Category Archives: Veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 R2 update

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Last week Veeam released there long awaited update to fix the support for VMware vSphere 5.5 and Windows 2012R2.

New Features

VMware 

  • vSphere 5.5 support, including support for 62TB virtual disks and virtual hardware v10 virtual machines.
  • vCloud Director 5.5 support.
  • Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as guest virtual machines (VMs).
  • Added ability to limit maximum amount of active VM snapshots per datastore to prevent it from being overfilled with snapshot deltas. The default value of 4 active snapshots can be controlled with MaxSnapshotsPerDatastore (REG_DWORD) registry key.

Microsoft

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 support, including support for Generation 2 virtual machines.
  • System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) support.
  • Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as guest virtual machines (VMs).
  • Support for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and its components on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1.

Built-in WAN acceleration

  • Increased data processing performance up to 50% with hard drive based cache, and up to 3 times with SSD based cache. Multi-core CPU on source WAN accelerator is recommended to take full advantage of the enhanced data processing engine.

Replication

  • Added ability for source and target proxy servers to reconnect and resume replication when network connection between source and target site drops for a short period of time.

Tape

  • Added support for a number of enterprise-class tape libraries with partitioning functionality that allows presenting multiple tape library partitions to the same host.
  • Import/export slot interaction has been redesigned to add support for a number of IBM and Oracle tape libraries.

Application-aware processing 

  • Added ability for application-aware processing logic to detect passive Microsoft Exchange DAG database present on the VM, and process it accordingly.
  • Added support for Exchange CCR clusters.

User interface 

  • User interface should now remember size and positions off the main window, as well as all panels and columns.

Resolved Issues

Engine

  • Importing backup fails with the “Failed to load backup meta from file. Unexpected end of file has occurred” if VBM file size exceeds 10MB.
  • Deleted VM retention incorrectly applies to not deleted VMs when full backup transform duration exceeds the deleted VM retention period (14 days by default).
  • Removed unintentional compression (and further uncompression) of data transferred between source and target data movers when both are running on the same server, and compression is disabled in the job settings.

VMware 

  • Replication jobs should now automatically handle the situations when source VM disk size changes, instead of failing with the “Declared and actual sizes of the disk are different” error.
  • Replication jobs using Windows 2003 hot add source proxy fails with the “Client error: Failed to send command” error.
  • Very long running replication jobs may fail with the “Failed to process [srcSaveSignature]” error.
  • Re-IP addressing process may unintentionally update some reparse points found in the guest file system, which under certain circumstances may make them unusable.
  • vCenter Server version is not updated after vCenter update on the vSphere Web Plug-in configuration page of Enterprise Manager web UI.
  • vSphere Web Client plug-in shows “Access denied” error for all users that have never logged into Enterprise Manager.
  • Added ability to configure timeouts for networkless (VIX) operations via vixOperationTimeoutSec (REG_DWORD) and vixExecutionTimeoutSec (REG_DWORD) registry values in seconds.
  • Added ability to configure timeouts for Instant VM Recovery operations via IrMountLeaseTimeOut (REG_DWORD) and IrVcdMountLeaseTimeOut (REG_DWORD) registry values in minutes. The new, increased defaults are 30 and 45 minutes respectively.

Hyper-V 

  • Under certain scenarios of dynamic VHD virtual disk size increase, changed block tracking information can be reset, resulting in incremental job run having to read the entire VHD to determine the incremental changes.
  • Performing compact operation on VHD virtual disk can reset changed block tracking information.
  • Instant VM Recovery fails with the “Connection with Hyper-V mount agent was lost” error for VMs with dynamic VHD disk size not being a multiple of 256MB.
  • Failure to rescan any host makes rescan of the remaining cluster hosts to fail with the following error: “Failed to execute WMI Query”
  • Instant VM Recovery fails with the “Failed to prepare VHD file for mounting” when target Hyper-V host’s storage uses native 4KB sector size disks.
  • Application-aware processing of Windows Server 2012 VM running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V may hang for 10 minutes.
  • Removed the single VSS snapshot per cluster limit. As the results, all jobs should now correctly use the max concurrent snapshot per volume setting.
  • Replication job may fail during the free disk space check with the “Failed to extract volume mount point by the specified path” error, depending on how destination folder was selected in the replication job wizard.
  • Veeam jobs may cause non-VM owner Hyper-V nodes to log the following events to the system event log: “(eventid = 8194): “Unexpected error querying for the IVssWriterCallback interface. hr = 0x80070005, Access is denied”
  • Changed block tracking functionality does not function on cluster disks.

