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Managecast News

Managecast Named Veeam VCSP Competency Partner

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Managecast Technologies, Inc., an award-winning Veeam Cloud Service Provider (VCSP), was named a Veeam VCSP Competency Partner earlier this month. This program designates a service provider that offers the highest level of qualification for providing Veeam-as-a-service solutions. Becoming a VCSP Competency Approved Partner involves thorough testing and approval processes and ensures partners follow strict business, technical and documentation requirements. Managecast Technologies, Inc. is a proud Veeam Gold Partner and has been part of the partner program since 2016. Managecast was also presented with the prestigious Veeam Innovation Award, which celebrates creating new and unique ways to add value to Veeam technology, in 2020 at VeeamON. “Not all Veeam service providers are the same, and some focus more on the providing instead of on the service, like we do,” says Nathan Golden, Owner of Managecast. “Managecast is proud to be recognized for our commitment, focus and expertise we provide for Veeam solutions.” Managecast has met the competency requirements for the following services: BaaS for Microsoft 365 Microsoft provides a wide array of powerful services within Microsoft 365, but a comprehensive backup solution is not one of them. Customers who don’t back up their Microsoft 365 data are at risk of accidental deletion, security threats and retention policy gaps. By achieving the Backup as a Service (BaaS) for Microsoft 365 competency, Managecast has been identified as an expert in providing an out-of-the-box BaaS solution that’s specifically built to protect your critical Microsoft 365 data. Off-site backup We make it easy to extend your data protection solutions with whatever storage option makes sense for your recovery needs, whether it’s tape, object storage or sending backups to a service provider’s off-site cloud infrastructure. Managecast offers a ready-made off-site backup solution to help you get started. DRaaS The need for a disaster recovery (DR) solution cannot be understated, particularly with the rise in frequency of ransomware attacks. Managecast delivers a best-in-breed DR solution that enables you to focus your resources on the important projects to grow and innovate your business, spending less time on risk mitigation. —- About ManagecastManagecast Technologies is a data protection business founded in February of 2000. Passionate about providing world-class data protection solutions, we offer a broad spectrum of services around disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. We combine professional management and disaster recovery planning services with the ability to deliver complete offsite disaster recovery solutions for virtually any platform and application. Our data centers are located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan and are HIPAA, SSAE, SOX, and PCI compliant/certified. To learn more, visit www.managecast.com About VeeamVeeam is the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management. Veeam’s Availability Platform is the most complete backup solution for helping customers on the journey to achieving success in the 5 Stages of Cloud Data Management. To learn more, visit www.veeam.com ContactNathan Golden, Presidentngolden@managecast.com(513) 735-6868 x 4002

