Veeam Community Forums Digest for dandvo [Feb 12 - Feb 18, 2018]

Veeam Community Forums Digest

February 12 - February 18, 2018

 

THE WORD FROM GOSTEV

After almost 2 months since the original release, last week our support management have given us the green light to initialize Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update notification server with Update 3. So all users on earlier builds will start seeing the popup in their consoles – while some of our partners may start getting extra calls requesting assistance with the update (and configuring those physical computers backup). Also, I was talking here about us potentially releasing Update 3a to address common support issues – this may still happen down the road, when enough such issues are identified. But for now, after over 100K downloads, the support situation looks surprisingly good for such a major update – kudos to our QC for such a great job on this release! Thanks everyone for your active participation in the legacy ESXi versions usage poll – it's always important for me to have at least a few hundreds of votes to get the margin of error down into acceptable levels. And also thanks for taking time to explain your cases of staying on the older ESXi version. Based on the results, we decided to keep supporting ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 with the next update to give those 6% (or approximately 15000) of Veeam users more time to migrate off them. There will be a small caveat though – due to security certification requirements, we are forced to switch to using the latest build of VDDK 5.5 with those ESXi versions, which means we will no longer be able to support 32-bit backup proxies (as VDDK 5.5 and later versions are 64-bit only). Late last week, VMware released the new version of vCenter Server Appliance: vCenter Server 6.5 U1f (build number 7801515). Notably, this release patches the vCSA operating system (Photon OS) against bounds-check bypass (Spectre-1, CVE-2017-5753) and rogue data cache load issues (Meltdown, CVE-2017-5754). However, there's still no patch for branch target injection vulnerability (Spectre-2, CVE-2017-5715). And this is, by the way, 1.5 months after the public disclosure – more from NDA disclosure. Which particularly makes it the perfect demonstration of the main drawback of proprietary Linux-based virtual appliances versus installable software for general-purpose OS. The result is not only customers being exposed to the known threat for an extended period of time – but also a software vendor having to waste many months patching vulnerabilities, instead of moving their product forward. To fellow Lenovo ThinkPad users, there's a critical vulnerability that would affect me directly if I did not use Windows 10. Because with earlier Windows versions, stored logon credentials are encrypted using a weak algorithm, and can be extracted with hard-coded password by any user with local non-admin access to the system with Lenovo fingerprint software installed. So embarrassing. Still, this can't possibly affect my love affair with Lenovo X1 Carbon – I've been using Gen 4 one for almost 3 years now, and think I'm stuck with this model for life! When I've first ran into CoinHive a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was a very cool and a very fair concept – instead of displaying ads, use every web-site visitor's CPU to calculate a hash or two. Truly win-win situation that would finally allow to get rid of those annoying ads - what's not to like? But, I could never predict it will go this far this fast (and this bad), with every 4th computer in the world now working at someone else's crypto-mine > Coinhive Crypto-Miner Now Affecting a Quarter of the World's Organizations

 

VEEAM CLOUD & SERVICE PROVIDER CORNER

Hi Team, Vitaliy is here. In this digest I would like to give you an update on Veeam Availability Console (VAC), our plug-ins for LabTech and share a cool blog post on how you can create your own App using our RESTful APIs! If you're using VAC, then please be aware that last week our QA team approved Veeam Agent for Microsoft Microsoft Windows 2.1 (VAW) to be published in the Veeam repository. What does this mean to you? Now, all new backup agents will be deployed using the latest version of the software. Additionally, if you've already been using VAC for some time with backup agents, then you can trigger the upgrade procedure on all your existing installations. Here is the VAW 2.1 Release Notes and the What's New documents for your convenience. A quick reminder from our support team: in our community forums there is a sticky topic which covers all known issues sand available hotfixes. This topic is updated on regular basis, so make sure you check it before opening a support case with our team (might save you some time). A heads up to all ConnectWise Automate (former known as LabTech) users, since there are more and more requests coming from our partners. If you're upgrading your ConnectWise Automate infrastructure to v12, then please be aware that our plug-ins for Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Endpoint Backup do not support v12. If you would like to continue monitoring, reporting on your Veeam infrastructure, please consider looking at VAC like this partner did. Here is the gem of this week digest created by our Senior Systems Engineer, Timothy Dewin. In his blog post Timo showcases how you can use our RESTful APIs to quickly create a small Android App to report and perform some actions on your Veeam backup infrastructure right from your mobile device. Quite impressive, eh? Finally, our Cloud Team would like to thank you for being part of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program. Please take 2-3 minutes to complete this survey. Your experience and feedback will help us to improve the VCSP program further and further. Your responses are for Veeam internal use only and will not be shared with other parties. -Vitaliy

 

BEST POST OF THE WEEK

Re: [POLL] Legacy ESXi versions usage (2018 Edition)   [BY: Craig Putnam • LIKED: 5 times] Ummm... 5.0. I suspect that a lot of smaller shops are going to be running old versions. It's not that the IT staff (zero to one people, normally) don't care, but that it's difficult to convince management that the time, expense, and risk of upgrading is worthwhile. Having said that, go ahead and drop support for old versions of ESXi. We small shops need something we can point to: "See? This platform is totally unsupported and we need to commit resources to upgrading."

 

TOP CONTENT

DD Boost Issues and 9.5 U3 Update   [VIEWS: 297 • REPLIES: 12] Can anyone clear this up for me. Since U3 upgrade we have been having random backup and copy back job issues where they would just stop in mid stride and get stuck. I went thru support and was told to just reboot to clear it. more Year-end backups   [VIEWS: 241 • REPLIES: 11] At the beginning of '18 I started new backup jobs to a new repository. I'd like to get "year end" backups of the last jobs that were pointed at the old repository, and put them on tape. What's the best way to accomplish this? more I don't understand Backup Copy jobs   [VIEWS: 238 • REPLIES: 9] I don't think I understand Backup Copy jobs very well. They seem illogical to me, or perhaps it is my logic that is flawed. I have 41 backup jobs that run at 6pm. They take a few hours to complete usually. more dynamically add vms to the right job   [VIEWS: 216 • REPLIES: 9] Lets say I have Windows and Linux VMs on a host. Windows and Linux vms need different backup job settings. Every time a new VM added to the virtual host, it has to be administered twice in Veeam: removing and excluding from one job and adding to the other job. more Achieving WORM compliance without WORM media   [VIEWS: 188 • REPLIES: 5] WORM in the form of physical media is clearly an obsolete concept as it manifests mostly as tape/optical media. There are proprietary solutions (NetApp SnapLock) that advertise WORM compliance on random-access media, can Veeam not be configured in such a way as to provide WORM compliance? Would it be possible to modify the contents of a *. more

 

YOUR CONTENT

None of topics you have contributed to have been updated this week.