Luis Knowledge Base

In today’s landscape, the concept of “backup” has moved beyond a simple maintenance task to become the backbone of business continuity. With the launch of Veeam Backup & Replication v13.1, the company is offering more than a tool for copying data: it is an integrated cyber resilience platform designed to face some of the most sophisticated threats of the 21st century.

Beyond Backup: The Era of Resilience

For decades, the goal was to meet the RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective). Today, the goal is survival. Modern ransomware does not just encrypt data; it also tries to destroy backups, leaving businesses without options.

Veeam v13.1 addresses this challenge through three fundamental pillars: Immutability, Visibility, and Intelligence.

1. Data Immutability as the Standard

One of the major improvements in version 13.1 is stronger immutability. Once data is written to the repository, it cannot be modified or deleted by anyone —not even an administrator whose privileged account has been compromised.

Veeam supports this through:

• Object Lock in cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob).
• Linux-based Hardened Repositories that protect data against internal and external attacks.
• Logical air-gapping, which can automatically isolate critical copies from the primary network.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration

Version 13.1 builds further on advanced analytics. AI is not here to replace the administrator; it is here to give them “superpowers.” The platform can help with:

• Anomaly detection: Identifying unusual encryption patterns or suspicious data behavior before an attack spreads.
• Storage optimization: Suggesting more efficient retention and deduplication policies to reduce cloud costs.
• Simplified recovery: Guiding users through complex disaster recovery processes with intelligent assistants.

3. Unified Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Management

Businesses no longer operate in just one place. They have on-premises servers, virtual machines in VMware, containers in Kubernetes, and workloads in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

Veeam v13.1 offers a “single pane of glass” experience. This lets you manage the entire infrastructure from one console and apply consistent security policies, whether the data is in the company’s basement or in a data center on another continent.

Performance and Operational Efficiency

Efficiency is critical for IT teams. Version 13.1 introduces significant improvements to data ingestion performance and restore speed. By handling massive data volumes (petabytes) smoothly, Veeam helps businesses run disaster recovery plans (DRPs) faster and reduce downtime that could cost millions.

Conclusion: An Investment in Peace of Mind

Veeam Backup & Replication v13.1 is more than a software update; it is an evolving response to a hostile digital world. By combining the strength of immutability with multi-cloud agility and AI capabilities, Veeam helps organizations spend less time worrying about whether an attack will happen and more time focusing on how to grow.

Ultimately, version 13.1 reinforces a fundamental truth: in the digital age, data availability is business availability.

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Key takeaways:

• Ransomware protection: A strong focus on immutability and anomaly detection.
• Flexibility: Native support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Simplicity: A unified console to reduce IT teams’ workload.
• Scalability: Designed for today’s large-scale storage demands.

Hi there,

After the first part of this topic, now is time to jump into the good stuff, the main thing here is to be notified every time something changes or goes “wrong”.

Lets follow u the screenshots, from Setup, to Notifications setup, to finally monitor a couple servers and services.

As I said before, this is basic “alive” monitoring, not statistics and deep monitoring, there are other cool tools for that, the topic here is first line, quick and easy! lets go:

This is my Uptime-Kuma Dashboard, after install, lets go to Settings, click on your name up right, and click settings,

under Settings, we will find an easy and clear menu to config the tool, from appearance to proxy, etc.

Im going to deep dive into the Notifications menu:

Now, let’s check it out, in the main menu, at the very bottom, we have the option to monitor TLS certificates and Domains expiracy, this is awesome! Im super happy Im not missing a cert renovation anymore, and no entries into my calendar, Uptime-Kuma notifies me in the time I program it.

Now, lets click into Setup Notification, A menu will Appear showing you all the options we have, they are so many, Im using at the moment SMTP and Telegram:

The is a huge list of services to choose from:

After setup, Just test and Setup, and you are set.

All right,

Now, moving on to the first monitoring item, lets configure a PING check for a vm inside the lab, and a web monitoring with the certificate expiraiton.

