There's one weekly newsletter that any VMware or Hyper-V professional will enjoy, already has 35,218 subscribers

Posted by Paul Braren on Oct 13 2015 (updated on Aug 2 2021) in

What arrives every Sunday, has just the right mix of personal and professional stories, and always includes interesting tips and forum highlights?

Yes, it's the Veeam Community Forums Digest, authored by backup and storage legend Anton Gostev (@gostev), Vice President of Product Management at Veeam Software. You might think the content would be all vendor stuff from Veeam, but you'd be wrong. Doesn't matter if you don't even use any Veeam products, it's still a great read, especially if you administer VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or cloud infrastructure.

For example, below I've pasted the October 4th 2015 newsletter, where you'll see Anton's usual right-between-the-eyes approach. He quickly hits you with just how serious the situation is with vSphere 5.5 release right now, with some patches sorely needed soon. The truth is always good to hear, even when it's not great news. Even if it really pisses off your partners. Hey, if it spurs fixes that result in a better product, it's all good. This industry could use a lot more tough love.

Like all software, Veeam software isn't without issues, and it's Anton's extreme candor that techies really appreciate, rapidly responding to problems and sharing whatever is known, at that moment in time. This honesty is also evident in his 18,094 forum posts. All good reasons I was among a sea of folks following Anton out of his VMworld 2012 presentation to ask some questions, the first time we met. VMworld 2015? I couldn't even get in. In person or online, he's very much the same guy, an intelligent and committed professional who regularly flies around the world, from his home in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. Yet he still manages to keeps up with the writing and the forums.

To get his weekly newsletter, all you have to do is these 2 follow these 2 steps, takes about 2-3 minutes total.

My original article's instructions replaced with Craig's better instructions on Apr 30 2018.

Veeam Weekly Digest – how do I get it?
Apr 23 2018 by Craig Dalrymple at cragdoo.co.uk

Veeam is one of the rare companies where their upper manament actively engage with their tech community. Anton Gostev, Senior Vice President of Product Management, is a very good example of this engagment done right.
...

I have a related Reddit post and the recent newsletter below, to give you a peek at what you've been missing!

Veeam Community Forums Digest Sample

From: forum@veeam.com [mailto:forum@veeam.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 4, 2015 7:37 PM
To: tinkererguy <tinkererguy@pobox.com>
Subject: Veeam Community Forums Digest for tinkererguy [Sep 28 - Oct 4, 2015]

Veeam Community Forums Digest

September 28 - October 4, 2015

THE WORD FROM GOSTEV

WARNING: Major vSphere 5.5 Update 3 issue was reported by our user last week. He observed VM crashing upon snapshot removal (which obviously happens each time when you backup a VM). VMware has later published a support KB article acknowledging this issue > KB2133118, and stating that the only workaround is to revert ESXi hosts to a previous version. Bottom line, stay away from vSphere 5.5 Update 3.

Unfortunately for VMware, public disclosure of a major security issue was already made along with Update 3 release, which supposedly fixes this hole. This puts vSphere 5.5 users in a tricky situation – neither they can stay on Update 2 (because of security vulnerability), nor they can update to Update 3 (because of KB2133118), nor they can upgrade to vSphere 6 (because of KB2124669). This makes it a pretty unique situation when there is simply NO usable VMware ESXi build of the latest versions available... Honestly, I have always felt VMware QA was one of the best in industry based on my many years of experience with them, but last half a year clearly indicate some major issues in that department.

But, competing hypervisor has its own severe issues. I was forwarded this link last week, and this looks to be a common issue that causes "production down". So, this patch is something all Hyper-V 2012 R2 cluster users who are using Software VSS Provider may want to have installed > Cluster service stops during the VSS backup in a Windows Server 2012 R2-based Hyper-V cluster

On to the Veeam news! Last week, RTM build for Update 3 for Veeam Backup & Replication 8.0 was signed off. If you'd like to participate in the pilot deployments, you can get this update from support. Otherwise, barring any issues reported, we are planning to make it generally available in a few days. Just as a quick reminder, this update adds full support for Windows 10 (as guest OS and for installation of B&R components). One other notable enhancement is significantly improved UI performance and vastly reduced configuration database SQL Server load in the environments with large amounts of VMs protected.

Also this week, we are planning to release a minor update for Veeam Endpoint Backup, version 1.1.2. This update adds ability to start backup job from command line, putting the full power of Windows Task Scheduler in to the hands of those who'd like to go crazy with their backup schedule. It also addresses performance issues with very long incremental backup chains, and a few minor issues from support. Keep an eye on our web site if you'd like to get it as soon as possible – because as usual, we will not initialize auto-update servers with this build until after a few weeks of pilot deployments.

By the way, here is an interesting fact about Veeam Endpoint Backup: last week, we have crossed 200,000 of unique downloads across all product versions. While some of those are existing users downloading their first update, still this is a very powerful number for a product that was released just half a year ago.

And to finish off Veeam Endpoint Backup topic, here is an excellent tip from one of our users on how to create a bootable USB containing Veeam Recovery Medias for multiple computers. It's not very easy, but it makes bare metal recoveries in large environments much simpler.

For a dessert reading, here is little something for those who still believes in the legend of Linux being malware-free operating system > Security firm discovers Linux botnet that hits with 150 Gbps DDoS attacks

BEST POST OF THE WEEK

VMs crashing after update to 5.5 Update 3 [BY: Joern Westermann • LIKED: 6 times]

Hi,
after updating vSphere 5.5 to Update 3 we're encountering several VM crashes during snapshot removement.
VMware confirmed the bug and they're working on a solution. Currently they don't have a public KB entry.
You can also read more here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/520379
So please wait with an upgrade if you still run 5.5.
Bye
Joern

Jan 24 2017 Update

Wow, there are now 43,974 subscribers to this newsletter!

Apr 30 2018 Update

Added Craig's wonderful article above.

The Veeam Community Forums have grown to 55070 members, with Anton having 22,004 posts under his belt. My assumption that all of them signed up for the weekly newsletter was wrong, but I'm guessing that a majority of them do.

Aug 02 2021 Update

Wow, there are now 69,295 users of the Veeam Forums! I'm not sure how many are active users, or how many have stayed subscribed to the weekly newsletter that's now called Veeam R&D Forums Digest - THE WORD FROM GOSTEV, but that's still a pretty incredible number.

I thought it quite nice that VP Anton Gostev gave behind-the-scenes helper Rick Vanover a lovely shoutout in his latest edition of the newsletter, thanking Rick for a decade of content review prior to each edition going out. Having another set of eyes on the lookout for the possibility of varied interpretations around the world was a great idea, as was thanking him.

Disclosure:
Veeam has been an advertiser on many virtualization sites for years now, and Veeam is currently running a BuySellAds-purchased advertisement along the top of TinkerTry as well. All TinkerTry advertisement goes through third party BuySellAds. None of my articles are sponsored posts, and note that there are currently no affiliate links for Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, or any of their other products. TinkerTry.com, LLC is not a Veeam Pro Partner, but I am a Veeam Vanguard Program member who receives no goods or services. There are no commissions for any Veeam products folks buy after reading one of my articles.

I am proud to say that TinkerTry was featured on one of Anton's newsletters, about my coverage of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, a product I regularly use to protect my extended family's Windows 10 PCs, automatically. I also "convinced" (hacked) an earlier build of VEB to get it to work on Windows 10 betas, that was actually fun!

I reserve and exercise the right to freely write about topics that I choose, whenever I choose to, an essential part of what makes blogging about home virtualization labs, storage, and backup so much fun for me.

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