Start protecting Office 365 in under 3 minutes

Office 365 is getting a lot of well deserved attention,  it’s an easy to use platform to provide your company with lots functionality without the need to heavily invest in on-premises infrastructure and hardware. Microsoft makes sure Office 365 is highly available and have all bits and pieces redundant. However, Microsoft does not own your data – You do! There are lots of different ways you might lose data: accidental deletion, ransomware and so on… A good read on the subject is a white paper from Veeam wich discusses 6 different areas:

  • Accidental deletion
  • Retention policy gaps and confusion
  • Internal security threats
  • External security threats
  • Legal and compliance requirements
  • Managing hybrid email deployments and migrations to Office 365

“With Office 365, it’s your data. You own it. You control it.”

-Microsoft

Since it’s your data it is also your responsibility to protect your data.  Now, how would you go about doing that?

Veeam Backup for Office 365 is currently in version 1.5 and supports backing up the mail environment of Office 365. Release 2.0 has been announced and will be released sometime later this year (at VeeamON maybe?), with version 2.0 you will be able to also backup OneDrive and SharePoint. And if you buy Veeam Backup for Office 365 today (version 1.5) you will get the added features down the line  with no additional fees or purchases, just upgrade the installation with the latest bits. Great stuff!

Another cool feature of Office 365 / Veeam Backup for Office 365 is that since both Office 365 and an on-premises Exchange server uses the same APIs you can use Veeam Backup for Office 365 to back up both environments if you have a hybrid installation, or you can even use Veeam as a migration tool – unidirectional of course!

But what does it take to start protecting your Office 365 mail environment? As it turns out, not a lot! It is REALLY simple to start backing up. As the video will show you, it took me no more than 3 minutes to start the first backup, quite impressive and again so simple to install.

See for yourself, the video shows installation of both Veeam Backup for Office 365 and Veeam Explorer for Exchange and configuring a new backup job in under 3 minutes:

PowerShell for the win!

Who doesn’t love PowerShell and PoweCLI? I use it to automate as much as I can. Building demo environments, upgrading stuff or just playing around. The list is just a few examples of available modules from the Microsoft PowerShell Gallery, you can spend hours exploring interesting modules there. The list below is mostly a reminder for myself but feel free to explore!

VMware

vSphere

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Vester/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/vDocumentation/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Get-VMotion/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/createsnapshots/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/VMW_RemoveOldSnapshots/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Virten.net.VimAutomation/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/install-vmwworkstation/

 

vRA

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/UMN-VMWareRA/

 

vCloud

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Invoke-vCloud/

 

NSX

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PowerNSX/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/TestNBPNSX/

 

Log Insight

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/LogInsight/

Veeam

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Get-VeeamBackupReport/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Set-VeeamBackupWindowOptions/

 

Pure Storage

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PureStoragePowerShellToolkit/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PureStoragePowerShellSDK/

Amazon Web Services

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AWSPowerShell/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AWSPowerShell.NetCore/

Dell

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/DellBIOSProvider/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/DellWarranty/

Övrigt

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/WinSCP/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/SSH/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Posh-SSH/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/TreeSize/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PowershellBGInfo/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Tesla/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Ravello/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Telldus/

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PSSpotify/

Veeam Backup & Replication update 3 released!

Update 3 has just been released for Veeam Backup & Replication. Update 3 comes with a lot of new cool functionality:

Storage Snapshots Integrations
New strategic partnerships and storage integrations include:

  • IBM Spectrum Virtualize – IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and the IBM Storwize family
  • Lenovo Storage V series

Bringing functionalities to these arrays like Backup from Storage Snapshots, Explorers for Storage Snapshots

Recycle bin for Cloud Connect
As a way of protecting backups from maliciously being deleted if someone gets access to the tenants credentials, deleted backups will now be placed in a recycle bin for a configurable amount of days but to the user they’re gone. This way it will still be possible to retrieve backup files and restore VMs and/or files even though from a user perspective the backup files seems lost. Once the backup files have been deleted and temporarily placed in the recycle bin, the backup files will not consume valuable resources from the disk quota. When the deleted backup files needs to be used the tenant has to contact the service provider to have the service provider restore the backup files from the recycle bin back to the tenants repository.

VMware Cloud on AWS
Support for backing up VMs running och VMware Cloud on AWS

Veeam ONE
Agent monitoring and reporting

  • Protected agents
  • Agent backup status
  • Identify agents with no backup copy

Backup Compliance reporting

  • Geolocation of Data Protection Report: List all data sources grouped by production location and location of their copies/replicas
  • Data Geolocation Mismatch Report: List all data sources that have one or more copies where the location is different from the production data

Agent only use: 0-socket license required for enabling advanced funtionalities (Scale-Out Backup repository, Tape, WAN accelerator) in Backup & Replication when using agents if you’re not using Backup & Replication for backing up any virtual environment.

Veeam Agents
Centralized deployment and management giving you a single pane of glass for all backups and restores regardless of location in the environment – VMs or physical servers, you can even install Agents on VMs running in the Cloud or on any hypervisor.

Veeam Agents for Microsoft Windows 2.1

  • Windows Failover Cluster
    • Includes SQL AlwaysOn, Windows Failover Cluster and Exchange Database Availability Groups
  • Change Block tracking driver for faster incremental backups of Windows Servers
  • Microsoft OneDrive support as a backup target

This means you can you Veeam Explorers to restore application-items from Exchange, SQL

Veeam Agents for Linux 2.0

  • Scale-Out Backup Repository
  • Direct backup to Cloud Connect
  • Source side encryption

Release notes can be found here

In 5 minutes: Veeam Cloud Connect

Time again for a new episode in the “in 5 minutes” series. Today I’ll be discussing Veeam Cloud Connect.

Swedish only!

Whiteboard: VMware vSAN

And yet another series, I’d like to call it – Whiteboard. It’s about me trying to give a little deeper  dive into a specific subject in the format of whiteboarding. So the first session will be a closer look at VMware vSAN.

Swedish only.

In 5 minutes: VMware AppDefense

The latest addition to VMwares security portfolio is called AppDefense, let’s have a look at it in 5 minutes.

Swedish only.

In 5 minutes: Veeam ONE

Next up: Veeam ONE. A solution for many things, such as:

Monitoring
Reporting
Capacity planning

Let’s have a short discussion.

Swedish only.

In 5 minutes: VMware vSAN

“In 5 minutes”-series, we’ll discuss VMware vSAN.

Swedish only.

In 5 minutes: VMware ROBO

Continuing the “In 5 minutes”-series with a discussion relating more to licenses than technology. A talk about licensing remote offices and branch offices for use with vSphere, vSAN and NSX.

Swedish only.

 

In 5 minutes: Veeam Backup & Replication

The series continues with Veeam’s flagship product for backing up and restoring virtual machines, files and objects from applications. And replicating VMs.

Swedish only.