General Cloud Backup

What are you using for offsite backups? – Spiceworks Discussion

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While scrolling through Spiceworks (an online community where IT professionals can collaborate and seek advice from one another), we found a post requesting options for offsite backups. We see questions like this (below) frequently and wanted to provide a thoughtful and helpful response. If you’re looking for offsite backup options, please take our response into consideration. Nathan Golden – CloudBackupGuy https://community.spiceworks.com/people/nathan-managecast Hey there C.J.  I don’t think you are going to find anything that absolutely prevents bad stuff from being included on the backups as 0-day attacks are often not detected until it’s too late. I do know Sophos makes a great end-point protection product and combined with their firewall offers pretty good defense, but it is not perfect. Nothing is. However, it is wise to do everything possible to keep from being infected such as regularly training your users not to click on bad things (knowb4.com), as well as advanced firewalls and end-point protection, etc.  Backup is the last line of defense! As others mentioned, with Veeam it is possible to run the restore through an AV engine. The idea is that once you’ve found you’ve been compromised you will hopefully find a way to detect the bad stuff. Maybe you need to wait for an updated AV signature, but the idea is once the AV has been updated you can run your restore through it and not restore infected files. Hopefully, only a few files had bad stuff and hopefully, you are restoring to a point in time before the malware has executed and done its thing. The other issue that some are eluding to is how do you protect your past backups from being corrupted/deleted by the malware. A lot of folks will talk about “air gap”, meaning you physically separate your media from the network, which is a great way to protect your data from being compromised by ransomware – though realize air gap does nothing to stop you from backing up malware. However, I see a lot of people do the air gap but then don’t get data offsite frequently. So while negating one threat (ransomware), they are actually introducing additional risk.  Personally, I think anything that relies on human intervention (like rotating media, etc) is prone to error and failure. Our solution is to use a Veeam certified immutable object-store. Yes, it’s still connected to the network, but protected by a different set of credentials and is a solution that is designed to provide unchanging read-only data, even by the network administrator. This maintains full automation and what I call a “virtual airgap”. This is on top of the protections offered by Veeam Insider Protection, etc., so you are really minimizing any risks. As you said there are thousands of companies out there offering these types of services. My suggestion is to ask these questions when choosing an offsite solution: 1) Is the company 100% dedicated to backup and DR, or is it 1 of many different offerings?   2) Is the company a utility-type provider doing their best to keep their humans from interacting with you?  They may provide a service, but little to no expertise – so know what you are doing. 3) Does the company offer Veeam (or other) certified immutable backup capabilities? 4) If you needed your data quickly, how fast can you get it? Is it download only or will they quick ship your data?  Do they offer failover/DR services? Hope this was helpful in your search.

Veeam

Azure File Share with Veeam

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In the Azure portal, you will select the storage account that your file share is currently being stored in. Select the File share that you want to backup with Veeam. Click Connect up in the left corner of the screen. Next, you will want to open up Veeam Backup and Replication. Go to Inventory, then under Inventory select File Shares. Select Add File Share. You will want to select SMB Share. When it asks you what shared folder to use, you will have to use the path of \\URL\fileshare In our case, it would be \\teststoragefileshare.file.core.windows.net\blogfileshare. You will then want to check the box next to “This share requires access credentials:” Click Add next to the credentials. Go to the text file that you saved with the connection configuration. In that file you will want to look for the /user: after that will be the username you will use. Then look for the /pass: and after that will be the password. Click Next and it will take you to the processing page. Adjust as you need to then click Apply. Click Finish and your SMB Share will be saved to Veeam. You will Then want to back up the SMB share. Right-click the file share and select Add to backup job, then New Job. Specify a name for the Job, then click next. The Fileshare should already be in there, click next again. Pick the backup repository that you would want the Fileshare backed up to. There are also other settings you can specify here as well. Click next on secondary target and then you will be in schedule. Schedule the backup for whatever time works best for you and click Apply. Finally, check the box for “Run the job when I click Finish” then click finish.

Veeam

Issue: Veeam Issues Nuisance Low Repository Disk Space Warnings

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Overview Generally, it is good to be informed of low backup storage situations on Veeam repositories. Running out of disk storage during backup operations can result in corrupted backups. By default, Veeam is configured to trigger a warning notification when backup storage space is 10% or less free space. For example, if you have 1TB of storage and the notification is set to warning at 10% left then it would trigger when there is 100GB or less space.  It is good to be aware of low disk space situations so we can proactively address the issue before it leads to a problem. However, in some scenarios, 10% can trigger nuisance warnings that make all affected jobs turn yellow (warning). For example, if there is 50TB of storage then warnings are going to be issued with 5TB left on the disk. In this situation, it may not be justified to resolve the issue as there is still a lot of free space Solution We recommend changing the notification settings when 10% of free space is still more than adequate for current needs. Changing these settings will return the backup jobs to green instead of showing up as warnings. Our goal is to keep all jobs green so we do not have to investigate why they are not. Green is good!  Do not change these settings if you do not feel comfortable that you will not run out of space!  Changing the value from 10% to 1% may not be wise. We recommend decreasing the threshold to only that which will resolve the issue, for example, changing from 10% to 7%. Note: This guide will work for Hyper-V hosts and VSphere hosts. Changing Veeam repository low-disk notifications First, log into your Veeam appliance. In the top left corner click the drop-down and select General Options. Next, click the notification tab. Then you will see an option for backup storage, there will be a checkbox next to it that says “Warn me when free disk space is below:”. You want to leave this box checked. Next to that will be a percentage. You are going to want to change the percentage from 10% to what fits best for your storage. We recommend cutting it in half to around 5%. You will then want to change the option “Skip VM processing when free disk space is below:”. You will want to lower that percentage to ensure that the VMs are not skipped from processing when there is plenty of storage. Summary Once the notification settings are made to verify future backup jobs return green status.  Take care to leave the threshold at a reasonable percentage as to notify you in the future if disk space gets dangerously low.

