Veeam Backup-as-a-Service, Part 1
Today I want to introduce and provide a walk-through on how to use what I think is one of the coolest modules SovLabs has produced to date for vRealize Automation: Backup-as-a-Service (or BaaS for short). BaaS is one of those pie-in-the-sky dreams for many CMP owners and operators and, frankly, the aim of lots of other companies hoping to give a real self-service-type experience to users inside a CMP. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of it, they all come up pretty short—until SovLabs entered the game, that is.
Replicating vRA Templates Easily with Veeam
For those who use vRealize Automation (vRA), you’re probably all too familiar with vSphere templates and how they are the crux of your service catalog. Unless you’re creating machine deployments anew from another build tool, you’re probably using them, and it’s likely you have at least two, sometimes many more. Using the Clone workflow, those vSphere templates become the new VMs in your deployments. That part is all well and good, but do you fall into the category of having several templates?
Monitoring Veeam Backup & Replication with vROps
Backup servers, I think we can all agree, are of primary importance. We rely upon them for business continuity as much as we rely upon other systems of primary record like Active Directory or DNS. So why is it that we monitor the latter systems with such fervor and the former not at all? Often times, we don’t know that backup systems are impacted until we go to attempt a restore when it’s necessary only to find it doesn’t work or you don’t have the needed restore point.
4 Free Community Veeam Tools and Utilities
I wrote last about attending VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans and you can view that here. As I was deep in various sessions or talking with peers and Veeam folks, several things stuck out in my mind as current gaps or “nice-to-haves” when it comes to Veeam. So after putting pen to paper, I identified four things I thought could really help other users out. I’m glad to say that all of these have been brought to fruition and have now been released to the community for all to use!
VeeamON 2017
I had the chance to attend VeeamON this year for the first time, which took place at the convention center in New Orleans from May 16–18. This three-day event was as much about the new product announcements, which we’ll get to in a minute, as well as expert technical deep dive sessions and networking. There were around 2,500 attendees in total, including about half the technical minds at Veeam. The focus of the conference was to reinforce Veeam’s message of “availability” and how they are themselves poised to be a cloud company, not just simply a backup company.
Fast Backup of vSphere Templates with Veeam
Most organizations use vSphere templates for a quick way to roll out VMs manually through vCenter, via a clone workflow in vRealize Automation, or something else. Sometimes they’re just base OS with configuration, and sometimes they have complicated applications installed in the case of VDI. Very often, these would be time consuming to reproduce and are changing on a regular basis due to things like patching and updates. So, naturally, you probably want to back those templates up.
Critical CBT Bug in vSphere 6 and Veeam workaround
There was recently (12 November 2015) another critical backup-related bug published affecting ESXi 6.x and CBT-based backups. Any backup product that leverages VADP (snapshot-based backup processing) is affected by this issue. For customers using Veeam, here is a workaround if it is not possible to downgrade to ESXi 5.5.
Edit each job that processes VMs on hosts that are at version 6 or higher, go to Storage, then click on the Advanced button.