Small Business Server 2011

[Lunddahl]

Hi Everyone!

As you might know, the new Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 has some very nice backup features, but they are all optimized for locally attached USB drives. That does not make it very simple to implement/use when virtualized in a VMware environment, unless of course we can just use Veeam to back it up.

Does Veeam support backing up SBS 2011 with VSS ?

Will the administrator be requered to make any changes to the SBS Server VM.

Is there a plan to make a whitepaper on how to do it ?

We are selling a lot of VMware Essential Plus Bundles, almost everyone opt in for Veeam Essentials. We get a lot of questions regarding SBS 2011 support.

If not officially supported a blog post would be very nice, unfortunately i don't have the skills and time to make it myself...

- Ulrik Lunddahl

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Ulrik,

Does Veeam support backing up SBS 2011 with VSS ?

We haven't tested it against SBS 2011 yet, but please note that all products included to this release are fully supported for Application-Aware Image Processing.

Will the administrator be requered to make any changes to the SBS Server VM.

Not sure I'm following your question, as we never had such a requirement for any VM. Thank you!

[marty9876]

For user with VSS permissions, since can't add local admin to a domain controller use built-in admin account which carries over in the migration or use a user with the Network Administrator Role?

[Alexey D.]

Built-in admin account is ok to backup with VSS enabled.

[Lunddahl]

I have done some testing, and so far Backup with VSS seems to work fine, Veeam reports successfull backups.

However i have not been able to restore a Small Business Server 2011 successfully yet, all backups without VSS is restoring just fine, but the ones with VSS enabled starts in Directory Services Restore Mode. I'm able to log on and run...

Code: Select all

bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot

...hovever after the reboot AD is working, but every other part of the system seems to be faulty/hanging/not working.

I have tried with a brand new/clean SBS 2011 installation, same issues occur.

Have anyone been able to get it to work, or am i missing something ?

[tsightler]

If you just wait a little while (say 5-10 minutes maybe even longer) when the system boots up in safe mode will it eventually reboot back into regular mode? That's normally how Veeam restores a domain controller, it boots in DSRM, performs it's little magic, and then reboots again on it's own as a fully restored DC. I've seen this process take 15 minutes in some cases (Surebackup).

[Lunddahl]

I found the problem, leave the vNIC unconnected and you will run into a low of problems, as soon as i connected the vNIC to a test Port Group, the server booted in DSRM, and was rebooted by the "veeam magic thing" and then all services came up, all databases performed receovery steps, and came online.

Thanks for the tip on "veeam magic" it's very hard to find in the manual.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the update, actually I didn't realize that you were not connecting vNICs. I'm not sure if it is even possible to do a proper restore of a domain controller without plugging it into a network.