Welcome to the “Lessi Learned” Newsletter!

By now, AI has found its way into just about every corner of daily life. Sometimes it works brilliantly, sometimes… not so much. And every now and then, these experiments produce stories that are as surprising as they are entertaining.

One of my favorite stories is about Claude, an AI tasked with running a tiny office snack shop. The mission was simple: choose products, set prices, keep customers happy — ideally without going bankrupt. Well, the last part didn’t quite work out.

But the journey there was full of memorable moments: unusual “snack” choices that no office ever asked for, emotional crisis where Claude seemed convinced it was human, even a brief detour into the world of the Simpsons.

If you want to read the full story, you can find it here: Project Vend

Nevertheless, there are really great AI News from Veeam – you will learn about them in the Newsflash.

Newsflash

Veeam Plug-In for HPE VM Essentials Beta available

If you watched the Veeam Global Launch event, you may remember Anton Gostev’s announcement, that by the end of 2026 at least 13 hypervisors will be natively supported by Veeam.

And as of December 1st, one of them has taken a major step toward that goal! The beta version for the Veeam Plug-In for HPE VM Essentials is now available for download.

This is especially great news given the many questions we’ve heard (and read) about support for this particular hypervisor. The beta already offers a first look at the features planned for the initial release, including (just examples):

Incremental and full VM backup using CBT
Support for most repository types
Application-level quiescence for Windows VMs
Active full, synthetic full, daily retention
Backup Copy Jobs and Backup to Tape Jobs
Policies based on eg. individual VMs, VMs by Tags and Labels
Malware Detection functions
and many more!

So, fire up your download engines and take an early look at the integration of this new hypervisor!

Read more in the Veeam Forum!

Veeam Recovery Orchestrator Best Practices Guide

The hopefully well-known and widely used Veeam Best Practices Guide has just received a major new addition: a comprehensive chapter dedicated to Veeam Recovery Orchestrator, created by the Veeam Solutions Architect Team.

Beyond the official documentation in the Veeam Help Center, this new Recovery Orchestrator Guide offers highly practical, field-tested insights—perfect for professionals who want real-world guidance instead of theoretical descriptions.

No matter whether you’re just getting started with Recovery Orchestrator or already consider yourself a seasoned pro, this new resource is well worth your attention!

Veeam App for ServiceNow available

Since last week, the Veeam App for ServiceNow has been available, giving IT teams a straightforward way to bring Veeam backup and recovery tasks into their daily ServiceNow workflows.

The integration allows backups and restores to be initiated and tracked directly within ServiceNow, reducing the need to switch between systems. Real-time updates and automatic incident creation help teams stay informed about backup activity and react more quickly when issues arise. The app also synchronizes Veeam asset information with the CMDB, improving accuracy and simplifying documentation.

Overall, it’s a practical addition for organizations that already use both platforms, and it is available to Veeam Advanced and Premium customers.

The app is available here: ServiceNow Store

Veeam Vanguard 2026 nominations are open!

I’ve always been a huge supporter of IT community programs. In my experience, these initiatives are one of the most underrated accelerators in our industry.

By freely sharing knowledge, we all move forward faster — and I personally have benefited greatly from being part of programs like vExpert, Cisco Champion, and yes, Veeam Vanguard over the years. They don’t just look good on a résumé — they expand your network, sharpen your skills, and deepen your impact.

Among the many community efforts in the tech world, Veeam runs several noteworthy programs — from Veeam Legends to internal recognitions like Veeam MVPs for employees.

But the crown jewel has to be the Veeam Vanguard Program, the spearhead of Veeam’s external community initiatives.

Vanguards are truly a global group of exceptionally smart, passionate contributors who evangelize, educate, and innovate — all with the joy of lifting others up.

Being part of this group isn’t just about prestige. It comes with tangible perks: exclusive access to product strategy sessions, insider briefings, beta previews, networking with technical experts — and even invitations to major physical events like VeeamON and the annual Veeam100 Summit.