Application-aware processing 

  • Exchange 2003 running in VM restored from Veeam backup may rename its mailbox databases after each subsequent reboot.

Backup Copy 

  • Retry cycles cause incorrect processing duration shown in the Backup Copy job report.
  • Backup Copy job reports show the inflated traffic savings ratios due to being calculated off the incorrect parameter.
  • Certain Backup Copy jobs failures result in Backup Copy job report not send immediately, but rather at the end of the copy interval.
  • A number of additional enhancements to the Backup Copy job report.

File level recovery 

  • Copy To fails on files with long paths with the following error: “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248”
  • Mount cache files should now be cleaned up from %AppData% folder automatically.

Guest indexing 

  • Guest file system catalog data processing performance was accelerated a few times in cases when the catalog contains very large amount of restore points.
  • Catalog service may take a very long time to start when there is a large data upload queue present.

1-Click VM Restore 

  • File restore operator scope settings should no longer affect ability to perform VM restore in certain scenarios with overlapping permissions.

Built-in WAN Acceleration 

  • Backup Copy job fails with the “Unable to initialize remote target session connection: all aliases have failed” after source VM disk has been resized.
  • Large Backup Copy jobs may fail with the “ERR |Invalid length of the binary data” error.
  • WAN accelerator resource is not released correctly if Backup Copy job did not copy any data during the copy interval, preventing the following copy intervals from obtaining access to WAN accelerators.
  • Under certain circumstances, the Backup Copy job health check may fail with the “Access is denied” error.

Backup from Storage Snapshots 

  • Added ability to perform multiple VM snapshot removal concurrently (according to the global concurrency setting) when multiple VMs are backed up from the same LUN by the same job.
  • HP StoreServ (3PAR) integrated jobs may fail with the “Invalid input: string length exceeds limit” error depending on the snapshot name length.

Tape 

  • Drive to library matching code does not process some symbols in the serial numbers, resulting in matching problems with certain tape libraries (for example, QUADStor VTL).
  • Added ability to disable tape device rescan completely with the DisableTapeSubsystem (REG_DWORD) registry key. This can help in situations when the same tape devices is shared between multiple backup solutions.
  • In some cases, stopping tape jobs can cause backup session not finalized correctly, resulting in future attempts to write to the same tape failing with the “Tape positioning” error.
  • The Do not protect data (cyclic overwrite tapes as required) option does not work correctly for standalone drives.
  • Tapes with multiple partitions cannot be correctly formatted.
  • Tape jobs fail with the “Tape changer alert: The library was unable to read the bar code on a cartridge” error upon receiving the corresponding alert from the tape library.
  • Certain tape device configurations cause “There is no media in the drive” error to be logged incorrectly when the media is in fact present in the drive.
  • Under rare circumstances, writing to the first tape in the media set may fail with the following error: “The INSERT statement conflicted with the FOREIGN KEY constraint “FK_Tape.file_parts_file_versions””

File Copy 

  • Linux symbolic links are not copied by file management operations and file copy jobs.

SureBackup 

  • SureBackup job may incorrectly use vCloud Director virtual machine backup when Application Group is configured by adding VM from vSphere infrastructure.
  • SureBackup does not update port group correctly when both production and virtual lab networks are located on the same Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS).

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange 

  • Launching Veeam Explorer for Exchange from Backup Browser may fail with the following error: “Error: JetError -546, JET_errLogSectorSizeMismatch, the log file sector size does not match the current volume’s sector size”

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

  • Using localized SQL server for staging fails with the “File is a Directory” error.
  • Attachments lost during recovery when attachment path contains Unicode symbols, even though they can be seen in the user interface.

