Veeam continues to advance the state-of-the-art for virtual machine (VM) backup with Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1. So what is new….

VeeamZIP

Version 6.1 includes a new capability for performing ad-hoc backups. In many

ways, it functions like a zip utility for VMs. For this reason, it’s called VeeamZIP™.

Use VeeamZIP whenever you need to:

• Backup a VM on-the-fly (for example, before making changes to it). Instead of running the regular backup job (which typically contains multiple VMs and a specified number of restore points) or creating a new backup job, simply VeeamZIP the VM.
• Archive a VM (for example, before decommissioning it). VeeamZIP is a powerful weapon in the fight against VM sprawl. You no longer need to keep unused VMs just in case someone comes around later asking for them. Instead, VeeamZIP and then delete unused VMs. It’s a great way to reclaim expensive production storage.
• Copy a VM (to your test lab, training center, to give to a client, etc.). To install the VM in a new location, simply restore it from the backup using Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Backup™ Free Edition (see next section). Unlike copying, cloning or exporting a VM:
  • You can VeeamZIP a VM without pausing or powering it off.
  • VeeamZIP compresses and deduplicates the data to minimize file size.
  • ­VMs are fully encapsulated, and all configuration settings are correctly restored.
  • ­Thin provisioned disks are maintained as thin throughout the backup and restore process.
  • ­You can extract guest files from the backup.

You can use VeeamZIP from the Veeam backup console. You can also install Veeam Backup Free Edition on your workstation and use VeeamZIP there. Running VeeamZIP from your workstation can be useful, for example, if you want to VeeamZIP a VM to a USB stick or local hard drive. Of course, you still need permissions in your virtual infrastructure to perform a backup.

Veeam Backup Free Edition

Version 6.1 introduces a new free mode. The free mode, called Veeam Backup Free Edition, provides subset of the functionality in the full (paid) editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, including VM and file recovery. So if you ever need to perform a restore but don’t have access to a Veeam backup server, you can simply download and install Veeam Backup Free Edition. You don’t need a license key, and you can recover VMs, VM files and guest files.

Veeam Backup Free Edition also includes file management capabilities. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as “the New FastSCP™.”

More information about Veeam Backup Free Edition, including a comparison to the full (paid) editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, is available on veeam.com.

New console

One of the first things you’ll notice about version 6.1 is the new console. While wizards and dialogs (which account for 90% of the user interface) haven’t changed, it’s now easier to get to them. Enhancements include:

• Use of Microsoft design standards. Follows Microsoft UX (User eXperience) guidelines to streamline user interactions and seamlessly blend with other Windows management tools. For example, the ribbon toolbar helps you quickly see all possible actions associated with the currently selected object. And multiple task-focused management trees allow you to find things easily—for example, you can use the VM tree to quickly find and add new VMs to an existing job.
• Dynamic nodes. Reduces clutter by only showing relevant management tree nodes. For example, the “Imported backups” node is displayed only if you’ve imported one or more backups. Likewise, the “Running jobs” node, which shows all running jobs in a single view, is displayed only if there are jobs currently running.
• Extensibility. Multiple task-focused management trees and Outlook-style tabs provide real estate for new functionality planned for the next major release.
• Instant search. Search any object list to quickly find VMs, jobs, backup proxy servers or other objects, even if you have thousands of them. UI performance and virtual infrastructure tree retrieval time have also been improved, so browsing, expanding and searching for objects is faster, especially in large environments.

vPower for Hyper-V

Version 6.1 extends Veeam’s patent-pending vPower® technology—as well as Instant VM Recovery—to Hyper-V. vPower runs a VM directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file on regular backup storage. You can run a VM from any restore point (full or incremental), without changing the backup. vPower enables Instant VM Recovery, which lets you restart a failed VM from a regular backup in as little as 2 minutes.

Additional enhancements

Version 6.1 also includes a number of other enhancements, as well as all fixes for version 6.0. The remainder of this document provides a list of the most significant enhancements.

Intelligent load balancing

• Backup proxy server selection. Intelligent load balancing now uses a Network access mode backup proxy server only when there is no backup proxy server available that can process the VM in Direct SAN or Hot Add access mode. This prevents autodetect from picking a Network access mode backup proxy server from another site.
• Subnet detection. Network access mode backup proxy servers are now chosen based on their subnet. The selection logic always tries to use a backup proxy server located on the same subnet as the processed host. If no such backup proxy server is found, the first least-busy Network access mode backup proxy server is selected, and a corresponding event is logged in the job’s session log.
• Excluded disks. Intelligent load balancing now takes into account the VM’s excluded disk settings when picking the best backup proxy server to process the VM.
• Transformation tasks. The transform process is now accounted for as an active backup repository task. This prevents multiple transform operations from overloading backup storage.

