Category Archives: VEEAM

VeeamOn 2017 Points of Interest

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Introduction

I’m back form attending, speaking, learning and sharing experiences and knowledge at VeeamON 2017 (and DELL EMC World before). It was a blast and I had the opportunity to engage in very interesting discussions with experts from around the globe.

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As it was a Veeam event it wil be no surprise that we got some very interesting information about the new Veeam offerings now as well as in the near future. Points of particular interest to me are:

  • Veeam backup for file shares. Really this might solve my entire dubio around virtualizing very large capacity clustered files shares (100-200TB) I have to protect. I’m looking forward to testing and leveraging the various restore options like File share rollback. Handy when ransomware just struck.
  • I like what Veeam is doing for disaster recovery in Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Veeam’s Direct Restore and new Power Network (PN) in order to facilitate and automate the disaster recovery process.
  • The Veeam agent that can protect Windows ad Linux based physical servers and endpoints, along with applications running in Microsoft Azure, AWS and other public clouds tied into Veeam Backup & Replication. We will also get support for failover clusters with this. Something I have been lobbying for!
  • They support native object storage support using Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure Blob etc.
  • They announced improved and extended Office 365 protection including OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. One of those improvements is very handy with multiple tenants.
    Ramsomware did something very significant beyond reminding everyone of the importance of recoverable backups and that is reigniting the interest in tape as a backup medium. The inherent “air gap” that tape offers has become more interesting to many people as ransomware can also delete or encrypt backups. So the 3-2-1 rule has never been more important and is being extended by additional rules of thumb. The product to investigate for me is Starwind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). What I like is that I can have an air gapped backup integrated with Veeam in Amazon AWS. Even while my entire business might run in Azure, this separates my data protection technology and location form my production / development environment. Ideal for maximum isolation to protect us form both external and insider threats and risks while avoiding the need to deal with physical tapes. This is and remains a major concern for operational costs and RTO.

Conclusion

The new capabilities are very welcome to help solve the challenges we have now and the ones we see coming in the near future. We have plenty of ideas and plans to build the next generation of data protection and data availability solutions. Whatever the need, on-premises, IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, private/hybrid/public cloud, the need to protect data against loss and down time is there in one form or another. That is and remains a primary responsibility of any business regardless of the technology. As always, my fellow MVPs and Vanguards are ready, willing and able to get the job done.

I am presenting at VeeamON 2017

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I’m travelling to New Orleans for VeeamON2. If you don’t know what that is, please check it out here. I can recommend this conference. Both the attendees and presenters are all very active users of Veeam products and the workloads Veeam protects in real live. That makes for excellent sharing of experiences, insights and knowledge with your peers.

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I have the distinct honor of presenting a joint session with Luca Dell’Oca (@dellock6 / http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/) and Carsten Reachfahl (@hypervserver / https://www.rachfahl.de/). The presentation is called: Throw your backups into ANY window and is on Wednesday, May 17 | 13:30-14:30.

Choosing a storage solution for your backups can be a daunting task: Windows or Linux servers, SMB shares, SAN, NAS, deduplication appliances … But block cloning, a new feature in Windows 2016 and leveraged by Veeam Backup & Replication™, is promising to change this. Available for ReFS 3.1 file systems, this technology allows for insanely reduced transform times and spaceless GFS backups. Or at least, this is what marketing has told us so far, but how good is it in reality? Is an expensive and complex Storage Spaces Direct the only way to consume all the amazing new features? How can I design my new backup repository with these new options in mind? What about encryption and Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository™? Didier Van Hoye, Carsten Rachfahl (both Microsoft MVPs and Veeam Vanguards) and Luca Dell’Oca (Veeam cloud architect) have joined forces to bring you from-the-field information, tips, tricks and ideas to build your next Veeam backup repository with real-life tests and feedback gained from deploying this new powerful combination into multiple environments.

This session is complimentary to the other ones given at VeeamON 2017, both the breakout sessions as well as some of the session the Microsoft MVPs are presenting at the boot. Those sessions combined will send you home with ideas and options on how to leverage Veeam in creative ways to achieve the best possible solution for your needs. Personally I’ll be discussing some of the options you have to get get high available backup targets leveraging ReFSv3.1 in brown field scenarios when  a brand new Storage Spaces Direct deployment is not option or when you don’t run Windows Server Windows Server 2016 yet.

Next to that and between attending interesting sessions I’ll be available at the Veeam and Microsoft boots if you want to have questions or want to discuss the technologies. At the Microsoft boot I’ll be presenting a demo focused walk through on how to on Discrete Device Assignment in Windows Server 2016.

Continuous available general purpose file shares & ReFSv3 provide high available backup targets

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Introduction

In our previous two blog posts on Veeam and SMB 3 we’ve seen how and when Veeam Backup & Replication can leverage SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct. See Veeam Backup & Replication leverages SMB Multichannel and Veeam Backup & Replication Preferred Subnet & SMB Multichannel.The benefits of this are more bandwidth, high availability, better throughput and with RDMA low latency and CPU offload. What’s not to like, right? In a world where the compute and networks need keeps rising due to the storage capabilities (flash storage) pushing the limits this is all very welcome.

We have also seen earlier that Veeam B & R 9.5 leverages ReFSv3 in Windows Server 2016. This provides clear and present benefits in regards to space efficiencies and speed with many backup file related operations. Read Veeam Leads the way by leveraging ReFSv3 capabilities

When it comes to ReFSv3 in Windows Server 2016 most of the focus has gone to solutions based around Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). That’s a great solution and it is the poster child use case of these technologies.