Known Issues

General 

  • Network traffic verification does not function when the Use multiple upload streams per job option is disabled.

vSphere 5.5 

  • E1000E vNIC adaptors has been found to crash ESXi host under heavy load. Avoid using them until the patch is available from VMware. For more information, please refer to VMware KB2059053.
  • Virtual appliance (hot add) processing mode does not support SATA disks. This is by design of VMware hot add functionality, which requires SCSI adaptors.
  • vSAN beta is not supported.

Hyper-V 2012 R2 

  • Offhost backup from deduplicated volume fails if Data Deduplication feature is disabled on backup proxy server, or incompatible with Windows Server deduplication version used on backed up volume.
  • Shared VHDX virtual disks backup is not supported.

Windows Server 2012 R2 

  • In Windows Server 2012 R2 environments with Windows Server deduplication feature in use, be sure to install Veeam Backup & Replication on Windows Server 2012 R2, and enable Data Deduplication feature. Windows Server 2012 deduplication driver is not compatible with Windows Server 2012 R2 deduplication, causing file level recovery errors with false data corruption reports.

R2 update is available for download starting November 13, 2013 (KB1831)

This update is cumulative and includes all fixes from Patch #1 below.

Veeam released Patch 1 for Veeam Backup & Replication v7.

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Veeam has released Patch 1 for Veeam Backup & Replication v7.

Mind this is NOT a patch to make Version 7 compatible with VMware vSphere 5.5! vSphere 5.5 is not yet supported by Veeam Backup & Replication v7.

For more information see Veeam KB1823.

So what is fixed in this patch.

Engine

  • Under certain circumstances, backup to CIFS target may fail with the following errors: “The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process”, “Failed to create or open file \\server\share\file.vbk“.
  • In reversed incremental backup mode, retrying previously failed backup of newly added virtual disk makes the created, and the following restore points for this virtual disk invalid.
  • Linux version of standalone backup extraction tool fails to restore v7 backups with the following error: “Declared number of bank pages (XXXXX) is exceed limit (1024)”.
  • Network throttling rules are not applied if the “Use multiple upload streams option” is disabled.
  • Under certain circumstances, the reported processing rate may be much lower than actual with parallel processing enabled.
  • Added ability to manually configure more than 100 ports to be used for data movers. This may be needed when running more than 100 jobs concurrently.
  • Deleted VM retention option is now disabled by default for the newly created jobs, and its logic has been enhanced to better handle job failures.

VMware

  • Jobs fail to remove VM snapshots if vCenter server is added to Managed Servers in B&R user interface both as a Windows server, and as a vCenter server.
  • Replication jobs do not use multiple upload streams for the first processed disk of each VM. This leads to either reduced performance, or network throttling rules not applying during processing of the first disk.
  • Maximum concurrent snapshot removal settings are ignored, limiting VM snapshot removal to one at a time within a job with parallel processing enabled.
  • The source VM snapshot is now first to be removed during in replication jobs. This helps to reduce the time VM runs off snapshot.
  • Powered on source VMs are now shut down automatically to streamline self-service full VM restores.

Hyper-V

  • Instant VM Recovery fails when dynamic VHD disk size is not a multiple of 256 MB. Such disks cannot be created with Hyper-V management tools, but can appear as a result of P2V/V2V conversion, or produced by 3rd party tools.
  • Instant VM Recovery fails when target Hyper-V host’s storage uses native 4KB sector size disks.
  • Under certain circumstances, Instant VM Recovery may fail with the following error: “CVeeamFCTRegionDynamicVHD::RequestProcess: Failed to read needed portion of data, Details: IDriverRequest::DataSet: Too much data”
  • Adding a new virtual disk to the original VM makes the created, and the following replica restore point for the given virtual disk invalid.
  • Changing virtual disk exclusion settings on the existing replication job makes failover fail with the “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”.
  • Failure to rescan any host also fails the remaining hosts rescan with the following error: “Failed to execute WMI Query”
  • Restoring VHDX into the root of CSV folder makes the restored VM fail to start with the following error: “General access denied error”
  • SureBackup testing of VMs with SCVMM-specific network settings may fail with the following error: “Failed to import virtual machine VMNAME configuration”
  • Application-aware processing for guest OS without Microsoft VSS support is now skipped automatically regardless of the job’s settings.

