Backup Speed Increases by 98 Percent at
Leading UK Pension Organization

The Business Challenge
The IT infrastructure at The Pensions Trust is 95 percent virtualized. There were nearly 35 physical servers before the VMware consolidation began, and now there are six. Four of them host 35 virtual servers, and the other two host 60 virtual desktops. With so many “eggs” in relatively few “baskets,” ensuring consistent, reliable backups of the virtual environment is especially important. Darren Bull, Business Support Manager for The Pensions Trust, and his team implemented a first-generation backup and recovery tool for the virtual servers that appeared to work for a while. “Then each revision of the product deteriorated,” he explained. “That meant we were constantly monitoring backups because they failed continually, which took a tremendous amount of extra time—both at work and into the evenings. I had to log on from home every night to check backups because they were always failing.”

The Veeam Solution
Darren and his team chose Veeam Backup & Replication to replace the previous product. “Veeam is totally brilliant,” he explained. “To start, it’s much faster than what we used to use. I can back up the 800 GB main !le server in 10 minutes; the other backup system took eight to nine hours to do the same job, if it worked at all.” While backup speed is important to Darren and his team, reliability is even more important. “I simply cannot believe how much di”erence there is between the two products, especially with regard to reliability. I used to spend countless hours monitoring and manually troubleshooting the old system because it continually failed. However, now that we use Veeam Backup & Replication, we all feel like a huge weight has been lifted.” Veeam Backup & Replication also requires less backup storage space than the previous product. “There was no ‘self-cleaning’ with the other product, which meant we had to clean down the !le system each week—a process that could take seven to eight hours—and we could only do this on a Sunday when no backups ran,” Darren said. “Not only was this a laborious process, but it hardly freed up any space. Veeam uses almost half the space (55 percent compared to 98 percent with the other product), and no manual intervention is required. That’s a massive di”erence.” Another major di”erence between Veeam Backup & Replication and the previous product is customer support. “Veeam is a breath of fresh air,” Darren said. “I !nd Veeam support to be very helpful because people actually answer my questions and don’t tell me to wait for the next version. I also like the Veeam forums, which include many contented customers because they did exactly what we did: they made the switch to Veeam.”

The Results
Increases backup speed by 98 percent – With Veeam Backup & Replication, Darren and his team can back up the main file server (800 GB) in 10 minutes. It used to take eight to nine hours with the previous backup product.

Ensures consistent and reliable backups – The IT team used to spend countless hours monitoring and manually troubleshooting the previous backup product because it continually failed. This included nights and weekends. Now that the team uses Veeam Backup & Replication, they feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

Requires much less space for backup storage – Veeam Backup & Replication uses almost half the backup storage space (55 percent) compared to the previous product (98 percent).

Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and Virtual Infrastructure 3. Veeam o”ers an award-winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including #1 for VMware backup: Veeam Backup & Replication; Veeam Reporter Enterprise, for VMware performance, storage, capacity reporting and chargeback; Veeam Monitor, for VMware performance monitoring and alerting across multiple vCenters; and Veeam Business View, a free add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for the VMware vSphere environment. With its acquisition of nworks, Veeam’s products include the nworks Smart Plug-in and the nworks Management Pack that incorporate VMware data into enterprise management consoles from HP and Microsoft. Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting Alliance Technology Partners, a Veeam Gold ProPartner

Alliance Technology Partners is now offering an expanded inventory of HP Renew Proliant Servers, Desktops, Laptops, Workstations, and Procurve Networking products. SAVE an average of 30-50%!

 

Alliance Technology Partners is a leading reseller of HP Factory Refurbished products including Refurbished Proliant Servers, Refurbished Procurve Networking Products, Refurbished HP Notebooks, Refurbished HP Computers, Refurbished HP Workstations, and more! In addition, Alliance is Gold ProPartner for Veeam Software. Alliance sells the entire Veeam Product Line including Veeam Backup and Replication, Veeam Reporter Enterprise, Veeam Essentials, Veeam Monitor, Veeam Management Pack for VMware, Veeam Management Suite, Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware 5.0, and More. Alliance also specializes in web security with the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner.

See our inventory of HP Refurbished Proliant Servers, Notebooks, and Computers

 

VEEAM ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR VMWARE VSPHERE 4.1

Veeam Monitor 5.0 first to support and leverage new vSphere 4.1 features

 

Columbus, Ohio, July 13, 2010 – Veeam Software, innovative provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced support for VMware vSphere 4.1. The first Veeam product to leverage the new functionality in vSphere 4.1 is Veeam Monitor 5.0, an easy-to-deploy, framework-independent solution for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning of VMware environments. A beta version of Monitor 5.0 is available today for download.  All commercial Veeam products will support vSphere 4.1 this quarter.

