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flakpyro
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SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by flakpyro »

Hey everyone

In testing SureBackup 5 with some of our CentOS 5.5 (RHEL5) test VMs im noticing networking does not come up during boot because the Mac address of the vNIC has changed, linux doesn't like this and eth0 fails to start, thus making the rest of the tests fail, has anyone found a way around this?

Once the VM is booted i am able to edit the NIC settings with the new mac address and networking will start but for an automated SureBackup job this is not a solution.
Gostev
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by Gostev »

Hello, try setting MAC address manually on the source VM (in VNIC settings), and performing backup of your VM again. MAC address will be set to VMX file, which we backup and restore - so this should help.
tsightler
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by tsightler » 1 person likes this post

As far as I'm concerned the simplest solution is to just make CentOS not care about MAC addresses. This is done by simply removing the "HWADDR=<MAC-address>" lines in your ifcfg-ethX config files located at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. We do this as a matter of course for our installs so that when we clone VM's from templates, or replicate them we don't have to mess with ethernet configs, everything just works.

Another option would be to set a static MAC address on the Linux host. The Veeam SureBackup process will preserve a static MAC address. We actually use static MAC addresses on a lot of our host. We use a simple schema where the MAC address is based on the IP address of the host, that we know the IP address of a machine just from it's MAC address and vice-versa. We started using this because it helped with Veeam replication, but it seems to work well for SureBackup too.
flakpyro
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by flakpyro »

Both these methods work, thanks!
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by Gostev »

Similar topic about Ubuntu > Ubuntu linux replication issue
Soko4Life
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by Soko4Life »

Hi

I have tried the above solution by making the CentOS not care about MAC addresses. So now I am looking in the Tasks and Events for the replicated machine. There is an error that says "The MAC address(00:50:____) conflicts the the MAC address of the Source VM" and also another error "Changed MAC address from 00:50:56:af:2a to 00:50:56:84:23:e5 for adapter Production". Should I be concern that the changes made to the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts didnt take place.

Regards
Ole
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by tsightler »

No, what your seeing is VMware saying that it's changing the MAC address of the replica so as not to have duplicate MAC addresses in your environment. This is the correct thing for VMware to do but this is what causes the default setup in CentOS to function incorrectly since CentOS sees a new MAC and thinks it's a different NIC (technically, it is a different NIC since it's actually a whole different VM, just a replica of that VM). What you've now done with the changes to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts is tell CentOS to ignore the MAC address and just assume that whatever NIC is "eth0" (or whatever physical NIC) is always the correct NIC to bring up, that way CentOS won't care what MAC address VMware assigns the the NIC.

It should all work fine.
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by Soko4Life »

Thanks, will check it out today and let u guys know how it went. :)
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Re: SureBackup networking with Linux VMs

Post by Soko4Life »

The solution worked, my Replicated VM has now got the same IP and DNS name as the source VM when performing failover. Thanks a lot...
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