Backup & Replication 10 Bare Metal Restore

[spug100]

Hi. I'm pretty sure this has been asked a thousand times, but I've read through a lot of the documentation and cannot find clear guidance. I'm looking to deploy B&R v10 (Community Edition ) as a replacement for Microsoft's WSB.

Most of my clients have a single Hyper-V host with two VMs (DC & Application). With WSB, all I used to do was run a full backup with all components, then from this single backup I could restore individual VMs or the whole physical server (including VMs), for a disaster recovery scenario (bare metal restore).

For Veaam B&R I cannot find any best practice guidance for this scenario. Do I need to run one backup for the two VMs on the host, and then a second backup for the physical Hyper-V host, to achieve what I could do with WSB? …would this not lead to a considerable amount of replication of backup data? …as the 2nd host backup would contain all the VM data from the first backup.

please provide me with your thoughts and whether I should be approaching this differently.

Many thanks, Doug.

[HannesK]

Hello,
disclaimer: I have no idea about the capabilities of Windows Server Backup.

From a Veeam perspective the question is, whether you want a "feature rich" restore, or whether bare metal recovery is "good enough" for you.

To allow single file or AD object restore, you need to backup the VMs separately.

To restore the Hyper-V server itself with bare metal restore, you can use the Veeam Agent for Windows. To make it space efficient, the VMs need to be on a different partition than the OS. Otherwise the agent would backup the VMs again (as you already mentioned).

To get started, I recommend the quick start guide: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

Best regards,
Hannes

[spug100]

Hi Hannes. Many thanks for your reply. Ideally I would only like to deal with one backup solution, and I think in this day and age you shouldn't have to use more than one …I don't really understand why Veeam don't include Veeam Agent as a tool from within their backup and replication software? …It costs enough money so I would have imagined you would get the complete solution and not have to look at buying an additional piece of software.

Anyway, from what I've been reading and from some initial testing, Backup and replication version 10 allows you to run a physical backup of a computer/Server (in this instance the hyper-v host). Once you have done this you can Create the appropriate “recovery media“ from within the software. I assume that this is identical to the process of bare metal restore used in Veeam Agent for Windows, is it not?

thanks again for you input.

Doug.

[HannesK]

I don't understand this:

Veeam don't include Veeam Agent as a tool from within their backup and replication software?

we include agents since several years

Veeam can be used in the the 90s style agent way (deploy agents everywhere and ignore the fact that the source is a VM), or in 21st century VM based way. The decision is up to the customer.

Bare metal recovery always works with a recovery media. I don't see a difference to other solutions. If you search the Veeam Agent forums, you will find several posts on backing up the Hyper-V host with the agent. It's a common thing for small environments.

Best regards,
Hannes

[spug100]

Hi Hannes.

Thanks again for your response. Regarding my question about the inclusion of the agent within the backup and replication software v10, I certainly do not have the option to install that when I run the installer, and it is not listed in any tools section under the program installation start menu. It is also listed as a separate download on your website, so this is why I am confused?

Could you specifically address this question:

Anyway, from what I've been reading and from some initial testing, Backup and replication version 10 allows you to run a physical backup of a computer/Server (in this instance the hyper-v host). Once you have done this you can Create the appropriate “recovery media“ from within the software. I assume that this is identical to the process of bare metal restore used in Veeam Agent for Windows, is it not?

I have included some images below, to show the process that I am using from within B&R v10 to make a bare metal restore-able backup image and recovery media. Is this ultimately the same process/result as if I was using Standalone Veeam Agent for Windows? Will the two VMs be individually restore-able from this bare-metal backup, or would I also have to run a Virtual Machine backup as well, as discussed at the beginning?

Many thanks, Doug.

[spug100]

I don't know why those images haven't loaded, but you can open them in a new tab.

[HannesK]

Hello,

I certainly do not have the option to install that when I run the installer

because manual installation makes no sense for a product that is built for central management.

Is this ultimately the same process/result as if I was using Standalone Veeam Agent for Windows?

yep. just a different user interface. the agent is exactly the same. Boot from recovery media -> restore.

Will the two VMs be individually restore-able from this bare-metal backup, or would I also have to run a Virtual Machine backup as well, as discussed at the beginning?

if you install the agents inside the VMs, then yes. If you only backup the Hyper-V host (including VHDX etc. files), then you can still restore the VHDX etc. files.

I'm still not 100% sure, that I understand the question. I still believe, that the way I answered initially is the best thing to do. VM backup for VMs and agent backup for the Hyper-V host (excluding the VM partition).

Best regards,
Hannes

[spug100]

Hi Hannes.

Many thanks for your clarity on the responses you have been very helpful at answering my questions. Regarding the final remark, I feel that my question is quite simple. With Windows Server backup all you needed to do was run a full bare metal restore backup, then from that one single backup you could either restore the whole hyperv host to a different server using the bare metal restore, or from that same backup you could just restore individual vms. So my question was basically whether backup and replication could do the same. I have done a bit more testing and it appears that this is not the case, which I find quite disappointing, as from a management perspective I would rather only have to run one backup.

