Tag Archives: Veeam

logo veeam on forum uk 2015

Last Minute VeeamON:Forum London plug!!!

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Oops I forgot to post this last week as I was busy finishing off my Cisco UCS Blog posts, but still if you read this in time, maybe you’re in the area and can nip down, or pull a sickie and get in, the event will be worth it!!

Personally I was all booked up for a trip down to the capital from the sunny north of England, however due to unforeseen circumstances, I cannot make it. Which is a shame, as I’ve been speaking to a few vendors that will be there, and it sounds as this will be a properly organised event, and not something thrown together.

So head on down and enjoy it for me!!!!

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VeeamON Forum, in June -http://go.veeam.com/veeamon-forum-uk
Europe’s Premier Data Center Availability Event. The one and only event that’s entirely focused on solving your challenges in providing Availability for the Modern Data Center™

When: 6/11/2015

Where: The Science Museum. Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD

Main topics:

  • Externalizing your backups with Microsoft Azure and Veeam

Speaker: Ric Howe, Partner Technology Strategist, Microsoft

  • Tuning your v8: Top 10 Misconfigurations

        Speakers: Phillip Moore, Russell Nolan

  • Recovery – how storage snapshots complement a Backup & DR strategy

Speaker: Phil Davies, Senior Systems Engineer UK&I at Nimble Storage

  • Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices 2015

Speakers: Chris Dearden, Preben Berg

EXCLUSIVE Veeam product presentation about NEW Veeam products coming in 2015

  • The event is entirely focused on solving challenges in providing availability of ALL applications and data.
  • Meet key Veeam® people and the world’s leading IT experts and visionaries to ask questions, share experiences and learn new ways to succeed!

Contests: LAB WARZ – Veeam’s first tech Contest, to be brought to Europe due to popular demand from VeeamON 2014 in Las Vegas. This action-packed competition will bring together IT pros, engineers and Veeam enthusiasts from Europe to tackle a Veeam-scenario obstacle course. Every participant will get a number of real cases in which he would have to solve the problem in limited period of time. The person who gets more points for solving cases – wins! Grand prize – Microsoft Surface Pro 3, second place prize – Apple Watch Green, 3rd Place Prize – Go Pro Hero 4.

Among event sponsors are Nimble, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Tintri – they are preparing their own speakers and contests.

And every participant of the event can win grand prize – trip to Formula 1 in Monaco! (Presumably in 2016)

Regards

Dean

backup error

ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes

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Post update 14th May 2015

VMware have released a hotfix KB2116126.

Removed information regarding old CBT workaround for Veeam is incompatible

_________________________________

So it’s come to my attention that the new and mighty ESXi 6.0 has a CBT fault as well. This time its effects are different than previous versions, but causes you backups to either fail, or take a considerably longer time to complete.

Here is the official KB from VMware: KB2114076 – Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0 (2114076)

The Cause

Below is VMware official note on the issue, which isn’t very promising, and will affect any backup technology using snapshots within VMware.

This issue occurs due to heap exhaustion when attempting to enable Change Block Tracking (CBT). 

If a virtual machine with a large number of virtual disks reached an upper threshold, enabling CBT fails because of heap exhaustion. This issue also occurs with multiple virtual machines with CBT enabled. In case of Windows virtual machines with VSS enabled, taking a quiesced snapshot creates double the amount of memory overhead.

Note: The virtual disks can be spread across virtual machines or can be in a single virtual machine.

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You can look in your VMKernel.log from the host the affected VM is on to see various warnings about CBT.

WARNING: CBT: 191: No memory available! Called from 0x418010db750e

Here I’ve used the System Centre Configuration Manager Trace32 Tool for viewing the VMKernel.log

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Continue reading ESXi 6.0 – More CBT woes →

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

Veeam Endpoint – Connect to a Backup Repository

General, ,

I am going to quickly detail how to connect Veeam Endpoint to an existing Veeam Backup and Replication Server to use a backup repository.

Covered is;

  • Pre-Reqs
  • Setup the permissions on your Backup Repository
  • Setting up the Backup Job
  • Integration into Veeam Backup and Replication Server GUI
  • Troubleshooting
  • Resources

Pre-Reqs

First off, you need;

And a suitable machine to run endpoint on.

 

Setup the permissions on your Backup Repository

It’s best to do this first, open up the GUI for Veeam on your Server.

1. Go to Backup Infrastructure > Backup Repository > Hold CTRL + Right Click on your repository object.

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2. Add your users that can access to repository, usually this will be the main user or service account used for Veeam Endpoint on the remote device. In my case, the Windows 7 machine runs LOB software for compatibility reasons, so a service account is used.

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Note: you can also configure encryption as well.

Setting up the Backup Job

1. Double click the icon in your task bar, or open the control panel of Veeam Endpoint and click to configure backup.

  • Select your backup type

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2. Select the destination as “Veeam Backup & Replication Repository”

Continue reading Veeam Endpoint – Connect to a Backup Repository →

veeam 2014 logo color tag

Veeam VMCE v8 Exam Experience

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I’ve completed and passed the Veeam VMCE v8 exam, having done the v7 exam some time ago.

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The official deadline is 15th May, to upgrade from v7 exam to the v8 exam, miss this deadline and you need to take the full course within 90 days and pass the exam to keep your status, anything after this your status will end as a VMCE and you will need to take the full course and exam to re-ignite it. So basically after the 15th May you need to take the full course.

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To be completely honest, I wasn’t that impressed by the course and exam for version 7, and had our partner status with Veeam not relied on me doing the exam, I wouldn’t have bothered this time around.

Course Material

Continue reading Veeam VMCE v8 Exam Experience →

cbt

Patch Released – Major bug in VMware’s CBT function. KB2090639

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VMware have finally released a patch to fix the Major CBT bug that causes your backups to be corrupted because the changed blocks are reported incorrectly.

Within the release notes for the 5.5 latest patch, its kind of hidden away to the point that  I missed it the first time.

When you use backup software that uses the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) API call QueryChangedDiskAreas(), the list of allocated disk sectors returned might be incorrect and incremental backups might appear to be corrupt or missing. A message similar to the following is written to vmware.log: 

DISKLIB-CTK: Resized change tracking block size from XXX to YYY 

For more information, see KB 2090639.

You can get the patches below for your version of choice, however there is no fix for ESXi 4.x yet.

ESXi 5.0 Patch 10 – Patch information

ESXi 5.1 Update 3 – Patch Information

ESXi 5.5 Patch 4 – Patch Information

You will need your my.vmware.com login details to access the patch repository to download the zip file, then just import it into your VMware Update Manager within Admin View.

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Regards

Dean