Application-aware processing

  • Backing up all Active Directory domain controllers at the same time (which is something parallel processing made possible to achieve) may lead to DFS-R SYSVOL replication failures.
  • Changed Microsoft SharePoint farm topology collection failure event from warning to informational.

Backup Copy

  • Multiple enhancements to Backup Copy job’s email notifications and statistics.
  • Added ability to disable creating weekly full backups for GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) retention policy.

Guest indexing

  • Temporary files produced by guest file system indexing process are not correctly removed from AppData\Local\Temp.

HP Storage Snapshots Integration

  • Initiating Active Full backup on the job with existing backups renders the created and the following backups in the backup chain unrecoverable.
  • Incremental replication runs fail with the “The method or operation is not implemented” error.
  • VM snapshots should now be created concurrently in scenarios when the job setup allows to backup multiple VMs from the same LUN. This decreases the time VMs will run off snapshot, and improves overall job performance.

SureBackup

  • Under certain circumstances, parsing route.exe output may fail. As a result, virtual lab creation process and SureBackup jobs may “hang” indefinitely.

Tape

  • Changer alerts may be incorrectly interpreted as drive alerts.
  • Tape drives appear online even when the corresponding tape library is offline.
  • When the “Continue media set” option is enabled, but the last tape is offline, the job fails with the following error: “Error Tape not exchanged”.
  • Restoring VM from tape fails with the “The directory name is invalid” error if the source VM backup job’s name contains invalid NTFS symbols (\|/*:?<>).
  • “Eject media once the job finishes” option now applies to both full and incremental job runs.
  • Added support for ejecting media once the job finishes to standalone drives. Previously, attempting to use this option with standalone drives resulted in the “Automated library not found” error.
  • Tape job email report now includes barcodes and names of all tapes that were used in the corresponding job session.

User interface

  • Deleting a single imported backup that is located in the root folder of the backup repository deletes the whole repository instead.
  • Improved Microsoft Exchange server autodiscovery logic in restore to original location wizard of Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange.
  • Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint crashes when desktop background changes (such as when switching to the new RDP session).

Other

  • PuTTY has been updated to the more recent version for security reasons.
  • Configuration backup fails with the “Value cannot be null” error if SMTP credentials in the email notification settings are not specified.

To obtain the patch please download it from: Download


Free NFR License for Veeam Backup Management Suite

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Veeam is giving away FREE 180-day NFR licenses for 2 sockets of Veeam® Backup Management Suite™ for VMware or Hyper-V for your home or work lab. Yes!!!
Veeam Backup Management Suite is built from Veeam Backup & Replication™ to deliver the data protection, visibility and control you need for your VMware or Hyper-V environment.

By leveraging the capabilities and benefits of virtualization, Veeam Backup Management Suite helps organizations modernize their data protection strategy and mitigate daily management risks.

Get a FREE NFR license for your lab to see the benefits of Veeam Backup Management Suite for yourself:

  • Complete visibility of your backup and virtual infrastructures
  • Advanced monitoring of backup jobs and resources
  • At-a-glance reporting and detailed documentation of backup status, performance, availability, utilization and more!

Link to the NFR request page.

And by returning a favor for this great gift, fill in the form at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2013-CommChoice-WinITPro-FinalVoting

Veeam launched their new flagship, Veeam Backup & Replication v7

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Last week Veeam launched a new version of Veeam Backup & Replication v7. In this version there are a lot of new features and enhancements.


I already created a blog post about the 7 biggest features. See my blog post: https://blog.mrpol.nl/2013/05/23/veeam-announces-latest-features-v7/
For an overview of all the new things see the What’s new document.
These new Features are in my opinion the ones I like the most or looked out for the most.