Managecast News

Managecast Wins Veeam Innovation Award 2020

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CINCINNATI – June 17, 2020 – Managecast Technologies, Inc. was presented with the prestigious Veeam Innovation Award, which celebrates creating new and unique ways to add value to Veeam technology, on June 17, 2020, at VeeamON. Starting in 2018, the Veeam Innovation Award is given out to partners who are making waves in the Veeam space. Managecast created the Managecast Portal for Veeam in 2019 and has been enabling MSPs and clients to more easily monitor backups ever since. This all-encompassing portal utilizes Veeam APIs form Veeam Service Provider Console to provide long-term historical trending of backup jobs and repositories,  ticketing integration, tracking of jobs that have not run, tracking the loss of connection with VBR consoles, a high-level dashboard showing backup activities, fully multi-tenant and MSP enabled to allow third parties to track their client’s backups, acknowledgment and tracking of events, and anomaly detection. “We originally built the Veeam portal for our internal use to monitor client backups and realized other MSP’s could benefit from the tool we built,” says Nathan Golden, Owner of Managecast. “It is a great honor to be recognized by Veeam for our efforts.” You are not required to store backups with us and can use our Veeam portal for your own Veeam service. Managecast welcomes any service provider running Veeam and managing customer backups to see why we were selected as the winner of the Veeam innovation award. ResourcesManagecast Portal for Veeam DemoAnnouncement from Veeam About ManagecastManagecast Technologies is a data protection business founded in February of 2000. Passionate about providing world-class data protection solutions, we offer a broad spectrum of services around disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. We combine professional management and disaster recovery planning services with the ability to deliver complete offsite disaster recovery solutions for virtually any platform and application. Our data centers are located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan and are HIPAA, SSAE, SOX, and PCI compliant/certified. To learn more, visit www.managecast.com About VeeamVeeam is the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management. Veeam’s Availability Platform is the most complete backup solution for helping customers on the journey to achieving success in the 5 Stages of Cloud Data Management. To learn more, visit www.veeam.com ContactNathan Golden, Presidentngolden@managecast.com(513) 735-6868 x 4002

Veeam

Validate a Backup With Veeam Backup Validator

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Have you ever been asked to validate your backups? Maybe you utilize Veeam SureBackup to validate your backups, but need to validate a specific backup on the spot and don’t want to run the entire SureBackup job? Veeam provides the Veeam Backup Validator tool to manual validate backups immediately. The tool is so simple to use that you could start using it right away. Everything is done through an administrative command prompt. A quick and easy command to start off with is:“C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup\ Veeam.Backup.Validator” /backup:”JobName” You can see below an example of what you would see when running the Veeam.Backup.Validator tool. In addition, if you’d like to generate a report that you can print, save, or email then you can add the parameter /report:”DesiredFilePathToSaveReport.html” to the command to generate an easier to read the report as shown below. You can find more information on the Veeam.Backup.Validator tool by visiting https://www.veeam.com/kb2086 At Managecast, we fully manage and monitor your backups so that you can focus on more strategic initiatives. Interested in learning how Managecast can help your business with its cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions? Fill out this form for more information!