I understand your original response, suggesting that I should run a bare metal restore but without backing up the data drive holding the vms and then also run a separate backup to back up just the vms; but from a disaster recovery perspective it just seems counter intuitive not to hold a complete single backup of the whole physical server.

I will continue to experiment and work out what is the best configuration for my SMB clients. In the mean time if you have any further suggestions they would be appreciated.
Regards, Doug.

[dffvb]

Hi there, I have pretty much the same question, and @spug100, I think there is sort of a misunderstanding.

You can use the normal windows agent, and perform full backups of server and VMs. You can only restore everything at the same time.
You can use the agent from back and replication, which does the same job as before. Here you can use the explorer to roll back to an individual VM (equivalent to Windows Server).
Or you use agent, and back up VMS indiviually, so the back up frequency can be different between VMs and the server.

At least thats what I understood.

[spug100]

Hi dffvb. from testing I have found no evidence of your statement:

Here you can use the explorer to roll back to an individual VM (equivalent to Windows Server)

restore from "Microsoft Hyper-V" only presents you with the option to select from your VM backup jobs, not your Agent (physical backup jobs), and restore from "agent" jobs present you with the following choices:
- entire machine restore
- volume restore
- guest file restore
- application items restore

none of these give you the option to restore an individual VM, even though all the data needed resides on the physical backup. it's so strange, I just don't really get why I have to run two backups to achieve the same result that WSB did with one ....I thought I was meant to be improving my backup practices by moving away from WSB to Veeam B&R.

...I feel like my original question was really dumb ...I don't understand why more people don't feel the same way....?!

[soncscy]

Hey Douglas,

It's not dumb, but it is outdated thinking, imo.

Why put everything in the same large backup file? There is a matter of convenience, I guess, but is an everything in one basket approach, and it means that bitrot becomes that much more of a risk. Also, I guess maybe it's because I mostly work with VMware shops and just have a small handful of hyperv based clients, but why centralize the backup on the host? Respinning a host should be just a matter install a vanilla server, then just restore from a config file, and then you can avoid having to include the HostOS data in every single backup

Per-VM backups and a separate one for the host makes more sense to me. Decoupling the VMs from one another in the backups means that the risk is minimized from common storage failures, copy failures, etc, and if I need to just get the main DB out somewhere safe, I can focus just on that VM. Plus, I guess I don't really get the DR scenario you're imagining where the HV host needs to be included in each backup -- if you're in a situation where the Host is truly gone, then you'd be doing a full environment recovery anyways.

Whether you have all 3 servers in a single backup file or 3 backup files, I don't see __that__ great of space savings; there cannot possibly be enough data for dedup to effectively help here, so you're most likely moving the same amount of data one way or the other.

As for dffvb's statement, you'd just do an FLR I suppose from such a backup and restore the VHDX files.

But I don't really get the major benefit of your intended approach or the big negative of 2 jobs instead of one job. You get way more functionality and portability/protection for your clients by doing VM backups as VM backups. As Hannes wrote, just exclude the VM volume from the hyperv host's backup, and you have no replication of data period.

The entire

[spug100]

Hi Harvey, many thanks for your input. You raise some interesting points. I guess the reality for me is that I deal with small businesses with no on site IT support. Their infrastructure is small (often a single Hyper-V host) and limited, and many have poor Internet and no separate buildings for NAS backup etc. Most restores if required, would be disaster recovery scenarios (physical server damage or crypto viruses etc), where the aim would be to restore a whole domain in one. In this scenario, for me it just makes sense to run one single bare metal backup to a rotateable set of removable drives, that can be taken off site and simply plugged back in and restored within an hour. It's of no benefit to me to have to run multiple backups and set exclusions etc.

…I'm just still not quite sure why Veeam B&R will not allow you to run a full server bare metal backup (that obviously contains all the hyper V host’s data), and at the same time if needs be, simply allow you to restore one or more of the hosts VMs from this backup ….it just doesn't really make sense, and no one has actually given me a good reason why this cannot be done?

[soncscy]

I get your point Douglas, but as I see it, you already can with Agents, it's just that recovering only the VMs from within the backup would mean doing a file level restore and getting the VM files that way.

Else, if you've got an all-down situation, then you just restore from your Agent backup and you have the host exactly as it was at the time of backup, right? If your primary restore scenario for these clients is "everything is down", then just do the Agent backup and be done with it. You lose granularity for the Application restores as I just don't believe that the Agent backup can dig in like this (maybe I'm wrong), but then you've got it covered.

I still think the granularity of separate ones is better, for protection purposes, resiliency purposes, and so on, even if you do just have Mom&Pop shops. If anything since I get that you're the one handling the restores, it gives you more flexibility and I think saves you time -- a misconfiguration in the HV host that renders VMs non-bootable would mean you have to continually re-restore with your current model.

With the split model, the VMs are self-contained in backups and if the host was backed up in an invalid state, just rollback to the next point. If it's bum points all the way to the full backup, then it's still easy enough to spin up a new HV host and just restore the VMs into that host.