Backing up vCloud Director environment has been one of those hot topics lately, as not many backup vendors have mastered it yet. All the big players in town are promising a fully integrated solution by this year end, but we still to see a fully integrated solution. I believe within the next 6 months, we will have most major backup vendors offering different vCD backup solutions with varying integration levels.

Veeam has offered support for backing up vCD VMs, but not vAPPs & vCD metadata in the current release but this seems to change soon. Veeam seems to lead the league by planning to deliver the first real vCD backup that is fully integrated pretty soon with private betas even closer. It got me quite interested that I have setup an exclusive interview with Rick Vanover (product strategy specialist for Veeam Software)  to get my readers the answers on what is Veeam will be really offering in their upcoming Veeam 7(Which is a lot to be excited about?). I don’t want to keep you any longer, below is the full interview questions that Rick was kind enough to share the answer with me.

Q: At what level is your vCD Backup working? Is it a provider or tenant focused? Would there be away for a tenant (vCloud Org Admin) to backup his VM without getting in touch with a provider?

A: The enhanced vCD support will be built into the Veeam Backup & Replication User Interface. This means it will still be targeted to the VM admin as the product has historically. There will be an additional extensible interface that we’ve not announced that will be of great interest to providers.

Q: How is your solution different/distinguished from others?

A: The main difference is vCD restore. This includes vApps and VDCs created in vCD so that the metadata is restored. Further, there are a lot of challenges to restore the vCD metadata by other products, v7 will make that simpler.

Q: Are you offering any new exciting features with your new release as you always have? Can you share some of them with us?

A: Tomorrow we are announcing the next piece, the vSphere Web Client for Veeam Backup & Replication. There will be 7 major features announced in the countdown at go.veeam.com/v7

Q: What of your existing advanced features will be compatible with vCD backup? VM Instant Recovery? Universal File-Level Recovery? SureBackup? U-AIR® (Universal Application-Item Recovery)?

A: Because vSphere is still underneath, all of those will still be supported. I am not sure however if Instant VM Recovery will go back to the vApp, but we can do IVMR.

The only notable missing feature will be replication, but if you think about it… doesn’t make sense in vCD.

Q: When will it hit the market? (If you can not share exact date, maybe a clue or estimate)

A: Q3, private betas before then

Q: Will your current customers be able to upgrade directly? Any extra cost?

A: The upgrade path hasn’t been finalized or announced

Q: Will the upgrade to the new version be as smooth as earlier versions or a rip & replace?

A: That is what is planned

Q: Will it allow customers to backup their vSphere VMs or vCloud Director vAPPs to a VMware vCloud Director based public Cloud? If not any plan on that?

A: If the public cloud is something we can see straight away and unobstructed, yes.

Q: Any extra info would you like to share with my reader? Videos? Images? demos?

Below are two good Videos to get you even more excited:

Veeam Backup & Replication V7 seems to offer the following extra functionality that is currently missing in the current release of Veeam & most other backup solutions out there:

- The ability to backup vAPPs, Organization and other vCD entities including metadata
- Display the vCD infrastructure directly in Veeam Backup & restore
- The ability to restore vApps and VMs directly to vCD
- It will support restoring fast-provisioned and thin-provisioned VMs.

Hope this get you excited & make sure to visit http://go.veeam.com/v7 regularly to keep track of the major features announced during the Veeam 7 countdown.

Veeam has always got me thrilled by how innovative they are when it come to virtual infrastructure backup & replication solutions. Every time they release a product, I think alright they have left nothing to surprise us with next release but each time they prove me wrong and here they do it again with Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. Their new release make it sound that all the amazing backup features they had in earlier releases were not enough. Below just few of their earlier releases features that were amazingly valuable, but were not enough to stop Veeam from innovating more features:

- Instant VM Recovery: It gave Veeam’s customers the ability to power on VMs from backup directly without needing to wait to restore them. This has cut recovering VMs from hours to minutes.

- U-AIR® (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual objects from ANY virtualized application without agents, additional backups or software tools.

- On-Demand Sandbox: Run VMs from a backup in an isolated Virtual Lab for testing or troubleshooting.

- Universal File-Level Recovery: Recover a file from any guest OS and file system directly from an image-level backup—without booting the VM. vPower extends Veeam Instant File-Level Recovery with support for ANY guest file system.