If you’re a Veeam enthusiast who loves the products, creates original content (whether blog posts, videos, or deep-dive guides), and you’re committed to growing your expertise — then you should absolutely consider applying for the Veeam Vanguard Class of 2026. The deadline is early January, and the new class will be announced in March.

Here are all the links you need to know:

SECURITI AI is now part of Veeam!

With December 11th Securiti AI is part of Veeam. So let’s take a look at Securiti AI:

Securiti AI delivers a unified Data & AI Security platform that gives organizations full visibility, control, and protection across all their sensitive data and AI systems.

With automated data discovery, privacy compliance, DSPM, and AI governance in one integrated solution, Securiti helps enterprises securely unlock the value of their data while reducing risk, eliminating blind spots, and ensuring responsible AI adoption.

But this move isn’t just about combining two companies. By bringing Veeam’s data resilience together with Securiti AI’s capabilities, they enable a future where data is not only protected, but intelligently secured, governed, and ready for safe AI innovation.

Lessons learned

Not really a lesson learned, but rather an observation from the field that might be helpful:

Why Reviewing Backup Settings Still Matters

In my day-to-day work, I regularly review the basic configuration of Veeam Backup & Replication together with customers. What continues to stand out—far too often—is that existing configurations no longer reflect today’s best practices.

In many cases, legacy settings were never adjusted after a hardware refresh or a change in the underlying storage platform.

In the best-case scenario, this results in unnecessary storage consumption. In the worst case, it can lead to significantly slower backups and restores.

A particularly striking example came up just last week. A customer was able to save a substantial amount of storage with only a few configuration changes. The root cause was a legacy setup that originated from a previously used deduplication appliance. While the appliance itself had been replaced by a Hardened Repository, the original backup job settings were carried over unchanged.

Most deduplication appliance vendors recommend disabling Veeam’s built-in compression and deduplication, as the appliance’s own technologies are optimized to handle data reduction more efficiently.

However, when the storage system is later replaced and these Veeam settings are not re-enabled, backup data is effectively written in a near-raw format—resulting in massive and completely avoidable storage consumption.

The solution in this case was straightforward: resetting the job settings back to Veeam’s defaults. With subsequent backup runs, the oversized backup files gradually aged out, freeing up a significant amount of space.

By the way:

changes to deduplication or compression settings do not trigger a new full backup. These adjustments only apply to newly created backup files, while existing restore points remain unchanged and will age out according to the configured retention policy.

This means such optimizations can usually be implemented without immediate additional storage pressure.

Nevertheless, in environments with limited free capacity, it is still recommended to apply changes in a controlled and planned manner, validating the impact step by step rather than rolling them out across all workloads at once.

Feature of the day

Infrastructure Lockdown (Veeam Software Appliance 13)

In Veeam Backup & Replication 13 — newly available as a hardened, Linux-based Software Appliance — one of the new introduced security capabilities is Infrastructure Lockdown. A powerful feature aimed squarely at preventing data exfiltration.

Why is this so vital now? Attackers no longer only aim to delete or encrypt your backups — increasingly, they steal them to sell on the black market. Your backup repository is like a beautifully wrapped gift basket for them: deduplicated, compressed corporate data, just waiting to be sucked out.

Infrastructure Lockdown addresses exactly that risk by stopping an attacker from adding a new repository. If an attacker could insert a cloud-based repo under their control, they might run a Backup Job or Backup Copy Job to siphon off data.

With lockdown enabled, adding new managed servers or repositories requires explicit approval.

Here’s how it works under the hood. In the Veeam Host Management UI, you activate “Backup Infrastructure Lockdown.” If you have configured a Security Officer (a recommended role), then enabling or disabling lockdown demands their approval. This four-eyes principle ensures that no rogue admin or attacker can tamper with the infrastructure.

So easy to implement, but powerful to increase the level of security!

Thanks for reading

I hope you enjoyed this edition of my Lessi-Learned Newsletter. Thank you for reading!

Got feedback or something you want to see in the next edition? Leave a comment, write me on X (@lessi001) or connect at LinkedIn.

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Newsflash

Lessons learned

Feature of the day

Thanks for reading

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