I am a Veeam Vanguard 2019

Yesterday my attention was focused on some NVDIMM (Storage Class Memory, PMEN) testing. Getting them to be leveraged in a Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V virtual machine. Testing can be fun, let me tell you that 🙂 I did get distracted however.

The e-mail

My activities got halted as I saw some Slack notifications come by about Veeam Vanguard renewals. So I hit refresh on the e-mail client and I saw the mail from Rick Vanover, Director, Product Strategy at Veeam Software.

Dear Didier, I’m happy to report that your Veeam Vanguard Renewal Nomination has been approved! Through 2018, we hope you have enjoyed the Veeam Vanguard Program and are happy to extend to you an invitation to the 2019 program.

2019 & beyond

This marks my 5th year of being a Veeam Vanguard. I’m one of the inaugural members and I really enjoy being part of the program. We have the webinars, the Vanguard channels, the briefings and the communication lines we have with the various Veeam experts and Vanguards who form a collective of knowledge, passion, experience and brainpower to learn from. The group has grown this year so we ‘ll have even more minds to pick and share with. As we come from all types of organizations and countries we have a divers mix of backgrounds. We avoid tunnel vision and brings new insights to old challenges. It also helps me become aware of things that had not been on my radar screen yet.

Then there is the fact that Veeam is about data protection, availability, recovery, and mobility. This suits my nature as my first questions with every project after figuring out what is need is how to handle this. I want at least 2 options to protect and restore data. I want to know how to keep it available and how to move it. It sort of comes natural to me. But, these tasks have become ever more complex and fragmented just like the IT solutions themselves.

Veeam is a company I trust, work with and rely on. It is a simple as that. People who know me can vouch that this isn’t given but earned. So, thank you Veeam. I’m humbled and proud that I am a Veeam Vanguard 2019.

Introduction

Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V On DELL UEFI generation 12 Servers boot loop issues are fixed. As many of you experienced Windows Server 2019 installed on UEFI mode BIOS setting on DELL generation 12 hardware (R620, R720) tends to send the server into a boot loop. This was a surprise as it worked well during the previews. The same was reported and experienced on DELL generation 11 hardware. You can read about it in various places like Windows Server 2019 Datacenter boot loops after enabling Hyper-V, Windows server 2019 fails after hyper-v role install and
Windows Server 2019 Boot-loop Problems…

In the end, it was an issue that Microsoft would have to fix and they did in KB4476976. Before that you would have to revert to BIOS to get Hyper-V to work on a generation 12 DELL Server. Today I am happy to report that the Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V On DELL UEFI Generation 12 servers boot loop issues have been fixed

Install using the original MSFT ISO

Use SW_DVD9_Win_Server_STD_CORE_2019_64Bit_English_DC_STD_MLF_X21-96581.ISO, not the earlier one that was retracted.

Clean Install

Install Windows Server 2019 and update it fully, including the latest CU, KB4476976 at the time of writing. Only then add the Hyper-V role.

In place upgrade

In-place upgrades work by removing the Hyper-V role, doing an in-place upgrade and then updating it fully up to KB4476976. Afterwards, add the Hyper-V role again. If the nodes are in a cluster you’ll need to evict it from the cluster and add it again before going through the above process for an in-place upgrade.

Install using a custom built ISO

I refer you the blog of my fellow MVP Philip Elder to learn how to do that. In this case, there is no need to remove the Hyper-V feature like in case of an in-place upgrade or run update after doing a clean install as the correct bits are in the ISO you created to install or upgrade the OS.

Conclusion

I’m happy I can finally use my lab hardware again and even upgrade some production servers. Do note that DELL generation 12 servers do not officially support Windows Server 2019. I will try this out on a generation 11 server when I get the chance.

What are the Veeam community editions?

Veeam is introducing the Veeam Community Edition for Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam One. It actually already has the community edition for Office 365. Up to now, Veeam offered a free edition of VBR but that was, while good and helpful, limited in use cases. The tech community at large used it for many “one-off” situations. In combination with the free edition of the Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux, you could already protect your physical hosts and the VMs running on them.

With the community edition, which offers offer more functionality and capabilities than the free edition, allows us to get started with Veeam at zero cost. This is a smart move, a small company can leverage the Veeam Suite now without any hassle and if they like it can easily move to a paid version that allows for more users and, if needed, more features and capabilities. Let’s give a warm welcome to the Veeam community editions!

Veeam community editions

Veeam backup for O365 community edition

This was the first community edition that Veeam made available in 2018. It offers full functionality with the following limitations:

• Maximum # of Exchange Users: 10
• Maximum # of OneDrive for business users: 10
• The maximum amount of SharePoint data protected: 1 TB
• Best effort support

Veeam backup community edition

The Veeam Backup Community Edition becomes available with VBR Update 4. I have played with it during RTM and it worked flawlessly in my 100% physical Windows Server 2019 lab and with a mix of Windows OS versions on the hosts. You do not need a license. You just install VBR 9.5 U4 without a license file and you have the community edition. Easy. The Veeam Backup Community Edition has the Standard functionality but it is limited to 10 Instances.

Veeam ONE community edition

The Veeam ONE Community Edition will be released later this year. It allows for only 1 Veeam B&R (paid or community edition) to be added and it has the following limitations:

• Partial application level monitoring
• Partial backup repository heatmaps
• No email customization
• Some reporting functionality is not available
• …

An overview of what you get with the community edition

Look at the matrix below. You get a lot with the community editions, even integration with the Veeam Agents. A freelancer or small company it is an absolutely superb way to get started with rock-solid data protection and a recovery strategy. As a partner or consultant, it is super easy to drop these versions in an existing environment and let the customer get a taste of the licensed editions. If the Veeam community editions do all you need, well that’s it. Enjoy it courtesy of Ratmir Timashev & Andrei Baronov.

In a later blog post, we’ll take a look at Veeam Agent for Windows 3.0 as this version has some nice capabilities that really make it hit the sweet point.