Ransomware

Ransomware Recap – January

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Welcome to our first Ransomware Recap! In this monthly series, we discuss a few of the biggest ransomware stories. Let’s jump in! Travelex Hackers Demand $6 Million On New Year’s Eve, hackers compromised Travelex’s infrastructure with Sodinokibi ransomware. The hack, which was undetected for 6 months prior, forced Travelex to shut down all operations across 30 countries. Alleged information gathered by the hackers included credit card numbers and over 5GB of personal information. Travelex, on the other hand, claims that no customer data was compromised. Currently, the Travelex website is still down, citing “We now have contained the virus and are working to restore our systems and resume normal operations as quickly as possible.” Source: Hot for Security Powred by Bitdefender FBI Warns US Companies About Maze Ransomware Attacks In an ongoing warning to privately owned businesses over the U.S., the FBI cautioned organizations about a progression of attacks utilizing Maze ransomware. The FBI described the recent attacks, stating the hacker would sometimes act as a government agency to steal data from the companies and encrypt it to further extort them. In another case, hackers using Maze threatened to release confidential files unless a ransom was paid. These attacks started hitting American organizations in November of 2019 and show no signs of slowing down. Source: Security Today Hackers Steal $10.5 Million from Real Estate Software Company RealPage, a real estate software company located in Dallas, was recently invaded when hackers obtained employee login credentials. The Hackers were able to access the company’s online financial accounts after an employee clicked on a phishing email. According to NBC DFW, ” Hackers, possibly from Nigeria, stole $10.5 million from a Richardson real estate software company with the help of “money mules” — dozens of Americans who unwittingly accepted fraudulent money into their accounts, transferred it to those behind the scheme and, as the culprits instructed, kept a cut for themselves, according to court documents.” Since the attack, more than $2.9 million of the stolen money has been seized by federal prosecutors. Source: NBC News Dallas Fort Worth New York Cities to Potentially Ban Ransomware Payments On January 14, New York State senators Phil Boyle and Sue Serino issued a proposal to encourage municipalities to ban the use of taxpayer money to pay ransomware demands. According to the bill, “A small investment in local government cybersecurity now, can help stop cyber-criminals from profiting on the backs of New York State taxpayers and protect important state and local government services from disruption… To incentivize these upgrades, the bill will prevent state and local governments from paying ransoms for ransomware attacks after January 1, 2022 by which time they should be able to sufficiently upgrade their cybersecurity systems.” Two days later, Senator David Carlucci introduced a second bill with similar text, the only stipulation being that it omits the creation of a security fund. Source: Threat Post Talk with one of our experts to learn how you can protect your organization from Ransomware. Schedule a meeting here. Enjoyed this Ransomware Recap? Read more on our blog!

General Cloud Backup

Ctrl+Alt+Delete Not Working in vCloud Director

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If you are having trouble interacting with your Failed-Over VMs through vCloud Director, there is a known issue with vCloud Director (VCD) where the proper signal is not sent when trying to CTRL+ALT+DEL from the web console window. The VMWare KB article Addressing this can be found here. As stated in the above article, there are a few workarounds, the easiest just using the Edge or Internet Explorer Browsers. Our preferred method is to use VMWare Remote Console (VMRC). It is an application you install on your workstation that displays the VM console instead of the Web UI. If you need to install VMRC you can download it from VMWare (My VMWare account needed), or if subscribed to our DRaaS service, grab it from the downloads section on our customer portal. Once installed, instead of clicking on the monitor picture to launch the console, use the “Actions” Dropdown and select “Launch VM Remote Console” and accept any prompts from the web browser to allow it to run the application. At this point, you can also click “Download VMRC”, if you haven’t already installed it. This links you to VMWare’s Downloads, where you will need a My VMWare account to continue. That’s it! The console window has a ctrl+alt+del button at the top and it does work. If you weren’t using it already with your local VMWare environment, it is also a good alternative to the web consoles vCenter and ESXi provide.

