I’m back from holiday and have a list of new blog post ideas as long as my arm.  Returning back online after being ‘out of the loop’ for a couple weeks has certainly made me appreciate the fast pace at which our industry and us as individuals move.  There have been new product announcements a plenty, a new vSphere related book released and to top things off my friend Scott Lowe is embroiled in a stupidly insane fiasco after being named a supposed FBI insider – has the world gone mad??? 

Anyway, one of the many exciting announcements over the past week has been from Veeam Software who have announced that they are spreading some Christmas cheer by giving a dual socket CPU not for resale (NFR) license copy of their popular data backup and replication product, Veeam Back & Replication v5 to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors (VCI).

Here is a copy of the announcement from Veeam:

Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced that Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 with vPower™ is now available free to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, and VMware Certified Instructors. Any vExpert, VCP or VCI can receive a free two-socket software license (valued at approximately $1,800) for non-production use, including training, evaluation and development.

So if you qualify for a NFR copy, how do you get your hot little hands on a copy?  Easy, just follow this link to Veeams website and complete the fields with your details or logon with your existing Veeam logon.  Also, don’t forget that Veeam have a whopping 42% off their Veeam Essentials package until the 24th December.

Full credit to Doug and the team at Veeam for being so community spirited by giving this NFR license away to vExperts, VCP’s and VCI’s – I know it will be greatly appreciated.

Veeam SureBackup has finally been announced and more detail released.  In my recent pre-release interview with Veeam’s Doug Hazelman we found out that it SureBackup was an actual technology rather than a specific individual product and today’s announcement fills in the gaps.

SureBackup is a collection of new features which will be found in the next release of Veeam Backup & Replication (v5.0).  It should be pointed out that today’s announcement was exactly that, an announcement, with no actual product available to download and use at this point in time.

As the Veeam SureBackup announcement video mentions, SureBackup is a “new concept built on a proven technology” including the following pre-existing Veeam product features:

• Support for Changed Block Tracking & thin-provisioned disks
• FastSCP
• SmartDedupe & Compression

The newest feature to be added to this existing list of features is “Recovery Verification” which will provide the ability to open and start up every VM which has been backed up and then check the integrity of the OS and any applications it may have installed, along with data.  The amazing thing is that it can do this for every VM each time the backup is run!

So no more risk of finding that your backups don’t actually work or are in some way corrupted when you are up against it in a disaster recovery type scenario.

The process is that upon a VM being backed up the compressed VM backup file is then started and the OS booted.  Once up and running the VM, OS and any applications are then verified to be working ok.

The ‘fenced-off environment’ you see mentioned above can be run on existing hardware so this combined with the minimal requirement for extra  storage makes this a pretty lean setup.  With a backup VM running in the ‘fenced off environment’ a very granular level of application data can be recovered, such as individual emails or records from a database.

To me this all sounds too good to be true and I am going to be interested to see how quickly it will perform these VM backup verifications, along with how many it can do concurrently and whether this is just limited by the hardware on which you are running it on.  Veeam give an impressive example of the times we can expect to see:  An MS Exchange server VM with 156GB of storage only takes 2 minutes to verify – wow! Now that I look forward to seeing.

For more information check out Veeam’s SureBackup video below.

For now it’s just a waiting game until this cool new technology is released for trial downloads, there is no ETA as yet though I will let you know if/when I hear anything.

The guys and gals over at Veeam have just released an update to their highly useful and extremely popular free VMware ESX(i) file transfer utility, FastSCP.

Those of you that have been using FastSCP v3.0.1 have probably already stumbled on the issue where FastSCP won’t run too happily, without a little tweaking, on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  The good news is that this has now been resolved in this latest v3.0.2 release along with the important fact that VMware ESX v4.0 is now officially supported along with ESX v3.5 Update 4!

So good news all round.  If you haven’t tried out FastSCP yet then I recommend you download it and give it a try.  I think you’ll find that it is by far the quickest utility for copying files around in your VMware ESX infrastructure.  Best of all, it’s free!  Download it from here.