Native tape support

Many organizations have invested in tape and are subject to policies requiring tape. Veeam Backup & Replication v7 offers you an easy way to copy files and backups on tape, with support for virtual tape libraries (VTLs), tape libraries and standalone drives. Files, VMs and restore points are tracked on tape, enabling you to easily locate items and making restores easy.

Built-in WAN Acceleration

Offsite storage of backups is a critical component of a good data protection strategy, and in v7, Veeam makes offsite storage easy with Built-in WAN Acceleration. Caching, variable block length data fingerprinting and TCP/IP protocol optimizations result in up to 50 times faster transfers of Veeam backups across the WAN while eliminating the need for additional backup jobs, copy scripts and capabilities like storage-based replication. Best of all, there are no VM- or host-based agents to install and no special network setup required.

High performance Backup from Storage Snapshots

Continuing what we started with the introduction of Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots in version 6.5, Veeam Backup & Replication v7 takes advantage of SAN snapshots again to offer new capabilities for powerful data protection. Exclusive innovations, including direct VMFS access and the ability to leverage VMware Changed Block Tracking, enable instant VMware snapshot commit and let you create backups and replicas from storage snapshots as often as you like and whenever you like. The result is dramatically improved RPOs for near-CDP that doesn’t impact your production environment or running VMs.

This VMware-only feature currently supports HP StoreVirtual VSA, HP StoreVirtual and HP StoreServ storage product lines.

Backup Copy jobs

Grandfather-father-son (GFS) policy. This data retention feature helps you meet data archival requirements by copying and storing full VM backups for specified intervals of time.

Engine enhancements

Parallel processing of multiple VMs. Enables better utilization and saturation of your storage infrastructure, eliminates dead time between backups and improves overall backup performance. 

Parallel processing of virtual disks within VMs. Significantly improves backup performance for VMs with multiple large disks and reduces the amount of time a VM runs off its snapshot, thus helping to reduce snapshot commit times.

Resume on disconnect. Data movers are now capable of transparently resuming communication after a network connection drops completely for a short period of time. This capability dramatically improves the reliability of remote backup and replication.

Hardware-accelerated compression. A new default compression level with a proprietary algorithm implementation leverages advanced CPU instruction sets (SSE extensions). This reduces backup proxy CPU usage up to 10 times when compared to the previous default compression level.

64-bit data movers. Backup repositories can now support appreciably larger backups. Please note versions of Windows prior to Microsoft Windows 2012 have a 16TB limit for maximum NTFS file size. This limit roughly equates to a maximum of 25TB of source data per backup job.

Backup repository overload protection. When a backup repository’s storage is overloaded with regard to I/O capacity, new tasks are not assigned to that backup repository even if task slots are available.

Reduced memory consumption. Memory consumption optimization allows 32-bit data movers to support larger backups.

Enhanced I/O pattern for data writes. Decreased fragmentation within backups files results in improved backup and restore performance, as well as reduced degradation from full backup file transformations over time.

Automatic termination of deduplication. When full backup files significantly exceed the maximum size recommended by Veeam Backup & Replication, deduplication is automatically disabled for those specific backup files. This measure is intended to increase the reliability of deployments that perhaps were not carefully planned or are not optimally configured.

Graceful job stop. Attempt to cleanly shut down all jobs when the Veeam Backup & Replication service is stopped (either manually or as a result of a computer shutdown).

Transparent backup of vCenter Server VM. The vCenter Server VM can now be backed up without having to resort to workarounds, such as adding the vCenter Server’s host by IP address and then configuring a separate job for it.

Concurrent snapshots commit operations. The maximum number of concurrent operations is now automatically limited to a preconfigured value (per standalone host or cluster). This reduces the impact of snapshot commits on your production environment. Maximum values are configured via updates to corresponding registry values.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange 2013. Support for Microsoft Exchange 2013 is now available.

Restore to original location. Redesigned restores to original location are now faster and more reliable.

Restore to Office 365. Experimental support is available for restoring mailbox items to Microsoft Office 365.