Engine

• Data mover agent priority. To make it easier to use an existing Windows server as a backup proxy server, the data mover agent is now started with BELOW NORMAL priority. This reduces the effect of the data mover agent on other applications and services running on the backup proxy server. The priority is further configurable through the registry setting.
• System cache tuning. The backup proxy server setup now adjusts low-level Windows system cache settings to avoid a gradual decrease in processing speeds with large backup jobs, as has been reported by some customers.
• Concurrent job limit. The maximum of 64 concurrent jobs per backup server has been removed.
• Memory consumption. Memory consumption by the job manager process has been reduced.
• Backup proxy server replication. Added the ability for the backup proxy server to replicate itself.
• Deleted VM retention period. The deleted VM retention period no longer affects incremental backups.
• Shared backup proxy servers and repositories. Backup proxy servers and repositories can now be shared between multiple backup servers.
  Note: The intelligent load balancing algorithm runs on each backup server and is unaware of any tasks assigned to a backup proxy server or repository by another backup server.
• Bottleneck analysis. Uses enhanced formulas for calculating proxy and network processing statistics.
• Disabling inline deduplication. Disabling inline deduplication now disables both target-side (as before) and source-side deduplication. This can improve incremental backup performance when backing up to a deduplicating storage device.
• Email notifications. Redesigned the default email notification subject.

Backup

• Support for rotating backup storage. Added support for the ForceCreateMissingVBK registry key to v6 backup repositories. When this registry key is set, the backup job will create a new full backup if previous backup files are missing. This registry key is useful if you want to rotate backup storage.

Replication

• Omit replica suffix. You can now configure the replica suffix to be empty.
• Edit source VM hardware. You can now edit source VM hardware settings (for example, add a new vNIC) without having to restart the replication cycle.
• Continue replication after failback. You can now resume replication after failback without having to replicate the full VM.

VM copy

• Overwrite existing VM files. A VM copy job now overwrites existing VM files in v6 backup repositories. Previously, each run would create a new VM copy.
• Importing backups. You can now import backups from password-protected CIFS shares.

VM migration

• Preserve source files. New option to enable preservation of source VM files after successful migration.
• Reliability and performance. Improved overall reliability and performance of the VM migration process.

File-level restore

• File-level restore mount. When performed by the user interactively (using the backup console UI), the Windows file-level restore process now mounts the volumes of the backed-up VM under C:\VeeamFLR. This functionality is useful if you prefer to perform file-level recovery with native tools instead of Veeam Backup Browser.
• 1-Click File Restore: Added support for restoring very large files.

Windows guest file indexing

• Support for ReFS volumes. Added support for indexing ReFS volumes (new Windows Server 2012 file system).
• Status notifications. Removed warning of failed indexing (and application-aware processing) attempts on non-Windows VMs.

 User interface

• View and restore from Windows Explorer. You can now view the contents of any .VBK file or initiate a restore by simply double-clicking the file in Windows Explorer (without having to import the backup file first).
• 24-hour job history. You can now see the results of all job runs in the last 24 hours in a single view.
• Delete default backup repository. As long as it’s not the only one, you can now delete the default backup repository.
• Synthetic full and transform progress. Progress of the synthetic full and transform operations is now displayed in the job grid.

Enterprise Manager

• Datastore view. Added datastore view to the virtual machine selection dialog.*
• Repository selection. You can now change the backup repository when editing a cloned job.*
• Email notifications. Added information about the target VM to the email notification for 1-Click File Restore operations.*

Enhancements specific to VMware

• Hot add. If a VM has multiple disks, hot add is performed once for the entire VM, instead of once for each processed disk, which speeds up VM processing.
• vPower NFS performance. Removed unnecessary logging to improve vPower NFS performance.
• Failback performance. Enhanced the virtual disk digest calculation process to improve failback performance.
• Delete default backup proxy server. As long as it’s not the only one, you can now disable and delete the default VMware backup proxy server.
• Warnings. The warning message indicating failover to network processing mode has been changed to an information event. Likewise, the warning message about outdated VMware Tools on the processed VM has been changed to an information event.

