VMCE_v12 Questions and Answers

In Veeam Backup & Replication, to utilize AWS S3 Glacier for long-term storage, the AWS S3 must first be added as a Capacity Tier within the Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR). This step is necessary before backups can be moved to Glacier. Once S3 is established as the Capacity Tier, the policies for moving backups to Glacier can be configured based on the retention requirements (in this case, after 90 days). This approach ensures that the monthly full backups are initially stored in S3 and then offloaded to Glacier for cost-effective long-term retention.References:

• Veeam Documentation: Scale-Out Backup Repository
• Veeam Help Center: AWS S3 as Capacity Tier and Archive Tier Configuration

The feature that is unique to Veeam Agent for Linux and not available in other Veeam Agent configurations is C: Backup from native snapshots. Veeam Agent for Linux includes the ability to leverage native snapshot capabilities of the Linux kernel, such as LVM (Logical Volume Manager) snapshots or Btrfs subvolume snapshots, to create consistent point-in-time copies of data. This capability allows for application-consistent backups even in complex Linux environments, ensuring that data is captured in a consistent state without the need for custom scripting or downtime. Native snapshot support in Veeam Agent for Linux enhances the flexibility and reliability of backups, particularly in environments where Linux-based applications and databases are critical to business operations.

For a VMware environment on a Fibre Channel SAN, the most efficient proxy transport mode to minimize impact on the production environment is Direct Storage Access. This mode allows the backup proxy to directly interact with the SAN, bypassing the production network and reducing load on the ESXi hosts.References: Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices, Veeam VMware Backup Proxy Guide

For diagnosing known issues in the configuration and performance of the backup infrastructure without the direct involvement of Veeam Technical Support, the administrator should utilize A: Intelligent Diagnostics in Veeam One. Intelligent Diagnostics is a feature designed to proactively detect known issues within the Veeam backup infrastructure by analyzing the system's event logs, performance data, and configurations. It uses predefined patterns and rules derived from common issues identified by Veeam Support to provide early warnings and suggest corrective actions. This self-service approach enables administrators to address potential problems before they impact operations, enhancing the reliability and efficiency of the backup infrastructure.

The Veeam restore process that allows for custom scripting to be run before returning a server to production is Staged Restore. This feature enables administrators to perform necessary operations, like running a script to remove customer photos, during the restore process before the VM is brought back online.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam Staged Restore Guide

Veeam Data Platform can achieve image-level backups for Solaris workloads. This means it can create a complete backup of the system at the image level, capturing the entire state of the Solaris system, including the operating system, applications, and data.References: Veeam Data Platform Documentation, Veeam Solaris Backup Guide

In the Veeam Service Provider Console v7.0, Veeam Service Providers can deploy C: Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. This deployment option is designed to extend the capabilities of Veeam Service Providers, allowing them to offer managed backup services for Microsoft 365 environments, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive solution that provides secure backup of Microsoft 365 data, ensuring its availability and recoverability in the event of accidental deletion, security threats, or retention policy gaps. By integrating this solution into the Veeam Service Provider Console, service providers can manage and monitor Microsoft 365 backups across multiple tenants, enhancing their service offerings and providing added value to their customers.

To meet the 1-hour RPO for the databases within the VM, while only being able to snapshot the VM once per day, the best strategy is to enable regular transaction log backups (option A) and process transaction logs with the job (option E). This setup allows the system to capture changes in the SQL Server transaction logs at intervals less than the RPO requirement, without needing to snapshot the entire VM more frequently.References: Veeam Backup & Replication Documentation, Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices Guide

When backing up NAS file shares, it's essential to ensure that more than one copy of the data exists to adhere to best practices for data protection, often referred to as the 3-2-1 Rule (3 total copies of your data, 2 of which are local but on different devices, and at least 1 copy offsite). Implementing a secondary copy of the data provides this additional layer of redundancy. In Veeam, this can be achieved by creating backup copy jobs, which ensure that there is a secondary copy of the data, possibly stored in a different location. This is not to be confused with the simple use of backup repositories, which are storage locations for primary backups, or with cache/archive repositories which serve different purposes in the backup process.