Windows UI

Credentials Manager. All accounts used throughout Veeam Backup & Replication can be managed through one central dialog, allowing account passwords to be easily updated when they change.

Enterprise Manager

RESTful API. All Enterprise Manager functionality is now available through the RESTful API, enabling integration with existing web portals and other web applications.

Storage integration

HP StoreServ (3PAR). HP StoreServ is now supported by Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (Fibre Channel connectivity only).

HP StoreVirtual VSA. Versions 10 and 10.5 are now supported by Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots.

HP StoreVirtual registration. The registration process has been revamped to avoid timeouts with large infrastructures.

Plug-in architecture. A new storage plug-in architecture is now in place to simplify the process of adding support for other storage vendors and models in future releases. This architecture is not meant to be leveraged by storage vendors directly; rather, implementation will be performed by Veeam.

Conclusion

Seeing all the new and enhanced features, definitely a good choice to upgrade to the newer version.
Links and other information.

Veeam announces latest features v7

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Last week Veeam announces the latest new big features in there new to release Veeam Backup & Replication v7 backup application.

This release is a big one with tons of new features and fixes. Veeam started in February with announcing the first new big feature and continued to do this every month. This is a summary of all the big new features with some extra information.

01. vCloud Director Support.

Veeam Reveals Enhanced Backup and Recovery for vCloud Director: Using the vCD API, Veeam will display the vCD infrastructure directly in Veeam Backup & Replication™, backup all vApp metadata and attributes, restore vApps and VMs directly to vCD, and support restore of fast-provisioned VMs. 

Continue reading →

Solving Veeam Error: Host with uuid was not found

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Today I was upgrading an VMware ESX 4.1 host to VMware ESXi 5.1. I did the update with the VMware Update Manager. After a successful upgrade I tried to backup a VM with Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. This resulted in an error. See screenshot.


How to solve this problem. I found this easy solution in the Veeam Support Forums.

Go to the license screen in Veeam Backup & Replication. Revoke the license of the ESXi host, and start the backup again. If all went well, the ESXi host gets a new Veeam license assigned and the Veeam backup is successful.

Problem solved!!

Extra information can be found:

Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition

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Today Veeam launched their new product Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud edition. So what is new? Here are some Key features.

Cloud-agnostic 

Support for 15 different public storage clouds including:

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon Glacier
  • Rackspace
  • HP Cloud and more

Cloud cost estimation

Set up cost estimates per cloud and specify limits by GB or dollar.

Encryption

Configurable encryption up to AES 256-bit secures data in transmission and at rest in the cloud.

Bandwidth scheduling

Control bandwidth in real time and schedule limits to ensure bandwidth during working hours.

Compression

Reduce the size of backups to reduce transmission time and storage costs. Data is compressed before transfer to the cloud.

Job notifications

Emailed reports keep you informed on backups synchronized to the cloud.

Simply affordable

Traditional methods of offsite backups can be costly and complex. With annual subscription licensing model, Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition avoids significant up-front costs and allows you to introduce cloud backups with minimal financial risk. Since you select the cloud provider of your choice and pay cloud usage costs separately, there is no commitment or vendor lock-in to a particular cloud.
Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition – Licensing and Pricing FAQs

Compare editions

Cloud Edition is available as an annual subscription and includes all of the functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise and Standard editions.


Download full comparison

See Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud edition in action.

More information:

Veeam backup file is not getting smaller when removing a VM from backup.

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I ran in to a problem with the VBK file size of a Veeam backup Job (running Veeam B&R 6.5). It didn’t fit on tape anymore. So I split up the Job into two different Jobs. One with important VMs and one with less important VMs. The important VM backup job goes to tape, and the other one stays on disk.

But after I deleted the VMs from the Job my VBK file size didn’t get any smaller. It was only growing. That was not what I expected.
So I contacted Veeam support and they pointed me into the right direction. See http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/vsphere/index.html?retention_deleted_vms.html

There is a Delete VMs date retention period. Default its configured at 14 days. See explanation and screenshot below.