Veeam

Veeam Agent for Windows Automated Deployment

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The process of installing the Veeam Agent for Windows isn’t especially time-consuming, but what if you need to install on multiple machines? Using the Veeam.Agent.Configurator.exe tool provided in the Veeam Agent install it’s easy to cut out most of the time required to setup. The Veeam.Agent.Configurator tool allows for exporting and importing a configuration.xml file. The XML file will automatically apply the exported settings to a new install. In order to export a config to use for deploying other agents, we need to first install and set up a new instance of the Veeam Agent for Windows. The following script runs an unattended install of the Agent software and exports the config: echo “Installing Veeam Agent for Windows” ## This will be your filepath of the installation media ## C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\VeeamAgentWindows_3.0.2.1170.exe /silent /accepteula /acceptthirdpartylicenses echo %ERRORLEVEL% echo “Veeam Agent Installation Complete!” echo “Starting Veeam Agent for Windows Service” net start VeeamEndpointBackupSvc echo “Start Configuration XML Creation for Automated instillation” ## Export the configuration file to a location to be used for future installations ## C:\”Program Files\Veeam\Endpoint Backup\Veeam.Agent.Configurator.exe” -export /f:C:\Veeam\configuration.xml ## This will also export the configuration for a job if one is created already ## echo “Export Complete!” Once the initial Agent set up and deployment is complete, you can use the following script to push out the installation and configuration out to multiple computers. echo “Installing Veeam Agent for Windows” ## This will be your file path of the installation media ## C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\VeeamAgentWindows_3.0.2.1170.exe /silent /accepteula /acceptthirdpartylicenses ## echo %ERRORLEVEL% echo “Veeam Agent Installation Complete!” echo “Starting Veeam Agent for Windows Service” net start VeeamEndpointBackupSvc echo “Installing Product License and Setting Edition” C:\”Program Files\Veeam\Endpoint Backup\veeam.agent.configurator.exe” -license /f:C:\”Users\Administrator\Desktop\Veeam_Agents.lic” /s echo “Complete!” echo “Import Backup Job Configuration and Application Settings” ## This will be the filepath of the configuration file previously created ## C:\”Program Files\Veeam\Endpoint Backup\Veeam.Agent.Configurator.exe” -import /f:C:\Veeam\configuration.xml ## If no job was created a warning/error may occur stating one was not available ## echo “Import Complete! Setup Successful!” And that’s it! Now you’re able to quickly and easily install the Veeam Agent for Windows on multiple machines, saving you a lot of time. At Managecast, we fully manage and monitor your backups so that you can focus on more strategic initiatives. Interested in learning how Managecast can help your business with its cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions? Fill out this form for more information!

Veeam

Veeam Hyper-V Error 32274 & Log on as a Service Right

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Recently, we ran into a case where Veeam backups for Hyper-V VMs would fail after about a day with the Error code: ‘32774’ failing to create VM recovery snapshot. Restarting the Hyper-V VM would resolve the issue temporarily, but inevitably would start to fail again. In a situation where a Hyper-V VM is failing to create a snapshot a good way to determine if Veeam or the Hyper-V is an issue is to attempt a manual snapshot on the Hyper-V hypervisor. We were also seeing “NT Virtual Machine\Virtual Machines group on the HyperVisor does not have the Log on as Service Right” This doesn’t always appear as an error in Veeam, sometimes showing it with a Green checkmark, so it could easily go overlooked. After some research, the Log on as a Service right error always occurred right before the failures start. This led us to investigate the Log on as a Service right on group policies. In this instance, we moved the Hyper-V into its own OU that we manually created a group policy to allow NT Virtual Machine\Virtual Machines the right to Log on as a Service, and to not inherit any other GPO, yet the error continues to occur. We then discovered the Domain had a forced GPO that was overwriting all other individual GPO’s for the OUs. Once this was turned off, the job started working perfectly.   In short, make sure the Hyper-V server has all the rights it needs to do backups and make sure there aren’t any forced GPO’s coming down to prevent this. At Managecast, we fully manage and monitor your backups so that you can focus on more strategic initiatives. Interested in learning how Managecast can help your business with its cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions? Fill out this form for more information!

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