Tag: Veeam

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VeeamON Virtual Event – save the date

Virtual Online-Conference on Dec. 5th 2018

2018 VeeamON took place in Chicago. Not everybody had the time or funding to go there. But there’s good news. Like in the years before there’ll be a virtual conference that makes it easy to attend. Join VeeamON Virtual 2018 from your desk, couch or garden hammock.

It’s been a pleasure being media partner for the event last year. And so I will join this year’s event too. Stay tuned!

Registration

Grab your virtual seat and save the date on December 5th 2018. Registration is free but priceless.

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vCenter Appliance Migration Upgrade

Relink VM MoRef IDs to Veeam Backup Restore-Points

In this post I will show how to use Veeam Migration Utility in cases when you have to migrate a whole cluster to a new vCenter, but you can’t afford to cut existing backup chains.

The Good

Upgrading a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has become a commodity in recent times. All you have to do is to run an upgrade wizard and point to the old VCSA. Thanks to VMware developers it’s one of these “Next-Next-Finish” deployments. At the end you’ll have an upgraded vCenter with same settings, name, IP, and (if you like) historic data.  This is great! I can remember vCenter on Windows upgrades that were a PITA.

The Bad

In some rare (but ugly) occasions you simply can’t use the wizard and you have to migrate your hosts to a completely new VCSA without data migration. You’ll have to rebuild every setting, datacenter, cluster, folder, pool, group, rule, etc from scratch to match your old environment. Continue reading “vCenter Appliance Migration Upgrade”

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Remove VM objects from Veeam backup-chain

Leverage Powershell to selectively eliminate VMs from backup archives

GDPR / DSGVO casts its shadow onto IT. On Friday 25th of May European privacy regulations will become effective and violations can result in very harmful penalties for enterprises.

In that context an unusual task was addressed to me today by a customer: “Delete all backups of VM KillMe (yes, all)!”

There are several strategies to fulfill the task: Continue reading “Remove VM objects from Veeam backup-chain”

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Backup NFS shares with RSYNC and Veeam

The poor man’s guide to backup old NetApp boxes

Veeam Backup and Replication has a deep integration into NetApp hardware since version 8. Yet there is still no NAS Backup Support for SMB and NFS Shares (v10 Feature or 9.5 Ux). The question arises how to back up NAS data from older NetApp boxes, when the ONTAP version is simply too old for Veeam integration and  you can’t utilize NDMP, NFS or SMB protocol for direct NAS backup?

I will outline a real-life scenario where a customer has an old Netapp (7+ years old) with single controller holding very important data (I will not comment on that). 🙂

How can we integrate these datasets into an existing Veeam infrastructure?

I’ve created a cheap and dirty(?) method how to synchronize the content of that old Netapp box with a Linux VM which can be easily backed up by Veeam. The content of the Netapp NFS share will be replicated into a Linux VM (1st copy), backed up to disk by Veeam (2nd copy) and archived to tape (3rd copy, 2nd media type) which is then kept in a fireproof safe (offsite). It was possible to fulfill the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 copy offsite).

pro

  • no extra licenses
  • simple implementation
  • reliable and mature protocol
  • 3-2-1 rule
  • rock-solid

cons

  • needs extra space on VM storage
  • basic knowledge of Linux commands

Continue reading “Backup NFS shares with RSYNC and Veeam”