“We truly value our relationship with VMware and are pleased to support their newest release,” explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeam President and CEO.  “It’s exceedingly important to Veeam and to our customers that we remain on the forefront of VMware innovation.”

vSphere 4.1 includes several enhancements of particular interest to Veeam customers. “Many of our customers have VMs on NFS shared storage,” said Doug Hazelman, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam. “They’ve been asking for more statistics on NFS and will be pleased that this data is in now available in the vSphere API and, by extension, in Veeam Monitor. NFS is no longer a ‘black box’ or something they have to monitor separately.

“Memory compression is another area that customers tell us they’re excited about,” Hazelman continued. “And with Monitor 5.0, they can quantify and document the savings they achieve with memory compression on ESX(i) hosts and individual VMs.”

Key Features
Key features in Monitor 5.0 include:

• Full support for vSphere 4.1: Not only is Monitor 5.0 compatible with vSphere 4.1, it also makes use of the new performance metrics in vSphere 4.1 and monitors new vSphere 4.1 capabilities such as memory compression.
• Built-in intelligence: Monitor 5.0 provides more than 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms to alert VMware administrators of potential performance problems. It also includes a comprehensive knowledge base that explains each alarm, with possible causes, suggested resolution and links to external sources of additional information.
• Dashboards: Monitor 5.0 includes a dashboard for each object in the virtual infrastructure tree, proving an at-a-glance view of the most useful information for any object, with easy drilldown to more detailed information, as required.
• Other new features include monitoring of logical disk space, snapshot monitoring and Infrastructure Overview reports that provide management-level reports for any part of the virtual infrastructure. Monitor 5.0 also includes streamlined alarm management, enhanced scalability and architecture improvements.

Pricing and Availability
The beta version of Veeam Monitor 5.0 is available immediately for download. A trial license key is required and is provided at no charge. The software will be generally available this quarter, with North American MSRP unchanged at $250 per socket. A free version of Monitor is also available. For more information or to download the beta, go to http://www.veeam.com/go/monitor-50.

About Veeam Software
Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and VMware Infrastructure 3. Veeam offers an award-winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including #1 for VMware backup: Veeam Backup & Replication™; Veeam Reporter™, for enterprise reporting, change management and capacity planning for VMware; Veeam Monitor, for VMware performance monitoring and alertingacross multiple vCenters; and Veeam Business View™, a free add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for the VMware environment. With its acquisition of nworks, Veeam’s products include the nworks Management Pack™ and the nworks Smart Plug-in™, which incorporate VMware data into enterprise management consoles from Microsoft and HP.  Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting www.veeam.com.

The following information appeared on the Veeam Community Forums, where Veeam customers share information about Veeam products and related virtualization technologies. Larry Walker, Vice President and Data Processing Officer for Chelsea Groton Bank, posted the following about how his organization uses Veeam Backup & Replication™.

1. Quick backup: Backup window went from 12 hours to 30 minutes. Went from
having one backup a day at most to having some VMs with 4 backups every day
in a much shorter window.

2. Quick restore: What used to be a project is now a simple “drag and drop”
operation. Restore works every time and can be performed by a non-specialist.

3. DR for a site failure: We have two main production sites; each is used for DR
of the other site. Previously used our SAN to replicate the LUN to the DR SAN.
This replicated the whole LUN and didn’t allow us to pick and choose which
VM was the most important. Also required a SAN specialist, VM specialist, SQL
specialist and a few hours for DR. With Veeam replication, it is just a right click
and power on all VMs at the DR site using vCenter. For testing we can now pick
the date and time for a failover, and after the test just do a quick undo failover.
Veeam’s VSS works every time.

4. DR for an ESX server failure: Before Veeam replication, used a PowerShell
script to clone with vCenter, but it took much longer because it didn’t use
Changed Block Tracking. There was no report to let us know if it worked, and we
needed a programmer to maintain the 5-page PowerShell script.

5. DR for a SAN failure: Used to rely on an old SAN and a lot of luck. Now we
replicate from the local SAN to the local ESX server disks and have a real plan in
case our SAN was to become unavailable. Local disks are slow for some VMs, but
slow is better than down, and this is a much cheaper option to maintain. After
the initial replication it takes just a few minutes and is 100 percent automatic.

6. Off-site storage of backups: This, alone, is why we bought Veeam Backup &
Replication. Our IT committee wanted to remove the risk of having our name in
the paper for a lost tape in transit. Veeam backs up our remote VMs to local disk,
then we write the Veeam backups to local tape with no load on our SAN. If the
tape job fails, we can now redo it during the day.

