I know Veeam's product insight out as I'm an early adopter, but by reading through Christian's book I found out some areas which I discovered even further.
This article is no mean to be in-depth detailed review, but rather a look for what an average enterprise admin who is managing business critical production systems running under VMware vSphere can accomplish with Veeam Backup & Replication.
The book is an in-depth guide which allows not only to get all the benefits from Veeam's solution, but also to configure the backups the way to fit your needs (respecting 3-2-1 rules) and also benefit disk space savings options. The 3-2-1 means 3 copy of backup on 2 different media types with 1 copy off site.
The book as you might already know as I recently published a post just after the release, is written by Christian Mohn (@hobbel) from Norway. Christian is a fellow blogger, vExpert and IT industry veteran. He works for EVRY consulting company as an Infrastructure manager.
The book explains everything from start to finish. At first you must understand your requirements (RTO and RPO), then through the introduction, you'll understand the architecture which has changed from centric to distributed by using backup proxies. Then you'll see the different components of the whole backup architecture. The components which form the whole backup system and the explications of roles for each of those components:
Veeam Backup Server (with backup service and backup shell, SQL db, PowerShell SnappIn)- Backup Proxy (or proxies)
- Backup Repository (or repositories)
- Native Tape support (as long as the tape device is recognized in Windows, it works in Veeam)
- Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager (backup catalog, SQL db)
- U-Air Wizards
- Built-in WAN acceleration
There is 5 main chapters in this book:
- Introduction to Veeam Backup & Replication v7 for VMware
- Configuring Backups
- Restoring data
- Replicating Virtual Machines
- Other Feature (Sure backup and Sure replica, Quick migration, U-Air, vCD support, Enterprise manager, 1-click restore)
Thoughts:
Veeam's product evolves fast. Every year there is a new version packing more and more features. Latest v 7.0 brought more than 75 new features or enhancements. To keep up if you're not day-to-day user it's difficult. New administrators starting with Veeam should definitely check it out.
If you're admin using or planning to use Veeam's product then the book is for you as you'll get the info you need not only to successfully configure the solution, but also some tips which help you with day-to-day management.
The book was published under Packt publishing but is available also through major online stores like Amazon. Printed or Kindle versions are available.
This small review has been done on my own with small compensation – a free electronic copy of the book. -:) I hope that you enjoyed it. Feel free to share and subscribe to our RSS feed. You can also follow on Twitter (@vladan)