Now, lets monitor a website with the certificate expiration:

All set, now, this is how it looks the main page of my lab monitoring Uptime-Kuma instance:

And this, is a view we can create for different accesses / services, so we can separate them by service, type, or “client”, depending on your setup.

cheers.

Hi everyone
After christmas, I had some time to improve my lab a little bit.
I decided to setup a Pi-Hole to use it as my main DNS and filtering app, and why not, use it also over my VPN with WireGuard , and be able to use it all the time reaching my Server from anywhere with a FQDN instead of an IP (Dynamic), with DuckDNS.

As a base system, I chose Ubuntu Server, with the minimum installation,
choose your own, maybe you will need to adapt some commands or content.

After login into my clean ubuntu server machine, and update all the packets,
I went to the Pi-Hole website, and click into the Install Pi-Hole button.

I used the Curl command with sudo before:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Now let´s open a browser and login into the Pi-Hole console:
http://192.168.15.136:80/admin
using the password provided in the previous step: Xa7K80RE

Done!
Now, let`s create our DuckDNS Sub domain before continuing:

Go to the DuckDNS website, and create an account, is free.

In my personal use case, I sing in with google, so the creation was super easy and smooth.

In the page, write down the name you want to use in your subdomain, and click in add domain

In my case, I have two domains created, im showing you them right now:

now, is time to connect our duckdns domain with our server to get the automatic IP update every time our dynamic IP address changes:

On top of the DuckDNS website, you will find an Install menu, click on it:

Follow the web instructions, choose your OS and setup, and follow the steps and input the information in your server, in my case, Linux base with cron tab:

DuckDNS setup completed,

Now, Let´s install WireGuard
to be full set,
We are going to use this command, its awesome and prepared for raspberry pi, but also work with many distros and platforms, making the deployment super easy and smooth!

Follow the screenshots!

sudo curl -L https://install.pivpn.io | bash

Done!
Now our server is full setup with PiHole, DuckDNS and Wireguard.
Now we need a few adjustments in PiHole and create users in WireGuard.

Important!

The Server has not a fixed IP Address, I do assign an IP address on my DHCP, if you want to do so, please setup a fix IP address into the machine.

Open your port on the router to be able to reach the VPN service from outside of your network, IP – port 51820 UDP, I normally open both, TCP and UDP

Now, lets create a VPN user, to be able to set it up into our phone / laptop, and start using our WireGuard VPN.

Connect to your new deployed server via ssh

Now, let`s execute the command:

pivpn add

Done!

now, you have your VPN fully configure.
anua time you want to connect, simply open the app and switch the VPN to on (green)

all traffic will be back and forth the VPN.

cheers.

​

I was updating my Lab, and came to this little issue I would like to share with y’all.

I was applying the patch for KB4696 to ensure my 12.3 was fully patched, but then I noticed my free space on the C drive was insufficient.
First thought: easy… let’s enlarge the drive (it’s virtual), increase it, and continue…
The recovery partition didn’t allow me to do so.

Find below the screenshot of the patch installation + steps for being able to extend your drive in case you also need to.

Let’s fix this issue to be able to deploy the patch, 
As you can imagine, we will shut down the VM, reboot, and then relaunch the install and continue.

Here’s a breakdown of the methods:
Using Disk Management and Diskpart (Requires disabling and potentially deleting the recovery partition):
Disable the Recovery Partition:
Open an elevated command prompt and run reagentc /disable. This moves the recovery partition’s functionality into a file (Winre.wim). 
Delete the Recovery Partition:
Use diskpart to select the disk, list partitions, select the recovery partition, and then delete it with delete partition override.
Extend the C Drive:
In Disk Management, right-click the C drive and select “Extend Volume”. Follow the wizard to merge the now-unallocated space. 
Recreate the Recovery Partition:
If you want the recovery partition back, you’ll need to create a new partition, format it, and then re-enable WinRE using reagentc /enable. 

Now, let’s continue with our patching…
I reboot the VM and restart the process. Here are the following steps.

I hope you find this info useful.
Cheers. ​