7. One report: One email shows 24 hours of jobs from both sites.
Visit the Veeam Community Forums at www.veeam.com/forums for more
firsthand accounts of how real customers use Veeam solutions.

For more information about Veeam contact Alliance Technology Partners

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 Software

1) Minimize vSphere disk risk with backup and replication: Veeam Backup & Replication combines backup and near-CDP-level replication in one interface to unify both data protection processes for IT with a synthetic backup process and consistent process wizards. Backup Benchmarks: A full backup of a VM running Windows Server 2003 averaged 189 MB per second and an incremental backup of the same VM averaged 245 MB per second on a VMware ESX 4.0 host.

2) Maximize backup performance with deduplication and compression: Data deduplication, compression, and recognition of thin provisioning lowered the footprint of a full backup of 8 VMs by a factor of 9 to 1.

3) Full support for ESX and ESXi without VCB: Veeam Backup & Replication can leverage the new vStorage API or VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) when performing backup or replication, allowing SMB sites with or without shared storage to fully leverage ESXi, including the ability to replicate VMs to an ESXi host.

4) Full support for VMware vSphere Changed-Block Tracking and thin provisioning: Veeam Backup & Replication dramatically increases full and incremental backup speed, as well as reduces storage requirements.

5) Higher RPO support via Virtual CDP with replication: Via support for synthetic backup, Veeam Backup & Recovery can leverage inline data deduplication and compression to support very narrow backup windows, which provides for near continuous data protection (CDP) with replication.

6) Ensure transaction consistency at VM and application levels: Veeam Backup & Recovery employs VMware snapshots to ensure VM transaction consistency and Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for VSS-aware Windows applications such as Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange.

INTRODUCTION

 

It’s also taken for granted that you are fully conversant with Veeam Backup and Symantec Backup Exec 12. This is not a tutorial for those applications. .

Integrating Veeam Backup and Symantec Backup Exec 124

 

2. Using Backup Exec create a job to backup the above folder to the relevant media set but not schedule it to run at any given time. Please make a note of the Job name used as we’ll be referencing this in a command later. It’s a good idea to make it simple in this example we used “MainServers” for the job name

3. In the folder created before create a dummy text file just for the purpose of testing.

4. Run the Backup Exec job manually to make sure that it completes successfully and ran automatically with prompting the administrator for any dialog. This step is necessary as Veeam backup does not have the ability to interface with the Backup Exec GUI to automatically answer dialog windows. However certain tasks are executable from the Backup Exec CLI which we’ll see later.

5. Next create you Veeam Backup job. Ensure you make a note of the “number of rollbacks to keep” When you get to this dialog box there is an Advanced button which you must select.

 

  

7. 7. Next in the text field input the following command: “c:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\bemcmd” -o1 –jMainServers

-o1 – Which instructs Backup Exec to start a Job

-jJOBNAME – Which runs a job using the Job name which in our case is called MainServers.

Now Backup Exec will stream the contents of the folder to tape.

1. Using Backup Exec restore the archived Veeam Backup Files to another location other than the original.

2. In Veeam Backup 3.x you have the option to import Backup files for use with restoration. Open the Backup Menu and select “Import Backup”:

 

4. Now when you walk through the restore wizard you should see an extra job to restore from which has the same job name as before but with “_imported” on the end. You may now restore for virtual machines in this job.

 

Integrating Veeam Backup and Symantec Backup Exec 12| White Paper P a g e | 7

 

 

A groundbreaking data protection and disaster recovery solution for VMware vSphere 4 and VMware Infrastructure 3 that combines backup and replication in one product. Contact a Veeam Specialist or go to the Alliance Veeam Virtualization Solutions Center

Veeam Backup & Replication 4 offers a major breakthrough in full and incremental backup speeds. Using technological advancements within VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vStorage APIs for data protection, Veeam customers experienced the following benefits derived from native support of thin provisioned disks and changed block tracking

Why Veeam is #1
for data protection:
•2-in-1: Backup and replication combined
•Full ESXi support with & without VCB
•Heterogeneous file-level recovery in seconds
(Windows, Linux, UNIX, BSD, etc.)
•Enterprise Management Console NEW
•Native support for vSphere NEW
•Database-consistent backup for application
recovery
•Reduced storage costs with data de-duplication
•Near-CDP replication at a fraction of the cost NEW
•Replica rollback