- SureBackup: Verify the recoverability of every backup, every time. Automatically test backups by running VMs from them in an isolated Virtual Lab. This one is worth watching their demo, as I still have not seen any one else offer an equivalent to it. You can see the demo video below.

As crazy as it seems these are not new features, but those Veeam 6.0 features. As many of you I was curious how much innovative could Veeam go with their Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 release, and I can tell you they never disappointed me as usual. Below are few of the most innovative features I liked in their new release:

- Restore from SAN snapshots: Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 introduces Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which provides granular VMware recovery from HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. Co-developed with HP, Explorer for SAN Snapshots lets you perform Veeam restores (Instant VM Recovery, Instant File-Level Recovery and Explorer for Exchange item recovery) of VMware VMs directly from array-based snapshots. This feature is giving a new dimension to SAN snapshots where now you can have as granular restore approach as you can have from any backup. Though its important to remember that storage snapshot should never replace your backup, but complement it. I would really love to see Veeam expanding this feature to more storage boxes from vendors like EMC/NetApp/IBM & so on. You might want to watch a demonstration of the restore from SAN Snapshots functionality by watching the below video.

-  E-discovery and item recovery for Exchange: Version 6.5 introduces Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft Exchange, which provides instant visibility into backups of Exchange Server 2010 virtual machines (VMs). Browse, search and selectively restore items (emails, notes, contacts, etc.) directly from Veeam backups, replicas, and HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. This features will excite many customers who run Exchange Server 2010 in a VM. If you are one of those, then the below video should get you even more excited.

- Advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for Backup: Veeam Management Suite™ 6.5 includes new functionality for Veeam Backup & Replication—namely, advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for the backup infrastructure. This will help customers better size their backup infrastructure to match their environment continuous growth.

In this post I have decided to touch on the major interesting functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5, though if you need more details then you should visit the Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 page at:  http://www.veeam.com/vm-backup-recovery-replication-software.html?ad=large

Most enterprise have already spent tons of money on their enterprise backup solutions before adopting Virtualization, and were more likely to adapt the same backup solution after adopting Virtualization as long their backup vendor offer Virtualization integrated solution that fits their needs to save on cost. On the other hand, a large portion of small businesses were using the default backup tools that was originally shipped with their OS which made backing up virtualized environment a new challenge to them and a question they keep coming up with is “what backup solution should we look at that can fit our Virtual Infrastructure backup needs without costing us an arm and leg?”. Although many Virtualization Backup Solutions are out there, I have chosen the below three solutions as I have the most exposure to as well seeing them quite often with a good feedback in the field.

Before going over what each of these solutions has to offer, you might want to educate your self about the 7 Myths that often confuse people during choosing the solution for backup & replication of their Virtual environment by reading the paper by vExpert Eric Siebert 7 Myths about Backup & DR in Virtual Environments White Paper. Now that we have Fuds and Myths out of the way, below are three great VMware vSphere backup products that does not cost arm and legs.

VMware Data Recovery

Anyone who worked with VMware vSphere for a while knows that VMware vSphere come with its own free built in backup solution called VMware Data Recovery. VMware Data Recovery is delivered as an appliance that can be deployed in no time. Below are few points that I really like about VMware Data Recovery:

1- Its free as its included with all the VMware vSphere Editions, so you have already paid for it!

2- Its deployed as an appliance, which mean you can deploy it and start your backups in no time.

3-It benefits from most of the vStorage API for Data Protection features that come with vSphere like change blocktracking, File level restore, Image backup, VSS consistent backup.

4- It utilizes de-duplication which can save plenty of space that could be wasted by duplicated data when doing backup of multiple VMs and in turn produce a great cost saving.

VMware Data Recovery wish list:

1- Taking backup to tape or remote site is challenging with VMware Data Recovery

Below is a great video giving you all the info you need about VMware Data Recovery

Trilead VM Explorer

What has got me to try Trilead VM Explorer is my surprise with their pricing model. Trilead VM Explorer is priced at 760USD / environment (including free support and 1 year upgrades). Unlike most other backup solutions vendors for Virtualization environments which charge per how many hosts, number of physical CPUs, or VMs exist in your environment, Trilead price their VM Explorer for the full environment at 760USD which is surprisingly cheap when compared with any Virtualization backup solution from a third party vendors. The good news while Trilead price is quite low, it has a lot to offer as below:

- Its easy to install and use. It take less than 10 minutes from the time you start downloading to the time you are ready to backup your environment.

