The secret life of VBM files

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What do they do? VBM files are an XML dump of relevant backup metadata pertaining to the relevant backup job from the Veeam DB. A VBM file will be created for each backup and backup copy job.

Why do we create VBMs? Before VBM files, Veeam would read metadata information from the backup files themselves. As Veeam was deployed into larger and larger environments it soon became apparent that this method of reading metadata information was too I/O intensive and needed to be improved, so the VBM file was born.

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Max concurrent tasks in Veeam B&R

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A quick post regarding max concurrent tasks in Veeam B&R which are tunable options in both proxies and repositories. The default max concurrent task for proxies is set to 2, for backup repositories the default is set to 4. An important thing to note is that we are limiting different things when configuring this max concurrent task between proxies and repositories.

When configuring proxies, the max concurrent tasks are based on a single virtual disk. So for example, if we had a single virtual machine with 4 virtual disks or a 4 virtual machines with a single virtual disk each, the units of resource scheduling required is the same, the units of resource scheduling required being 4 virtual disks that need to be processed.

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Deployment Projects in Veeam ONE

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Did you know that Veeam ONE has a tool called deployment projects that has the ability to simulate how a task such as adding or evicting hosts and VMs impacts your virtual infrastructure? These simulations help us to review predicted resource capacities against future resource demand, provide practical recommendations and help identify potential resource shortages. It’s a quick and easy way to check your resources before making small or large changes. Think of it as a way to perform due diligence and gain insight before making any changes to your virtual environment.

Deployment Projects can be found under Veeam ONE Reporter, to access Veeam ONE Reporter we browse to the URL of the Veeam ONE Reporter website. This website runs on the machine where the Veeam ONE Web UI component is installed. Assuming you have are using the default port it would look similar to https://veeamoneip:1239

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FREE & NEW Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v2 PROMO

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Veeam is giving away FREE 6-month subscriptions of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows licenses until the 30th of June for both existing Veeam customers and new users.

The “Any User” offer includes Evaluation Support, and does not require the user to be a Veeam customer.

To be eligible for the “Existing Veeam Customer” offer, the user must own Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Backup Essentials by June 30, 2017 and must be current on maintenance. Offer is for full production license including Basic Support. Upgrade to Production Support offer is available to existing Veeam customers only. Only one registration per corporate domain will be accepted for existing customers.

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Veeam Explorer for AD – the search filter is invalid

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These blog posts serve more as a reminder to myself than anything else, especially if I can’t find any other information regarding the problem encountered. So as is tradition, my next post is again about documenting an error I’ve witnessed that was simple and easy to resolve but easily forgotten (at least for me it is).

So my job involves a fair bit of demonstrating what features and capabilities Veeam has along with knowledge transfers. I especially love showing off the Veeam Explorer’s, they certainly making restoring application items a breeze for the most part. I find one of the easiest and quickest ways to demonstrate what the Veeam Explorer’s are all about is to demonstrate a quick restore using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory.

With full permission granted, I like to make a small adjustment to the ‘description’ field for an inactive user that lives on the domain, making a small typo for example. After making the change, loading up Veeam Explorer for AD, letting Veeam filter out the unchanged data between production and the restore point, finding the change I introduce and attempting to restore the original ‘description’ value back. Usually, this goes without a hitch but this time Veeam came up with the below error.

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VeeamON 2017

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Hey Guys,

What a whirlwind the last couple of days have been, between the long haul flights to get to NOLA, jet lag, attending sessions, networking and catching up with old acquaintances it really all starts to blur together. All I can say is, Veeam knows how to put on a good show and they have certainly repeated their success from last VeeamON.

The sessions included a broad range of topics and for the ones I did make it to were always packed and full of great content. In regards to new features and announcements, there were several stand-outs for me

– Integration with object-based storage (S3,Glazier,Blob + More)
– Veeam Continuous Data Protection (Zerto should be worried)
– Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2 to support SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Instead of writing about all the newly announced features including the above, I thought it would be better to simply link to all the other wonderful posts done by fellow Vanguards.

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Veeam Explorer for Sharepoint is unable to find content database

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Ran into this Veeam error today when demonstrating Veeams Explorer for SharePoint to a customer.

The customer was using a supported version of SharePoint and Veeam was configured to use a licensed version SQL 2014. After checking over the backup job settings and ensuring no errors or warnings were being thrown I hit the Veeam forums. Fortunately, someone else had seen the same problem which you can find here.

“The Application-aware logic uses NetBIOS names to locate corresponding SQL servers during backup and in some cases (where SQL server for the site collection is specified using IP address or SQL Server alias, for example), Veeam B&R still does not have the required information, even provided that application-aware backup was successful. If this is your case (I believe support will be able to verify that), you can configure SQL server mapping manually via the registry, as far as I know, there’s an ability to do that.”

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Collected SQL Server transaction logs do not match any existing database backup: [DB Name]

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Experienced this error ‘Collected SQL Server transaction logs do not match any existing database backup: [DB Name]’ recently for a customer, 

Luckily there is a Veeam KB article on for this error which can be found here.
Unfortunately, the solution provided ‘ Start the Backup Job (right click the job > Start).’ didn’t fix the problem. Well to be precise, it worked for about 24 hours and then the error returned.

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Missing vSphere tags from Veeam Console UI

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So working on a Veeam project recently and noticed I couldn’t add vSphere tags to any jobs. Now I won’t go into the benefits of using vSphere tags in this post, I’ll leave that up to this excellent write-up by Luca Dell’Oca which can be found here.

missing vSphere tags

So checking the usual culprits and researching online I found someone with a similar issue on the Veeam forums here but I still couldn’t resolve the issue. I checked vCenters FQDN IP address which was set correctly and that I could indeed query vSphere tags from vCenter using PowerCLI without any problems. I bounced the Veeam B&R server, checked event logs and eventually ran out of ideas to try.

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