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bg.ranken
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SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by bg.ranken »

Hi All,

I'm hoping I can get some advice on setting up SureBackup to verify some remote presented LUNs. Currently we are using Riverbed appliances to remotely mount a LUN that exists in our primary datacenter, the same place that our Veeam server lives. In order to back up the VMs on these LUNs we have a snapshot of the LUNs presented to an extra host in our datacenter and it updates about 2 hours before backups run. The job itself targets the powered off VMs on this extra host and backs them up.

Now the backups have been working mostly fine, but what I'd like to do is get SureBackup to verify somehow that the servers are up to date and are real backups of the actual servers and not stale data. There's been a few cases where our storage didn't properly update the snapshot and it's been a pain to manually have to check to make sure the backed up data is actually current.

Can someone give me some ideas? Best I can think of is maybe make a script that runs on the original VMs that makes a file with the current date slightly before the snapshot updates and then have the SureBackup job run a custom script that checks to make sure a file is there. I'm hoping someone else has a similar setup and perhaps they have some more robust scripts they can share that might verify more than just something simple like that.
PTide
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Re: SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by PTide »

Hi,

Your idea is good and easy to implement, also I think that in fact there can be no other reliable sign of a successful update.

Thanks
bg.ranken
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Re: SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by bg.ranken »

Do you think it's worth it to test it against the live server? I was thinking of having the file create a randomly generated stream inside the file and then having the script compare the file from the SureBackup server to the one on the live server.

I haven't used SureBackup before so I'm not really sure if it's recommended to have scripts that target the real servers or not.
Gostev
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Re: SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by Gostev »

SureBackup is not for live servers, but rather for VMs running from backup in the isolated environment aka Virtual Lab.
PTide
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Re: SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by PTide »

A simple .txt with a timestamp should be enough. Also I think that such situation when storage not able to properly update a snapshot is worth contacting storage vendor.

SureBackup basically allows you to spin up VMs directly from backup files and run scripts against them in order to make sure the VMs inside the backups are alive and kicking.

Thanks
bg.ranken
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Re: SureBackup of Remote Presented LUNs

Post by bg.ranken »

Thanks for the info PTide. Regarding the actual snapshot issue, at this point we are not sure what was causing the issues. I opened a case up with support and they were unable to pinpoint the cause of the issue, only that it is happening. Case #01898120 if you're curious. Basically if Veeam tried to take a backup within 5-10 minutes of the snapshot updating then it would think there were no VMDKs attached to the VM and backup zero data. We verified on the storage end that things were fine and we could verify that the VM did in fact spin up and work fine if tested within 15 seconds after the snapshot update completed. Support had just said that the host itself was returning the VM with no VMDKs, so at that point my best guess was that there was some bug in VMware that didn't get the real data from the LUN if it was updated too close to the backup window. We moved things around and put the backup to start 2 hours after the snapshot updates and so far haven't seen the issue return. I'm at least sure it's not a Veeam issue :D

That being said, the problem that I'm trying to fix is that the backup job itself completed successfully with no errors. The only way someone caught it was to see that the job log showed zero data being written. So I'm hoping to at least use SureBackup to verify in case we ever run into a scenario similar to what happened before.

Also, regarding the original topic, one of the things I'm struggling with is how to get job information ported from Veeam into the script. Is there a list of other arguments that can be passed other than the two listed (%vm_ip% and %vm_fqdn%). I'm using VBScript and can't figure out how to get the date of the restore point that is being tested with SureBackup.
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