- It offers a multiple hypervisor support, in case you have multiple hypervisors in your environment.

- It include replication capability within the same backup software, which give you a cheap and a quick Disaster recovery option.

- It benefits from most of the vStorage API for Data Protection features that come with vSphere like change block tracking, File level restore, Image backup, VSS consistent backup.

- Dynamic compression can be used to help replication over slow links.

Trilead VM Explorer wish list:

While Trilead VM Explorer offers all the essential backup and replication features that should be sufficient to most SMB customers, it does not offer the more sophisticated features like Instant VM Recovery & SureBackup features that is offered by vendors like Veeam for premium cost. If all you need is a backup/replication solution that offers all the essential features at a great cost, then Trilead can be the product for you.

 Veeam Backup & Replication

In my opinion, Veeam Backup & Replication is the most sophosticated solution between the three solutions reviewed here. Veeam has always managed to be ahead of the curve on producing Virtualization backup/replication features that distinguish them from other offering in the market which allow them to charge at  a premium. While Veeam Backup & Replication can put a check mark next to all the advantages highlighted above in the Trilead VM Explorer beside pricing, it has the below distinguished features:

 Instant VM Recovery: It is a feature which allow you to restart/run a VM directly from the backup without having to wait for restore/copying time. Check the below video for more info on Veeam Instant VM Recovery:

 SureBackup: Automatically verify the recoverability of every backup, every time. Test backups by running VMs from them in an isolated Virtual Lab. Watch the video below for more details on SureBackup.

U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual objects from ANY virtualized application without the use of agents, additional backups or software tools. Check the following video for more details on U-Air

As most things in the IT world there is no single perfect solution to every environment. The best backup/DR solution for your virtual environment will highly depend on your requirements and need, though the focus of this post was to show SMBs what these three backup/replication solutions has to offer and give you quick hints that might help you to find the right solution for your environment a bit quicker.

FREE VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION v6 LICENSES FOR YOUR LAB IS VEEAM CHRISTMAS/NEW YEAR GIFT TO MANY OF US. If you are VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, VMware Certified Instructors, VMUG members, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, and Microsoft Certified Professionals, then you should check the instructions below to obtain your free NFR copy of Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Backup & Replication is such a great backup & replication product with many outstanding features and would be a great fun to own it for free for your lab. Actually I am planning to use my free NFR copy to automate the backup and restore of my home lab, so what are you waiting for go and get yours while they are free!!!

Below are few of the fantastic features that Veeam Backup & Replication offer and could encourage you to obtain your free copy. I still to see a similar capability with any other backup solution for Virtual Infrastructure:

SureBackup

Automatically verify the recoverability of every backup, every time. Simply create a VM in an isolated environment and run it directly from the backup file.

OK, I guess by this time you are ready to get your NFR copy & looking for the link so below is the details to get your free NFR Copy:

Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware

Veeam Backup & Replication for Hyper-v

Well, I believe most of my readers are eligible to one of the above free NFR copies, though if you find your self left alone then please leave me a comment and I will do my best to try to obtain an exception NFR license from Veeam for you (No promises though I will try).

Veeams to add a new free Capacity planning functions to their Veeam Reporter at no additional cost. Below is Veeam announcement in this matter:

Veeam Reporter  has always provided valuable data for capacity planning. With the new Capacity Planning Report Pack, it also does forecasting and modeling for you.

By knowing in advance when additional CPU, memory and storage are needed, you can:

Eliminate service delays
Control costs
Maximize utilization

The Capacity Planning Report Pack is included with Reporter at no additional charge. Download the new version of Reporter  now and get complete visibility of your virtual infrastructure—past, present AND future.

Download Veeam Reporter and the Capacity Planning Report Pack now.

*Also includes support for vSphere 4.1

Veeam Reporter™ has always provided valuable data for capacity planning. With the new Capacity Planning Report Pack, it also does forecasting and modeling for you. By knowing in advance when additional CPU, memory and storage are needed, you can: Eliminate service delays Control costs Maximize utilization The Capacity Planning Report Pack is included with Reporter at no additional charge. Download the new version of Reporter* now and get complete visibility of your virtual infrastructure—past, present AND future. Download Veeam Reporter and the Capacity Planning Report Pack now. *Also includes support for vSphere 4.1

Today, I had a call from one of my enterprise customers complaining that he cannot log into Veeam reporter WebAccess Portal. The main error he was getting is:

“Parser Error Message: Could not create Windows user token from the credentials specified in the config file. Error from the operating system ‘Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.”