But what other options do you have out there to build efficient and effective high available backup targets creatively except for S2D? What if you would like to repurpose existing hardware to build those? Let’s take a look together at how continuous available general purpose file shares & ReFSv3v3 provide high available backup targets

CSV, S2D, ReFSv3 & Archival Data

In Windows Server 2016, traditional shared storage (iSCSI, FC, Shared SAS, Shared RAID) with CSV are not recommend to be used with ReFSv3. Why isn’t exactly clear. The biggest impact you’ll see is the performance difference when not writing to the owner node of the CSV in this use case. Even with a well configured RDMA network that difference is significant. But that doesn’t mean that the performance is bad. It’s just that many of the super-fast meta data operations are relatively and significantly slower when compared each other, not that any of these two are slow.

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Microsoft does state that an S2D with ReFSv3 and SOFS shares can be used for archival data. Storage spaces and ReFSv3 also have the benefit of offering automatic repair of corrupt data from a redundant copy on the fly even when needed. So yes, the best know supported scenario is this one.

Continuous available general purpose file shares and ReFSv3 provide high available backup targets

But what if we need a high available backup target and would love to leverage ReFSv3 with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5? Well, you can have 95% of your cookie and eat it to. All this without ignoring the cautions offered.

We could set up SOFS shares on a Windows Server 2016 Cluster with ReFSv3 with traditional shared storage. Some storage vendors do state this is supported actually.

That only means you don’t have the auto repair functionality ReFSv3 combined with storage spaces offers. But perhaps you want to avoid the risk of using ReFSv3 with CSV in a non S2D scenario all together. What you could do is forgo ReFSv3 and use NTFS. How well this will work for archival data or backup is something you’ll need to test and find out how well this holds up. There is not much info is out there, only other cautions and warnings that might keep you up at night.

There is another scenario however and that is using Windows Server 2016 failover clustering to set up continuously available general purpose file shares that leverage SMB3 transparent failover.

The good news is that general purpose file shares (no CSV) do work consistently with ReFSv3 because such a share/LUN is only exposed on one cluster node at the time, the owner. By having multiple shares and setting preferred owners we can load balance the workload across all cluster nodes.

Thank to continuous availability for general file shares and SMB 3 transparent failover we can still get a high available backup target this way. The failover is fast enough to make this happen and all we see with Veeam Backup & Replication is a short pause in throughput before it resumes after failover. To put the icing on the cake, you can leverage SMB multichannel SMB Direct for both backup and restores.

I would take a sizeable whitepaper to walk through the setup so instead I’ll show you a a quick video of a POC we did in the lab here https://vimeo.com/212886392.

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If you want to learn more come to the community & other conferences I’m speaking at and will be around for Ask The Experts time opportunities. I’ll be at the German Hyper-V community meet up, The Cloud & Datacenter Conference in Germany 2017, Dell EMC World 2017 and last but not least VeeamON 2017 (see  May 2017 will be a travelling month). 

Conclusion

What do you lose?

Potentially there is one big loss in regards to the capabilities of ReFSv3 with this solution when you are not using storage spaces. This is that you lose the capability to automatic repair of corrupt data. The ability of ReFSv3 to do so is tied into the redundant copies of Storage Spaces (parity/mirror).

What do you get?

That’s fine, the strength of this design is that you get the speed and space efficiencies of ReFSv3and high available backup targets in way more scenarios than “just” S2D. After all, not everyone is in a position to choose their storage fabric for backup targets green field or at will. But they might be able to leverage existing storage and opt to use SMB 3 for their data transport.

So even if you can’t have it all, you can still build very good solutions. It offers ReFSv3 benefits and high availability for your backup target via transparent failover with SMB transparent failover on continuous available general purpose file shares. This also only requires Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition, which is a cost saving. You get to leverage SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct. All this while not ignoring the cautions of using ReFSv3 in certain scenarios.

On top of that, if you use NTFS with this approach it will also work for Windows Server 2012 (R2) as the OS for the backup target cluster hosts.

Disclaimer

I do not work for or at Microsoft, nor am I perfect or infallible just because I’m an MVP. You’ll have to do your own testing and validation. From our testing and without ReFSv3 bugs ruining the show, to me this is a very valid and cost effective approach.

Win a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017!

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Win a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017!

Are you located in the EMEA region? Do you live to protect & recover the IT systems businesses depend upon in a 24/7/365 economy? Are you convinced you should really attend VeeamON 2017 but you have not been able to secure a ticket or get the budget approved to do so?

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Convince me of your need to attend. Show me why you are the person that should really be at VeeamON 2017 but for some reason or mistake has been left behind. Why? Well, as a Veeam Vanguard who’s attending as well, I get to offer you to enter a raffle to be able to attend. The package includes a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017. That includes your flight, hotel and conference attendance!

Interested?

I need you to send me a short explanation via my contact page on my blog why you need to be at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. I will only filter for valid answers in order to sort out anyone not treating this seriously. Those valid replies will go into the Veaam Raffle where the lucky winner will be drawn. Don’t forget to include your full name so I can pass it along to Veeam with your e-mail address. The deadline is April 7th (CET). So don’t delay!

So, for those people serious about attending VeeamON 2017 but didn’t not get approval due to budget restrictions or management not will to let you go, this is your opportunity. With some effort and luck, you can step into an awesome world of techies that operate in an always on mindset. Those that live to protect IT systems so their businesses can thrive and if needed, survive when a calamity happens. You can come and learn with the best of the best.

Good luck to all!