Today, my story will be about new features of Veeam ONE 9.5, monitoring and creating reports for the virtual environment and backup infrastructure, and about who and how can be completely free of charge, that is, the gift of getting NFR license keys for the recently released Veeam Availability Suite 9.5. For details, welcome under cat.

What's new in Veeam ONE 9.5

Perhaps, we haven't dealt with the work of Veeam ONE for quite a while, so let me remind you that this product is able to monitor the performance and state of VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments, as well as the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, with generation of alerts, with the current report displayed on statistical panels and built-in knowledge base to help solve the problem as quickly as possible. In addition, Veeam ONE offers both off-the-shelf and custom reports that are extremely useful in the work of an IT administrator: this includes accounting for resource allocation, and predicting the attainment of maximum power (useful for justifying purchases), and a summary of unprotected VMs for which it is impossible backups due to configuration features, and many others.

In the new version of Veeam ONE, as well as in Veeam Backup & Replication, some of the changes touched upon the technology of data collection and processing (that is, it remained “under the hood”), and there were also useful new items among the reports and alerts.
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Among the changes, above all, support for Windows Server 2016:

• All Veeam ONE components are installed on machines running this OS.
• Veeam ONE monitors and generates reports for the virtual environment now on the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 platform

The Veeam ONE database can now be created on a SQL server with the support of the AlwaysOn Availability Group, and the newly deployed Veeam ONE websites are now configured to work by HTTPS by default.
For data collection, several modes are proposed that correspond to deployment scenarios in infrastructure of one scale or another and are configured depending on which metrics you plan to collect. The first two modes are aimed at collecting data from both the virtual environment and the backup copy infrastructure, the third only from the backup copy infrastructure:

• Optimized for Typical deployment (optimized for typical deployment) - recommended for small and medium-sized virtual infrastructures, including no more than 100 hosts and 1500 virtual machines. In this mode, Veeam ONE collects all data about the topology and configuration of the infrastructure, as well as performance metrics. Reports are then generated based on them, and they are also used in monitoring alerts. The advantage of this mode is the maximum detail of the data, but there are also disadvantages - the increased load on the Veeam ONE server and the large size of the database.
  
  
• Optimized for Advanced Scalability deployment (optimized for better scalability) - recommended for large infrastructures (more than a hundred hosts, more than 1500 VM). In this mode, the performance metrics required for the operation of alerts and report generation will be collected. Although this mode does not have the same high level of data granularity, however, the load on the Veeam ONE server and the size of the database is much smaller.
  
  
• Backup Data Only (data collection from the backup infrastructure only) - recommended if you want to focus on monitoring and reporting on the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, without delving into the analysis of the virtual environment. In this mode, data, including topology, configuration, and performance metrics, is collected from Veeam Backup & Replication servers (no performance metrics will be collected from virtualization servers) Therefore, you need to understand that in reports and alerts you will find only information about backup operation and data on the performance of objects VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V will not get there. This mode will provide the minimum load on the server and the smallest size of the base Veeam ONE.

The desired data collection mode is selected during product installation; the mode selection step will be as follows:


Note: In the future, you can change the mode using the Veeam ONE Settings utility, but it is recommended to contact Veeam support service first.

Among the innovations, for example, there are also separate storage policy settings for performance data, events, and backup infrastructure. By default, infrastructure data is stored for 12 months, event data is 3 months. You can also change these values ​​using the Veeam ONE Settings utility.

Monitoring and reporting

There was a useful alert Ransomware detection alarm , which allows you to monitor the use of the processor and recording operations on the storage system. If the VM has a sharp increase in these counters, then there is a high probability that work is under way on data encryption.

Several new reports, I think, will be very useful for service providers, for example, VM configuration chargeback report - he, in particular, reports which VMs are the highest and lowest in the current configuration. On this basis, it is possible to calculate the cost of the resources that each customer consumes, and issue a corresponding invoice. The report will also be useful to enterprises where similar services are provided to each of the divisions and application owners in a private cloud.

What is included in the report:

• Summary Information - the number of VMs, the number of Business View groups, the average cost of one VM, the total cost of all VMs.
  
  
• Top 10 Most Expensive VMs (10 most expensive VMs ) - a chart of the cost of a VM according to the allocated resources, including the cost of vCPU, vRAM and storage for each of them.

Cost Distribution - a diagram of the cost of resources.
VM Power Status - chart shows how much VM is on and how much is off.
Business View Groups Cost - built if you used the Business View categorization to build in the Adminsitration report, shows the cost of VM according to categories.
Details - a table with detailed data on the cost of the current VM configuration.




New reports are also proposed:

• VM performance chargeback — Reports which VMs have the highest and lowest CPU and memory usage.
• Host configuration chargeback — Reports which VMs are the most and least expensive in terms of hardware cost and current configuration.

Also, in general, I note that the time for generating reports has been significantly reduced.

A brief description of the version of Veeam ONE 9.5 in Russian can be found here . For those who prefer to work with the free Veeam ONE Free Edition, the description can be read here .

Will they give out free NFR keys this time?

Yes, for this version there is also such an opportunity. You can get a NFR license (not for commercial use) for a period of 1 year, for 2 CPU sockets on Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 for VMware and Hyper-V platforms. To do this, go to the site and in the form to the right make sure that your merits give you the right to receive the coveted key, that is, you are the owner of one of the following titles:

vExpert, VCP, VCAP, VCO, VCDX, VMUG Leader, VTEC, VMCE, MVP, MCSE, MCSA, MCT, Cisco Champion, PernixPro Member.

If your title is not in the list - do not despair, fill in the registration form anyway, by selecting Other from the list, then press the green button labeled Get My NFR Key and wait for the letter to the address you specified.

Note: if you are, say, a blogger, and you only have home mail, you can send a letter with an application not through the form, but to veeam_team@veeam.com .

What else to read and see

» Article on Habré about the new version of the Veeam Availability Suite
» Review of the decision in Russian
» Video (in Russian)
» Veeam ONE User Guide (in English)