Actually the full exact error message is below:

==================Error Start===================

Server Error in ‘/VeeamWebAccess’ Application.
——————————————————————————–

Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not create Windows user token from the credentials specified in the config file. Error from the operating system ‘Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.
‘Source Error:
Line 117: </assemblies>
Line 118: </compilation>
Line 119: <identity configProtectionProvider=”DataProtectionConfigurationProvider”>
Line 120: <EncryptedData>
Line 121: <CipherData>
Source File: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\VeeamReporterEnterprise\WebAccess\web.config Line: 119
——————————————————————————–
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3603; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082

==================Error End===================

After fuzzing out with the product & with Active directory for some time, as the error point out to some authentication problem I have to came to a conclusion its not an active directory authentication problem. Then after searching Veeam forums I hit the following post which show the resolution for the problem: http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2177

All you have to do basically is to open the web.config file normally installed in

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\VeeamReporterEnterprise\WebAccess\web.config

After that look for & remove the following lines of code:

<identity configProtectionProvider="DataProtectionConfigurationProvider">
<EncryptedData>
<CipherData>
<CipherValue>AQAAANCMnd8BFdERjHoAwE/Cl+sBAAAAYDN1hKNGzk62WgeD/ad+BAQAAAACAAAAAAADZgAAqAAAABAAAACdhnJWECkPZbtH9vHWf6O/AAAAAASAAACgAAAAEAAAADvEnGe/xStwHbIUjRnsuCigAAAAfi4w5TIIldqc1V3K0gOpyNkKQKs6qvANRtISHTfXA6fP5t6Y+EXlnXEUDqiQjPsH8CTnckOZe9Hfz+ZOi5OLjw+tKVOZ0zV2IHCtnkR/Z7kf8xhjylNkqWLcL8QIpx3BUUQHe74YyLx56LhSPEaL6aFKGIstXoYYPKEyxDjkOSoZoLpMxshO50swjijHe2BnRDfEe293+UpAZmGctyxJTxQAAACLlTtJ4HOqX6lmRzLZOgBI8JF3Aw==</CipherValue>
</CipherData>
</EncryptedData>
</identity>

Right after I have deleted the above lines of the web.config, Veeam Reporter got back operational. I am not sure why these lines are causing this problem, though it seems a bug with the software. I thought I will share it with you all in case some one hit the same problem in the future. If someone of Veeam kind enough to explain the reason behind this problem in the comments, it will be great.

In the past few weeks, I was lucky enough to get the chance to look over many third party monitoring solutions for VMware vSphere. I have decided its worth covering few of them on my blog. I will start today with Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.

Earlier last year, I had a look at Veeam monitor which I thought of being a very basic performance monitoring tool though I expected that from its price tag (I have not yet tried Veeam Montir 4 & that is on my to do list). Though  Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr has changed my view of Veeam when it comes to monitoring. Its a 360 degree full VMware monitoring solution & I would definitely rate it as an enterprise ready. I believe Veeam should revamp their Veeam monitor to match Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.

Actually Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr was able to change my view of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. I have never thought Microsoft System Center Operations Manager will be one of the good candidates to monitor VMware Infrastructure, but Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr has proven me wrong. I was amazed by the granularity of the product. I mean it has got a monitoring parameter for every item I have though of.

Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware has a great customizable dashboard, which makes it great for customers with a Network Operation Center that are filled with large LCDs. It help the NOC operators to easily identify any problem arising with the VMware infrastructure & escalated to the concerned administrator in a timely fashion. Monitoring dashboard was totally missing, when I tried Veeam monitor & I think Veeam should look at that for their next Veeam monitor release if they are reading my post. One of the Veeam nworks dashboard screens is showing below.

So for customers with SCOM in their environment & want a comprehensive solution for monitoring their full environment from one pane of glass Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware is just that. It has the ability to publish VMware configuration, performance, state, capacity, topology, and VMware vCenter events directly into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, giving you a common view across your physical and virtual infrastructures. One feature I have loved about nworks Management Pack for VMware was the ability to integrate Microsoft Application Monitoring Agents into the same view of Veeam nworks  MP Microsoft Ops Mgr. For example, you will have an alert of MS SQL 2005 performance alerts integrated with your virtual machines alerts.