Enhancements specific to Hyper-V

• SCVMM 2012. Added support for System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager.
• Localized Hyper-V servers. Added support for localized Hyper-V servers.
• VMs on backup server’s host. You can now protect VMs running on a Hyper-V host where the Veeam backup server is installed in the parent partition.
• On-host backup proxy server tasks. You can now customize the maximum number of concurrent jobs on a Hyper-V on-host backup proxy server.
• Changed block tracking. Added compatibility with certain 3rd party applications (such as antivirus) that previously affected changed block tracking. Also, to keep CSV volumes clean and for better reliability, files containing changed block tracking information are now stored on local host storage.
• Application-aware and VSS processing. Improved reliability of application-aware and VSS processing.
• Replication. To prevent replicas from auto-starting upon host reboot, VM auto start options are no longer replicated. Virtual network optimizations and VLANID settings are now replicated.

Other

• Setup. On modern versions of Windows, automount is now disabled using the corresponding
• new primitives provided by the operating system (OS). This change was required because “old-style”
• automount disabling is deprecated in these OSs and can cause unwanted issues, such as issues
• with OS patching.
• Logging. Added current backup log compression when the size exceeds the threshold, as well as
• the ability to customize log folder and log retention policy.

With other words, a great new version with lots of new things and possibilities…

These are my notes about creating a Veeam Virtual Lab. After a lot of testing en searching why my installation was not working I finally took the time to read the manual  … As a good technical person this is the last thing to do after searching with google…  So these are the important text pieces of the Veeam Backup & Replication v6 manual.

What is a Virtual Lab

A virtual lab is an isolated virtual test environment where verified VMs with all components required for their proper operation are started and tested. A virtual lab is created using existing resources in your virtual environment and ensures secure integrity and functionality testing for backed up VMs.

When a new virtual lab is created, Veeam Backup & Replication adds a new VM folder, vSwitch and an optional resource pool on the host where the virtual lab is registered. The network configuration in the virtual lab mirrors the configuration of the production network. For example, if a tested VM and its dependencies are located in two logical networks in your production environment, these two networks will be recreated in the virtual lab and mapped to corresponding production networks.

To enable communication between the outer world and VMs in the virtual lab, Veeam Backup & Replication uses a proxy appliance that is created and registered in the folder and resource pool of the virtual lab. The proxy appliance is a VM that acts as a gateway routing requests from the production network to the isolated network.

To connect to isolated networks, Veeam Backup & Replication adds to the proxy appliance a vNIC adapter for each network. Each vNIC adapter gets an IP address from the network to which it is connected, which is typically the same as the IP address of a default gateway in the corresponding production network.

If the application group to be started in the virtual lab does not have a DHCP server and some applications in this group as well as verified applications require DHCP, you can enable the DHCP service on the vNIC adapter for each isolated network. You can also select specific DNS servers from the production network that should be started in the isolated network. Keep in mind that to be able to add a DNS server, you should have it virtualized in your production environment, and you should also have its backup.

To ensure correct work of applications, VMs in isolated networks are run with the same IP addresses as in the production network. To avoid IP address conflicts between VMs in production and isolated networks, Veeam Backup & Replication uses IP masquerading. For each isolated logical network, Veeam Backup & Replication assigns a masquerade IP address, and adds a new route to the IP routing table in the Veeam Backup console, where a proxy appliance is specified as a gateway to access VMs in this network.

For example, when trying to access a VM with IP address 172.16.10.1 in the isolated network, Veeam Backup & Replication sends a request to the masquerade IP address 172.17.10.1. According to the routing rule added to the IP routing table, all requests are first sent to the next hop – the proxy appliance. The proxy appliance performs address translation, substitutes the masquerade IP address with a real IP address in the isolated network, and forwards the request to the necessary VM in the isolated network – in our case, to 172.16.10.1.

Sometimes it is necessary to provide many clients with access to a restored VM, which is especially the case for user-directed U-AIR restores. For example, you may want to provide access to a backup copy of the Exchange Server for employees using web-based access (Outlook Web Access). In this situation, it is impossible to update the routing table on every client machine. Veeam Backup & Replication enables you to get access to a VM in the isolated network directly from a production environment. To get access to a VM in the isolated network, you should reserve a static IP address in the pool of production IP addresses and specify which IP address of the VM powered on in the isolated environment it matches. This static IP address will be assigned to the proxy appliance NIC connected to the production network. IP traffic directed to the specified static IP address will be routed by the proxy appliance to the VM powered on in isolated network.

