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smoore
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Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by smoore »

Hi there, just lodged this as case as #00693435 and wanted to get others thoughts on it how they are dealing with it.

Looking to leverage the new replication features in v8 for wan acceleration and replicating from the backup source offsite.
http://www.veeam.com/blog/v8-feature-an ... ments.html

Now usually our offsite Veeam server is setup to manage replication jobs from other sites so that in event of disaster it can handle the replica tasks and is known as best practice design. Attempting to use this new feature however to replicate from backup files doesn’t seem to work in that scenario without rescanning the backup repository from offsite Veeam server to pick up new backup files. Of course this isn’t feasible to be done manually.

Options I see:
- Continue replicating offsite via production esxi storage which means not being not being able to leverage fast backup repositories when you have slow vm storage for instance.
- Setup replica jobs to run from production Veeam server to offsite Veeam server but this means lack of failback/failover/reip ability in a DR event as theres no way to import a replica VM and tell it to failover etc. I know VM’s can be turned on manually if required but then if we are restoring to a point earlier than latest snapshot then that can be a problem not having veeam control.
- Import configuration backup onto DR Veeam side though this would be useless if DR side is sending replicas the other way back to and having its own backups to look after.
foggy
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by foggy »

smoore wrote:Attempting to use this new feature however to replicate from backup files doesn’t seem to work in that scenario without rescanning the backup repository from offsite Veeam server to pick up new backup files. Of course this isn’t feasible to be done manually.
Steven, you can use pre-job script to perform that (just don't forget to create a dummy backup job for this backup).
nunciate
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by nunciate »

I have a similar issue. I have 2 physical servers which have all of my storage. I have Veeam 8.0 installed with Windows 2012 R2 on both servers. One server is here in production and has all of my Backup, Backup Copy and Tape jobs. All backups are done over FC from production storage to this server. Then I perform backup copies to the sister server in DR each night. I have the remote tape library setup in the production server as well and I perform tape a tape out of all data in both sites each night. These jobs area ll on the production server. This all works fine.

For replications I have a 1 VM in production and 1 in our DR site. I have all replication jobs setup on the VM server in the DR site so that I can easily log in and fail over if production goes down. Currently they are just pulling data from the VM in production across the wire each night. I would love it if I could stop the nightly snapshots of production servers for replication and only transfer the data once through a backup copy.

What I want to do is to setup all my replication jobs on the physical server in DR and have it pull the data from the local repository. One issue I have is that I re-scan the repository manually so the latest restore points show up as imported. I will automate this with scripts later. Then I execute the replication job which is pointed at that local repository as the source. All I get is a job failure saying "No Restore Points Found". Not sure if I have this setup right or what. I think the replication jobs have to exist on the same server as the backup copy jobs so that it can see the repositories properly but not sure. I am guessing that I could create the replication jobs on the production server and point to the repositories I have setup on the DR servers. If that is the case I can't use this feature because I have no way to easily start my replicas using Veeam in DR if we have a failure.
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by foggy »

Alan, as it is stated in the thread I've referred to above, you cannot perform replica from an imported backup, unless some backup job is mapped to it. Have you created a "dummy" backup job on the DR Veeam B&R instance that is mapped to this backup?
nunciate
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by nunciate » 1 person likes this post

I totally missed that link.
Created a backup job with the VM I am testing in it.
Configured the repository for that job to point at my backup copy repository with the server's backup data and mapped the data in the job.
Now my replication runs and it is looking at the backup copy repository locally and syncing things up.

One thing I noticed was I had an issue trying to do the seeding option where it will restore the VM replica if it doesn't exist. With that option checked and my local repository chosen the job would stop with a warning that said "Cannot find restore point newer than seed". I just did a restore of the VM manually and now I am running my replication after mapping the already restored replica. Seems to be working fine.
nunciate
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by nunciate »

I have identified another issue with offsite backup copies.
All of my backup copy jobs have encryption enabled. This causes issues when importing the backup copies on the remote node.

After a backup copy completes I go to my remote server and perform the rescan of the repository where the files reside. All of the backups show up under Backups | Encrypted. I have to right click each one and manually enter the encryption password. Then I can create a dummy job and map it to the imported backup copy.

The problem is when the next backup copy runs an incremental and I perform a rescan of the repository again to get the changes registered the data shows up back under Encrypted. I have to manually enter the password again and the job is no longer mapped to the data so I have to do that again as well. This simply isn't going to work unless you all know of another way to make it happen?
foggy
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by foggy »

I was going to say that you can supply encryption password using PowerShell and include this operation in your rescan script, however, after checking with devs, it turns out that import command currently lacks this ability, so this is not possible. Though we are going to add it down the road, looks like omission from our side.
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[MERGED] replica from backup

Post by mtoms »

Hi,

My current scenario is 2 sites, production site and DR site with a Veeam B&R server in each. The VBR server at the production site currently runs daily forever incremental backups of all VMs, with an offsite copy job of select vms going to a repository on the VBR server in the DR site nightly.

At some stage I plan to implement replication of core VMs at the DR site with the replication jobs being managed by the VBR server at the DR site. I know replicas can be created from backups so I was wondering if it is possible to use the backups from the existing copy job? If so how what would I need to do?

Cheers

Matt
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by foggy »

Matt, this is possible with the help of scripted repository rescan, please see above for details.
nunciate
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Re: Veeam v8 replica issue with offsite Veeam servers

Post by nunciate » 1 person likes this post

Here is how it is done.

Production Site:
BackupJob1 to ProductionRepository1
BackupCopyJob1 to Offsite Repository1 (Configured to backup copy from either the Job:Backupjob1 or ProductionRepositry1 as the source)

DR Site:
Add Offsite Repositry1 to Veeam Backup Infrastructure
Scan Offsite Repositry1 so the backup copy data shows imported
Create Dummy BackupJobCopy1 on Offsite server and map it to Offsite Repository1 and the backup copy data. This is basically a copy of the backup copy job you have in production.
One note here. I am not sure if the job above should be a copy of the backup job or the backup copy job from production. I tried both ways and both worked.
Since the data you are looking at offsite is actually backup copy data I chose to copy the production backup copy job.
Disable the Dummy job (It is only a place holder for the replication job to look at. You will never run this job.)
Put a power shell script on your hard drive somewhere with the following:

Add-PSSnapin -Name VeeamPSSnapIn -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Repository = Get-VBRBackupRepository -Name "INSERT YOUR REPOSITORY NAME HERE IN QUOTES"
Rescan-VBREntity -Entity $Repository

Create a replication job adding whatever VMs you want to replicate. The VMs must exist in the backup copy data though. Choose the source button on the Virtual Machines tab and choose the Offsite Repository1 only.
On the Job Settings tab under Advanced run the script before the job starts

That should do it. You will backup to disk and then backup copy to offsite. The offsite server will have a replication job that will pull data from the backup copy rather than over the wire.
I verified it does work. The trick is adding that dummy job in the offsite server so that the replication job has something to work from.

What will not work is if you chose to encrypt your backup copies. Unfortunately for me I have over 60Tb of backup copy data on my DR server and it is all encrypted with Veeam. When you re-scan the repository the data moves to an encrypted area and is no longer mapped to the dummy job. You have to manually right click each backup and supply the encryption password. So until that feature is added I guess I will be replicating the old fashioned way. Creating extra snapshots on production VMs and transferring the data twice.
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