More Veeam Links – Veeam SureBackup, Veeam Backup and Replication 4.1

Veeam SureBackup Posted By Texiwill on March 23, 2010

Veeam has introduced a new technology named SureBackup. SureBackup is designed to not only use Veeam’s Backup technology to backup your virtual machines (VMs) but will also test the restoration of each of these VMs to ensure that they at least boot and at most the applications involved are actually running within the VM. This is a great improvement over current backup methodologies which consists of by hand testing of only a scant number of virtual machines to ensure restorations result in boot-able virtual machines. The full test of restorability almost always happens during a disaster situation when everyone is under a fair amount of pressure. The current backup and restoration testing follows this path: •Quiesce the virtual disk employing VSS or other technologies •Backup the virtual disk•Copy the virtual disk to offline storage (tape, blu-ray, dvd, hot-site, remote disk array, etc.) •Choose some of the VMs for by hand restoration (perhaps rotating through all VMs eventually) •Restore chosen VMs into a testing pool (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs boot (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs applications work (by hand) What is interesting is that the last 3 steps often do not happen and per backup schedule do not test ALL the virtual machines, instead a select number of them. However, this situation now changes. These last three steps may also have an additional license cost if running Microsoft Windows operating systems as the Microsoft EULA is based on running instance of the operating system which includes any restoration testing performed by hand or process. Introducing Veeam SureBackup Veeam Surebackup takes those last three steps and automates them so that every VMs restoration is tested. How much testing depends entirely on how SureBackup is configured. You can easily test to ensure all VMs restore and boot out of the box. You can also verify the integrity of certain applications out of the box. You can also add your own scripts to SureBackup to test other non-standard applications as well. Since this is an automated task, human error is no longer an issue, the process is repeatable, and best yet, all VMs are tested to ensure restoration happens properly before you need it, preventing issues during the high pressured disaster recovery situation. Veeam SureBackup can restore VMs on local systems, hot-site systems, or dedicated systems. VMs are restored into private virtual networks within specific resource pools so that your systems can be configured to lower the overall impact of restoration testing. Backups take quite a while when you have 1000s of VMs, so incrementatl backups and Change Block Tracking is available to reduce this time. Backup takes quite a bit of disk space so data and disk de-duplication can be used. Restoration testing takes personal and system resources to complete, now SureBackup can alleviate much of these resource utilizations but not licensing issues.

For More Information about Veeam Backup and Replication or to Buy Veeam.  Go to www.alliancetechpartners.com

SAVE $300 per CPU socket

Veeam Backup and Replication

St. Louis – March 2010 – Veeam Software names Alliance Technology Partners a Veeam Gold Pro Partner. Alliance, a leading virtualization technology provider based in St. Louis, MO, specializes in implementing virtualization solutions for medium sized organizations. “Veeam’s technology takes virtualization to the next level,” said Mark Dendrinelis, Vice President of Sales, Alliance Technology Partners, “Veeam’s Backup and Replication is the absolute best product in the virtualization backup space.” Veeam helps organizations safeguard their investment in virtual infrastructure by providing innovative systems management software designed to reduce costs, increase productivity and mitigate risk. Alliance’s mission is to offer best of breed IT solutions that do just that – Increase productivity, lower costs, and secure their customers’ data.

About Alliance Technology Partners
Alliance Technology Partners is a nationwide IT Solution provider based in St. Louis. Founded in 2000, Alliance offers best of breed IT solutions designed to maximize their customers’ return on investment . Alliance’s prominent solutions include Virtualization, Hosted/Cloud Solutions, Web Services, U.S. Based Help Desk, Remote Network Management, Critical Infrastructure, and Professional Security Services. Alliance also is a leading HP Partner offering new and refurbished hp products at significant discounts. Prominent Alliance Technology Partners include HP, Cisco, Acunetix, Symantec, Trend Micro, Lenovo, VMware, Veeam, and Microsoft. For more information, visit http://www.alliancetechpartners.com or call 888-891-8885 and press option 4.

About Veeam Software
Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and Virtual Infrastructure 3. Veeam offers an award-winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including #1 for VMware vSphere backup: Veeam Backup & Replication; Veeam Reporter Enterprise, for VMware performance, storage, capacity reporting and chargeback; Veeam Monitor, for VMware vSphere performance monitoring and alertingacross multiple vCenter (VirtualCenter) Servers; and Veeam Business View, a free add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for the VMware vSphere environment. With its acquisition of nworks, Veeam’s products include the nworks Smart Plug-in and the nworks Management Pack that incorporate VMware data into enterprise management consoles from HP and Microsoft. In addition, Veeam is announcing SureBackup on March 22, 2010. Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting http://www.veeam.com.