The scalability of Veeam nworks is great. This is quite important if you have a large datacenter. Your monitoring product must be able to scale to monitor all your servers without compromising on the amount of details it monitor & report. The way Veeam nworks scale is by allowing you to deploy multiple collectors & manage them from the same Management Center, which keep your alerting system consolidated. One more factor that make it scalable in my opinion at least, that it is agentless & totally depend on VI-API. That means using it will not cause you any compatiblity problems, or upgrade issue in the future.

Its worth mentioning, if you have MS SCOM then Veeam nworks Management Packs for VMware will be the de-facto solution for your organization. Though if you don’t have MS SCOM, then you don’t really need to implement it just to get a close monitoring of your virtual environment. There are many other Virtualization Monitoring solutions from other vendors that offer a great visibility of your virtual infrastructure & does not require the present of SCOM, as its not always cheap to implement SCOM in your environment.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Arseny Chernov & Tatiana Mishina from Veeam for providing me with trial licenses for Veeam nworks & all the support to try it out. Ah one more last last thing & below is a quick video of the product:

Veeam Backup & replication is one of my personal favorite DR solution for VMware, specially when SAN replication is not an option. Though just as with any other backup or Disaster Recovery solution you will have to test your backup or disaster recovery plan regularly. As Veeam Backup & Replication does not include a button for testing the DR, many people don’t test their DR or get to restart the full replication over & over again after every DR test. For that I have decided to document my Veeam Replica test procedure & share it with you to save you the time & ensure you can test your DR as often as you like without affecting your production or replication.

Testing replica with Veeam Procedure:

1. Temporarily Disable Veam Replication job

2. Create a snapshot of the replica using VMware vSphere Client. This will be used to revert the replica VMDK to its original state after the DR test being completed.

3. Change the replica VM network Configuration from being connected to production port group to an isolated test network.

4.  Power on the replica Virtual Machine & test if it work properly.

5.  Shutdown the replica Virtual Machine.

6. Revert back the replica virtual machine to the snapshot you have took at step 2.

7. After the virtual machine has been completly reverted back. Delete the snapshot you have created in step 2.

8. Enable the Veeam Replication job, by removing the check mark next to the disable as per the below image.

9. optional – consider starting the replication job to ensure it is working again

I hope the above help you test your Disaster Recovery regularly. A non tested Disaster Recovery has a big chance being a non working Disaster Recovery. Good Luck.

Today I have received an e-mail from Veeam, announcing that Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 is fully supporting VMware ESXi including the replication to VMware ESXi host as a target. Below is the body of Veeam announcement e-mail:

======= Veeam Announcement =========

Veeam proudly announces the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 with full support for replication to ESXi hosts!

By moving your virtual infrastructure to ESXi, you can gain the benefits of better security and compliance while still achieving your desired RPOs / RTOs.

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 will provide no-limits support for restoring and replicating to ESXi. You’ll get all the advanced features of Veeam replication, including the ability to fail over to both the latest and earlier points in time, when replicating to ESXi.

Another industry first from Veeam!

================================

Its worth mentioning that Veeam backup & replication is the first third party application to support VMware ESXi as a replication target. This might not seems a big deal for environment with only VMware ESX in it, but its a great news for customers running ESXi or planning to use ESXi. I already know few companies who would definitely care about this news. This feature alone can make ESXi customers choose Veeam backup & replication without having to think about it for long as its the only solution that support it at the moment.

Just a funny thought that when I was working with ITComparison team on comparing the earlier version of Veeam backup & replication with Vizioncore vReplicator we had made a small statement that both vendors are planning to support ESXi as a target in the 1st half of 2010, Veeam requested to remove that announcement & did not share with us the announcement date. At that time, I felt kinda funny and as they are preparing a surprise. I guess here is the news that they were hiding & the support got to market way faster than any of their competitors though possible.

At the end, I am not paid for this review or associated with Veeam. I deal with VMware, Veeam, VizionCore, PlateSpin, & many other vendors on daily basis. Though this achievement was worth mentioning.

Please leave your comments & thoughts in the comments area below.