In the VM retention section, specify the number of days to keep backup data for deleted VMs.  When a backup job starts, Veeam Backup & Replication checks the list of VMs included in the job. If a VM is no longer available (for example, it was deleted or moved to another location), Veeam Backup & Replication will keep its data in the backup for the period you specify in the Deleted VMs data retention period field. When this retention period is over, data of the deleted VM will be removed from backup files.

The retention period for deleted VMs is particularly useful if the job is configured to create synthetic full backups, and you want to make sure that the full backup does not include redundant data.
This was an option that I didn’t know it existed. So I changed this to 3 days, and indeed the backup job shirked. Problem solved, the Veeam job fits on tape again.

** Edit 14-02-2014, updated Veeam link to the new location. Thanks Cor for pointing that out.

More ways to WOW! Veeam launches Backup & Replication v6.5

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Today Veeam announced that “Veeam Backup & Replication version 6.5” is GA, witch means that we have access to a brand new version of this amazing backup product. So what is new….

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.

Restore from SAN snapshots

Version 6.5 also introduces Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which provides granular VMware recovery from HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. Codeveloped 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.

Reminder: Although SAN snapshots can provide excellent RPOs (recovery point objectives) for certain operational disasters, they cannot serve as real backups since they would be lost along with production data in the event of a storage disaster.

Thus, you should never rely solely on SAN snapshots for data protection. To ensure protection against all types of disasters, continue to perform regular backup of all VMs to backup storage using Veeam backup jobs or VeeamZIP™.

vSphere 5.1 support

Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 provides full support for VMware vSphere 5.1. And like vSphere 5.1, Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 supports VMs running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 8.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V support

 Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 provides full support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V (and Microsoft Hyper-V 2012), including:

  • Changed block tracking on CSV v2 and SMB v3 shared storage
  • Support for VHDX disk format
  • Support for large virtual disks (up to 64TB)

Not only does Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 support the new version of Hyper-V, it can also facilitate deployment of 2012 Hyper-V:

  • Safeguard in-place upgrades: Make a backup copy of VMs before performing an in-place upgrade. If something goes wrong, you can reinstall 2008 R2 Hyper-V and restore VMs from backup.
  • Simplify migration: Backup VMs on 2008 R2 Hyper-V and restore to 2012 Hyper-V. You can also replicate VMs from 2008 R2 Hyper-V to 2012 Hyper-V.

Advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning

 This document details the enhancements in Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. Veeam Management Suite™ 6.5 also includes new functionality for Veeam Backup & Replication—namely, advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for the backup infrastructure.

This functionality is delivered by Veeam ONE™ through new integration with Veeam Backup & Replication (both are part of the Veeam Management Suite), and includes:

  • Real-time monitoring of the backup infrastructure
  • Identification of unprotected VMs
  • Resource analysis
  • and more

For further information, see the What’s New in Veeam ONE 6.5.

Additional enhancements

Version 6.5 includes a number of other enhancements, as well as all patches for versions 6.0 and 6.1. The remainder of this document provides a list of the most significant enhancements.

Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 support

 Version 6.5 includes full support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, including:

  • Guest OS. Backup, replicate and restore VMs running Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8, whether on vSphere or Hyper-V, with advanced application-aware image processing.
  • ReFS volumes. Full support for Microsoft’s new Resilient File System (ReFS), including direct file restore (described later), guest file system indexing and 1-Click File Restore.
  • Global data deduplication. Leverage data deduplication in Windows Server 2012 to minimize the size of backup repositories. This includes deduplicating data between backup files produced by different backup jobs. Veeam has tested and certified Windows Server 2012 deduplication for use with Veeam Backup & Replication.
  • Veeam components. Install any Veeam component (backup server, backup proxy server, backup repository, Enterprise Manager) on Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8.