For example, to access a VM that has IP address 192.168.1.20 in the isolated network, you can reserve IP address 192.168.1.3 (in production) for it. You should also register an alias record in the production DNS server for the reserved IP address. For the example mentioned above, you can register backup.exchange.local as an alias for the IP address 192.168.1.3.

Creating a Virtual Lab

When setting up a virtual lab, you should select an ESX host on which it should be created, a datastore to hold redo logs and files of the proxy appliance, and specify settings for a proxy appliance and isolated networks.

To create a new virtual lab, you have to start the New Virtual Lab wizard. Do one of the following:

• Right-click the Virtual Lab item in the menu on the left and select Create virtual lab from the shortcut menu.

• Click Virtual Labs under SureBackup in the management tree, right-click anywhere on blank area in the information pane and select Create virtual lab from the shortcut menu.

Step 1. Specify Name and Description

Enter a name and description for the new virtual lab. The default description contains time at which the lab was created and user who created it.

Step 2. Select a Host

Click Choose to select an ESX(i) host on which the new virtual lab will be created. You can select a standalone ESX(i) host or the one being a part of a cluster.

Note If you want to create a virtual lab on the ESX(i) server being a part of the vCenter hierarchy, make sure that this vCenter server is added to the Veeam Backup & Replication console. If such ESX(i) server is added as a standalone host, a virtual lab will not be created on it.

For every new virtual lab, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a dedicated folder and a resource pool where all tested VMs and the virtual proxy will run during recovery verification process. By default, the folder and the pool have the same name as the virtual lab. To change the name of the destination folder and/or resource pool, click Configure and enter the necessary names in the Destination Options section.

Note In clusters with disabled DRS no resource pools can be created. If the destination host is included in such a cluster, click Configure and clear the Create resource pool check box. For details, refer to the VMware Knowledge Base.

Step 3. Select Datastore

Click Choose to select a datastore on which redo logs for tested VMs should be stored. Redo logs are auxiliary files used to store all changes that take place when a VM is run from a read-only backup. As soon as a recovery verification jobs completes, redo logs are deleted.

Step 4. Set Up Proxy Appliance

To enable automatic recovery verification of VMs, select the Use proxy appliance in this virtual lab check box. The proxy appliance acts as a gateway that provides access from Veeam Backup server to VMs running in the isolated virtual lab. If you do not select this check box, you will only be able to verify VMs and perform item-level restore using built-in temporary VM console in Veeam Backup & Replication, or using vSphere Client, and perform heartbeat tests.

By default, the virtual proxy uses the name of the virtual lab. To change the default name, click Configure in the Proxy appliance VM settings section and specify the name of the created virtual appliance.

Click Configure in the Production network connection section to select a network where the proxy appliance should be created, specify its IP address and settings of DNS server to be used. You can choose to automatically obtain IP address for the proxy appliance and DNS server, or set them manually.

Important! If you assign a proxy appliance an IP address from the same network where the Veeam Backup server is located, Veeam Backup & Replication will automatically add a new route to the routing table on the Veeam Backup server. If you assign a proxy appliance an IP address from the network other than that where the Veeam Backup server is located, you will have to manually add a new route to the routing table on the router in the production network. Otherwise you will not be able to access virtual machines in isolated networks.

Step 5. Select the Networking Mode

Select the type of network settings configuration. Veeam Backup & Replication offers two types of networking for the created virtual lab:

• Basic – this type of networking is recommended if you have only one production network, and the Veeam Backup server is located in that network. Veeam Backup & Replication will use parameters of this network to automatically configure an isolated network to verify tested VMs.

• Advanced – this type of networking is recommended if you are planning to verify VMs that have dependencies on other VMs located in different networks. In this case, you will have to configure network parameters for these isolated networks manually.

Step 6. Specify Isolated Networks

This step is available if you have selected the Advanced networking option at the Networking step of the wizard.

At this step of the wizard, you should create isolated networks where verified VMs should be started, and map them to production networks where these VM are located.

To add a network, click Add and select a production network in which a VM from the application group or a verified VM resides. Then, specify a name for an isolated network that should be mapped to this production network, and enter an identifier for the created virtual network.

Step 7. Specify Network Settings

This step is available if you have selected the Advanced networking option at the Networking step of the wizard.

At this step of the wizard, you should specify settings for every created isolated networks and how a proxy appliance should connect the production network to these networks.

Communication between the production network and an isolated network is carried out through the vNIC adapter that is added to the proxy appliance. A vNIC adapter is added for each isolated network.

To add an adapter, click Add and specify its connection settings.

