Good old FTP (and cloud!) to protect your vSphere environment

Lately, I had to rebuild my personal lab after a major crash of the storage system I use, and even if I was able to restore everything, the procedure I had to use involved many manual rebuilding of the resources. This time, I decided that everything has to be protected in a way that it would be really easy to perform e restore of every component of the lab. I started with the basic infrastructure based on VMware vSphere, and I realized that, as much as it sounds something from the jurassic age, the best way to create backups of those resources was to use an FTP server!

Permissions for Veeam backup Linux repositories

I’ve seen often Veeam users to configure their repositories using administrative permissions. This is a really bad practice as the most precious part of a Veeam environment, the backup files, are then exposed to security risks, in case anyone can obtain those credentials. And with the raise of cryptolockers and ransomware this behavior has become even more dangerous. For Linux repositories, users can configure their servers to use common users.

Use Veeam Backup & Replication Free Edition to collect Veeam Agents backups

Veeam Agents, both for Windows and for Linux, have the possibility to send backups to a Veeam Backup & Replication server. This is a great feature, but sometimes customers don’t even have anymore any virtualized workload to protect, so they find a hard time to justify the deployment of Veeam Backup & Replication to only protect physical workloads. There’s a solution to this however, and it doesn’t cost anything to users.

Security for your virtual machines: backup of vSphere encrypted VMs

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.

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

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?

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

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.