Engine

  • Synthetic full transformation and reversed incremental backup. Improved performance (up to several times, depending on backup storage).
  • Storage optimization. New storage optimization setting provides improved performance and resource utilization for backup jobs with backup files over 16TB in size.
  • Memory consumption. Average memory consumption by the job manager process has been reduced up to 3 times.
  • Network packet loss. Increased the processing engine’s tolerance to network packet loss.
  • Network traffic verification engine. New network traffic verification engine detects and automatically recovers from in-flight data corruption caused by malfunctioning network equipment and similar issues.
  • Improved NAT support. Control whether the source backup proxy server or the backup repository/ target backup proxy server establishes network connectivity. This is helpful when deploying Veeam Backup & Replication in a network with NAT and firewalls.
  • Storage space notification. Added support for low disk space notification for CIFS-based backup repositories.
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2012 support. Added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 as a backend database.
  • Microsoft .NET 4.0. Migrated user interface and management components to Microsoft .NET 4.0 for reduced resource consumption and improved performance, stability and security.

Backup

  • Configuration backup. Automatically (and periodically) backup the Veeam product configuration to a specified backup repository. Useful when your backup server is physical and cannot protect itself, and when migrating a backup server to another computer. Configuration restore automatically rescans all backup repositories and replica hosts to register any additional restore points that were created after the configuration backup took place.

Job scheduling

  • Chained execution. Chain job execution directly in the backup console, without having to use scripts or post-job actions. New scheduler setting allows a job to start automatically once the job it depends on finishes processing all VMs.
  • Start time. Specify an exact start time (within the hour) for jobs that run on an hourly or less frequent basis.
  • Continuous jobs. Define an allowed window and prohibited hours for a continuous job. For consistency, continuous jobs have been moved under the periodic jobs option in the user interface.

Application-aware processing

  • EFI boot. Added support for VMs that use EFI boot.
  • Log reduction. Significantly reduced the number of logs produced on VMs.
  • Timeouts. Increased network-less processing operations timeouts to reduce failures when processing VMs with applications that take longer to perform a VSS freeze.
  • Reverse order. Added support for the InverseVssProtocolOrder registry value (DWORD). When this registry value is set to 1, the sequence of application-aware processing is reversed, making jobs try network-less processing mode before network processing mode.

File-level restore

  • Direct file restore. When restoring a guest file back to its original location from the backup console (Backup Browser), perform the restore with a single click. You no longer need to supply destination information, and Veeam Backup & Replication does not have to stage the file locally on a backup server or on a network share.
  • Dynamic disks. Extended support for file-level restores from dynamic disks to include spanned, striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.
  • Backup Browser UI. Updated the Backup Browser’s user interface (UI) to match the new product UI introduced in version 6.1. Removed the hidden system partition from the volume tree. Now retrieves actual drive letters from restored guest OS settings (rather than simply assigning in sequential order).

Licensing

  • CPU cores. The License Information dialog box now includes the number of CPU cores on each licensed host, to make it easier for customers to stay in compliance with Veeam license tiers.
  • Automatic update. Disable automatic updates of the license file from Enterprise Manager to backup servers (available to authorized backup-as-a-service providers).

Enhancements specific to VMware

  • Improved processing performance. Significantly reduced data transfer initialization time in all transport modes by disabling excessive VDDK logging.
  • Direct file restore. Perform a direct file restore (described earlier) without a network connection between the backup server and the destination VM.
  • File management. Improved file management (FastSCP) performance up to 25%.
  • Migration wizard. Specify that Veeam Quick Migration be used even if VMware vMotion is available.
  • Intelligent load balancing. To facilitate LAN-free operation, if a backup proxy server can Hot Add connect to both the source and replica VM disks, intelligent load balancing assigns it as the only backup proxy for the replication job.
  • Replica VMs. To save disk space, replica VMs are created by default with thin-provisioned virtual disks, regardless of the source VM disk type.
  • Virtual Lab. Added internet access from the Virtual Lab environment for VMs using port groups other than first.

Enhancements specific to Hyper-V

  • Instant VM Recovery. Added support for Instant VM Recovery from backups created with some virtual disks excluded.

Other

  • Enhanced PowerShell support. Added PowerShell cmdlets for replica failover, replica failback and VeeamZIP operations.

Can’t wait to try this..