongs to those dedicated appliances. We have seen many many discussions in our Veeam forums, and I also published two articles on this topic you may want to read: Windows 2016 and Storage Spaces as a Veeam backup repository and An example for a Veeam backup repository using Windows 2016.
Now that people are starting to use ReFS, another question has risen: which cluster size should I use? 64KB or 4KB?

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Concurrent Linux file restores in Veeam Backup and Replication v9.5 vCloud Director Self-Service Portal

Luca Dell'Oca,

The new vCloud Director Self-Service Portal in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 allows tenant to perform backups and restores in a complete self-service mode. To execute file level restores for non-Microsoft file systems, a Multi-OS FLR Helper Appliance virtual appliance is used. This appliance is configured by a Veeam administrator before it can be used for any file restore, and you can learn in this post how to configure it to be deployed multiple times and allow multiple concurrent file restores.

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Backup and restore vSphere SPBM policies with Veeam Backup & Replication

Luca Dell'Oca,

SPBM allows virtualization administrator to remove all the burden of manual placement of virtual disks, spreadsheets full of data about which VM is stored where, which LUN coming from a given array has feature X enabled, and so on. With SPBM, admins can create multiple policies with the needed options, and once the policy is applied to a VM, vSphere will automatically check for the compliancy of the VM and the storage it is actually stored onto, and if the policy is not fulfilled, a storage vmotion will happen to move the VM into a complaint storage. And policies can also be changed in real–time, and remediation again will happen automatically.
This new solution is a huge advantage, and many admins are leveraging this capability more and more. But what happens when a virtual machine has to be restored from a backup? Are those policies preserved? The answer is yes, if you use Veeam Backup & Replication.

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