Instant file share recovery is the most effective method to minimize service impact in this scenario. This feature allows users to instantly access the NAS data directly from the backup files without having to wait for the entire file share to be restored. This approach is beneficial when quick access to data is crucial.References: Veeam Backup & Replication Documentation, Veeam NAS Backup Guide

In the event that the Veeam Backup & Replication configuration database is corrupted, the appropriate action to take is to perform a configuration restore. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to back up and restore its configuration database. The Restore option should be used to recover the data from a configuration backup. This process will restore the configuration database from the backup file, which includes information about backup jobs, repository settings, and more. Instant Recovery, Failover, and Migrate are not appropriate options for recovering a corrupted configuration database. Instant Recovery is used to quickly restore a VM to a running state, Failover is used for High Availability in case a VM fails, and Migrate is used to move VMs from one host or storage to another.

Within Veeam Backup & Replication, the functionality that achieves the lowest Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is B: Continuous Data Protection (CDP). CDP is designed to protect critical workloads by continuously capturing changes and replicating them to a target site, allowing for very low RPOs, often measured in seconds. This is achieved through the use of VMware's vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO), which intercepts and replicates I/O streams almost in real-time. CDP is particularly valuable for applications that require high levels of availability and cannot tolerate significant data loss. By providing near-continuous replication, CDP ensures that in the event of a failure or disaster, data loss can be minimized to a very narrow window, significantly reducing the potential impact on business operations.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange allows recovery of items that are under litigation hold or in-place hold. This feature is essential for compliance and legal discovery processes where emails and other items need to be preserved and may be subject to eDiscovery requests. It is not used for restoring databases from backups created with Veeam RMAN plug-in, exporting to BAK files, or restoring original passwords for account objects.References:

• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange User Guide: Working with Items under Litigation Hold
• Veeam Knowledge Base: Recovery of Exchange Items

The most efficient approach to getting all servers onto tape, considering there are both VMware VMs and physical Windows servers in the infrastructure, is to first create backup jobs that target both the VMs and the physical servers. After these backups are stored on a disk-based repository, you can then create backup to tape jobs. This method leverages Veeam's ability to handle both types of environments and ensures that all data is efficiently backed up to tape for offsite storage and ransomware protection.References:

• Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide: Tape Device Support
• Veeam Best Practices: Configuring Tape Jobs

In Veeam Backup & Replication, an immutable backup means that the backup data cannot be modified or deleted during the specified immutable period. However, even with immutability enabled, once the period expires, the data should be automatically subject to the defined retention policy. If a backup still persists beyond the retention period, a likely explanation is that a retention lock or exception has been applied to that particular restore point, preventing it from being deleted. Other listed reasons wouldn't typically prevent the deletion of the backup file after the immutable period has lapsed.

To avoid running out of space when moving backups to a new repository, the "Move backup..." function in Veeam Backup & Replication should be used. This function allows you to relocate backup files to a new repository without duplicating data, which can save space. Unlike a simple copy action, the move function ensures that the backup chain remains intact and does not require additional space for a copy of the backups during the transfer. When the move is initiated, Veeam will also automatically update the configuration to point to the new backup location, thus preventing any disruptions in the backup chain.

To achieve the goal of creating a secondary copy of the backups that is transferred only once a day, the engineer should configure a Hardened Linux Repository and create a Backup Copy job with Periodic Copy (Pruning) mode to this repository, scheduling it to run once a day. This setup respects the bandwidth and compute limitations while ensuring a daily copy of the backups.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam Backup Copy Job Configuration Guide

The correct approach for backing up Hyper-V VMs to tape in a ransomware protection strategy is to create media pools first and then configure backup to tape jobs. This method ensures organized and efficient tape management while securing VM backups on tape media.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam Tape Backup Configuration Guide

Veeam Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) are equipped to offer a range of services designed to extend Veeam's data protection capabilities to the cloud, enhancing the flexibility and reliability of backup and disaster recovery strategies for Veeam's customers. The two service offerings that align with VCSP capabilities are:

A. Backup as a Service (BaaS) - This service allows Veeam customers to offload their on-premises backup operations to the cloud, leveraging cloud resources for storage and management of backups. BaaS simplifies backup processes, reduces the need for extensive on-premises infrastructure, and provides an added layer of data protection and accessibility.

E. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) - DRaaS extends beyond basic backup services to offer a more comprehensive disaster recovery solution. It ensures not only the availability of backups but also the capability to rapidly restore and run critical workloads in the cloud in the event of a disaster, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.

These services leverage the robust capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication, tailored for cloud environments, to offer scalable, efficient, and secure data protection solutions.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It is essentially the age of the files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume after a failure or disaster. In other words, it defines the data loss tolerance of a business unit or organization. If an RPO is set to one hour, the system must back up at least every hour to meet the RPO.References:

• Veeam Documentation: Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide: RPO and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) Definitions

A failover plan in Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to define the order in which VMs are started during a failover operation. It can include startup delays for certain VMs, ensuring that some VMs can be configured to start after a defined time delay. This meets the requirement of having some replicated VMs start on a time delay.References:

• Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide: Failover Plans
• Veeam Help Center: Creating Failover Plans

When configuring Veeam Backup & Replication in a VMware vSAN environment, the best practice is to use the Virtual Appliance transport mode. This mode is also referred to as "hot-add" and allows the backup proxy to mount VM disks directly from the datastore. This method is more isolated from the VMkernel network traffic, as it does not require network connectivity to the hosts to retrieve data, thus providing a level of isolation that meets the requirement stated in the question. The Direct NFS and Direct SAN options are not applicable for vSAN, and Network mode would not provide the necessary isolation from VMkernel network traffic.

Veeam provides agentless backup solutions for several public cloud infrastructures, among which AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure are the prominent platforms supported. Thus, the correct answers are A: AWS and E: Microsoft Azure.

• For AWS, Veeam offers Veeam Backup for AWS, an agentless solution designed to protect AWS workloads by leveraging native AWS technologies. This solution allows for the backup and recovery of AWS EC2 instances without the need for agents inside the instances, providing efficient and flexible cloud-native data protection.
• In the case of Microsoft Azure, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure provides a similar agentless data protection capability, allowing for the backup and recovery of Azure VMs. This solution also utilizes native Azure technologies to facilitate seamless integration and management of backups within the Azure ecosystem.

These solutions are designed to provide comprehensive data protection for cloud workloads, simplifying management while ensuring robust backup and recovery capabilities in these public cloud environments.

The primary benefit of configuring replica seeding in Veeam Backup & Replication is reduced WAN traffic. Replica seeding allows for the initial replica to be created using a backup copy that is transported to the DR site, which significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the WAN during the initial replication process.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam Replica Seeding Guide

The fastest way to bring a corrupted data drive back online with the least disruption in a VMware environment is through Instant Disk Recovery. This feature allows the administrator to quickly restore the specific affected disk from a backup, minimizing downtime and impact on business operations.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam Instant Disk Recovery Guide

To change a backup copy job from periodic mode to immediate mode, an administrator can edit the original backup copy job and select the immediate copy mode from within the job settings. This change ensures that backup copy jobs are started immediately after the source backup job completes, rather than waiting for a defined copy interval.References:

• Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide: Backup Copy Job
• Veeam Help Center: Backup Copy Job Modes

To solve the space issue while enabling GFS retention, the engineer should add an Object Storage as a Capacity tier to the Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) and set the policy to move backups that are older than 14 days. This approach allows for efficient use of local NAS storage for short-term retention and leverages object storage for long-term archival purposes.References: Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, Veeam SOBR Configuration Guide