Backup

One of my customers replaced the old Veeam environment with new gear. The HW was pretty simple designed:

• two HPE ProLiant
• per server two HPE D3610 enclosures with 6 TB disks
• ~ 5km between backup server and backup copy destination

One server was designed to act as the Veeam backup server and repository, and the second server was designed to act as the backup copy destination. Both servers were running Windows Server 2019 Standard. We planned to use Windows Deduplication and ReFS, but it turned out that we have to adjust the filesystem size to get Windows Dedup working. Windows Dedup supports filesystems up to 64 TB. Due to the 24x 6 TB disks, we had to create to logical volumes to stay under 64 TB usable capacity.

Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.

In December 2018, Vembu announced the fourth major release of their BDR Suite. Vembu BDR Suite 4.0.1 is now out for production setups with enhanced performance and bug fixes. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 is an intermediate patch update that addresses the customers reported issues and other support issues on the previous build of v4.0. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 also features a large number of enhancements and significant of those are listed below.

When it comes to disaster recovery (DR), dedicated offsite infrastructure is a must. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, then you should have at least three copies of your data, on two different media, and one copy should be offsite.

But an offsite copy of your data can be expensive… You have to setup storage and networking in a suitable colocation. And even if you have an offsite copy of your data, you must be able to recover the data. This could be fun in case of terabytes of data and an offsite copy on tape.

It is pretty common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and Vembu has Vembu BDR Essentials.

Now Vembu has extended their Vembu BDR Essentials package significantly to address the needs of mid-sized businesses.

Affordable backup for SMB customers

Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets. Because of this, Vembu BDR Essentials supportes up to 6 sockets or 50 VMs. Yes, 6 sockets OR 50 VMs. Vembu has no rised this limit to 10 Sockets OR 100 VMs! This allows customers to use up to five 2-socket hosts or 100 VMs with less than 10 sockets.

I got this error in a new deployment of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4. The error occured every day at 9 pm.

24.02.2019 21:00:11 :: Error: Remote deployment and management is available for licensed agents only. Please change your backup server settings to allow managed agents to consume the license, then perform a protection group rescan.

The solution to this issue is pretty simple. Make sure that you allow the consumption of licenses for free agents. You will find this option under General > License.

Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.

Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?

To backup a virtual machine, Veeam Backup & Replication needs two permissions:

• permission to access and backup the VM, as well as the
• permission to do specific tasks inside the VM

to guarantee a consistent backup. The former persmission is granted by the user account that is used to access the VMware vCenter server (sorry for the VMW focust at this point). Usually, this account has the Administrator role granted at the vCenter Server level. The latter permission is granted by a user account that has permissions inside the guest operating system.

One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a

• HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity,
• and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016

as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus. The backend storage is a HPE 3PAR 8200.

Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.

Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.

Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.

One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.