Select the network to which you want this adapter to be connected. Specify the IP address that the proxy appliance should have in this isolated network, and the subnet mask. Typically, the IP address should coincide with the gateway IP address in the production network.

Note Network addresses for different adapters should be different. For example, if the first adapter has address 192.168.0.1 with mask 255.255.255.0, and the second one – 192.168.0.2 with mask 255.255.255.0, such configuration will not be supported.

Once you specify the IP address, Veeam Backup & Replication will automatically configure a masquerade IP address for accessing VMs running in the virtual lab through the production network.

Select the Enable DHCP service on this adaptor check box and specify settings of a virtualized DNS server if necessary. Click OK to save settings.

Select the Route network traffic between vNICs check box to enable communication between isolated networks. When you select this option, make sure that the IP address of the proxy appliance in the isolated network matches the IP address of a proxy appliance in the production network.

Step 8. Specify Static IP Mapping

At this step of the wizard, you can specify static IP address mapping rules to make VMs in the virtual lab accessible from any computer in the production network.

To add a new static IP relation, click Add. In the IP relation window, specify an IP address of a VM in the production network, and its masquerade IP – a free IP address from the production network that will be used to access it in the isolated network from the production environment.

Step 9. Apply Parameters

Review the parameters of the virtual lab which will be created. You can go back to any previous step to adjust the parameters. If everything is fine, click Next to create the virtual lab.

Important! Use Veeam Backup & Replication to modify or delete a virtual lab. If you change lab settings or delete any of its components from outside (for example, using vSphere Client), the lab will be corrupted and its component such as created vSwitch, resource pool and so on will remain in the virtual infrastructure.

I also found a Youtube movie about the working of the Virtual Lab. This movie is created by Andreas Neufert of Veeam.

Last week I had a problem with an fresh installation of Veeam Backup & Replication v6. I wanted to schedule a monthly backup, scheduled to make a backup on the last Friday of the month.

When I completed the configuration of the backup job my scheduled date was not the last Friday of the month but the next Friday.

This is not correct, in my case the backup should start at Friday 30 march.

So I started looking on the internet, also checked the Veeam forum, found another post http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10704. I decided to install the latest patch for Veeam B&R v6, patch 3. I checked the release notes, but it no info about a scheduling problem. I installed it anyway, you never know…

After a reboot my schedule was corrected, the job is scheduled to run at Friday 30 march. Problem solved…

Patch 3 can be downloaded here: http://www.veeam.com/kb_articles.html/KB1442

Patch 3 release notes.

These are the issues resolved by the Patch 3 for Veeam Backup version 6.0.0.153. All patches are cumulative so each below fix is contained in this patch.

• Application-aware processing fails for SQL server where Veeam configuration database is located.
• Cannot specify “0” in re-IP rule.
• Hot add operation can sometimes cause a very long backup source/target proxy Virtual Machine stun. This stun can be so long that it can cause all jobs using this backup proxy to fail due to timeout with:”Error: Client error: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time”.
• CBT may fail on virtual disks other than Hard Disk 1 with the “Soap fault. A specified parameter was not correct” error when the hot add processing mode is used.
• Backup console UI freezes periodically (upon automatic refresh event) when there is a large number of managed objects exist.
• Any job processing the same Virtual Machine longer than 48 hours is forcibly terminated.The new timeout is set to 7 days.
• Very large jobs start failing with the “Failed to save file content” error after the VBM metadata file reaches 4 MB in size.
• Hyper-V CSV ownership change during backup or replication preparation process may take too long with certain storage devices, causing bug check (BSOD) on Hyper-V hosts.
• Hyper-V virtual disks with the disk file’s extension in capital letters (.VHD) are backed up like regular files, and not like virtual disks.
• Copying very large files to Linux or ESX host with service console credentials specified may fail.

Enhancements

• For VMware virtual machines with multiple disks, hot add was changed to only happen once for each processed virtual machine instead of multiple times, before each processed disk.
• Improved VMware replication failback performance by enhancing the virtual disk digest calculation process.
• Improved vPower NFS performance by removing some excessive logging.
• Changed the warning about outdated VMware Tools on the processed virtual machine to an information event.
• Removed CBT warning from the initial run of backup and replication jobs which have backup and replica mapping configured.
• Added support for adding Hyper-V with Veeam Backup and Replicationg installed. Previously, adding the host would fail with the “User credentials cannot be used for local connections” error.
• Improved bottleneck analysis formulas for proxy and network processing stages. For example, heavy backup target load should no longer affect the Network stage percent busy value.