Is Veeam doing anything in KVM space?

[Martini]

Hi Gostev,

Thanks for the reply, that's unfortunate but clear to me now.

[evilaedmin]

Is the recent publication of this guide for using Agent with RHEV guests a sign of anything in development?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi evilaedmin,

No, this is certainly not a sign of anything . Previous word of Gostev remains the same

[LuCloudo]

Apologies for bumping up an old thread, but I believe a lot of people who use KVM are in the same boat as us.

We've got a large number of VMs running on different flavors of KVM (including OnApp), but only some portion of the VMs on a commercial KVM platform that we have can be backed up by its own built-in incremental VM backup at the block level, the rest are on other KVM platforms that still lack a proper backup solution that can be scalable. Based on our experience, incremental file-level backup is definitely not suitable for our environment, and did become a drastic problem once the number of small files in a VM grew large.

We've been looking forward to some kind of Veeam integration for KVM as Veeam Backup is something we can trust based on our experience, but we given there's been so much fragmentation in setting up/running KVM, we can also understand why we have barely come across a proper backup solution for KVM (be it free or paid-for) that can do incremental backup at the hypervisor and block level. Most of the solutions seem to simply install an agent into a VM and back it up like a bare metal.

However, since Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) is already pretty powerful for bare metal, I was thinking maybe we could think outside the box and see if it could be used for backing up KVM to some extend. After some quick testing, the following workaround seems to work for certain scenarios on KVM, but this is nothing official.

In a nutshell, imagine one has a standalone CentOS 7 host with local storage that runs generic/stock KVM, and each VM uses a local LVM as its own virtual disk (this seems to be a fairly common setup but not to my liking). Given VAL already supports live-backing up LVM (per LV or entire VG), this means we can simply install VAL on a KVM host and then achieve incremental backup at the block level for each virtual disk as each virtual disk is just an LV on the host to VAL so to speak. TBH, we don't really need backing VM memory state and VM config can be easily backed up anyway, so this type crash-consistent backup at the hypervisor level is good enough for us.

After some testing, this workaround seems to be working as expected in my test environment with CentOS 7 and Debian 9, and I guess it would work for a lot of people since VAL supports all the major distros.

However, there are some caveats, depending how one's KVM is set up:
- File-level restoration is currently not directly possible as VAL doesn't seem to know how to detect the file system/partitions contained inside an LVM. However, this can be easily worked around by simply making VAL restore the virtual disk (an LV) onto a different LV on a different host, then you can manually mount the LV to extract the files or attach it to a new VM on a different host then boot it up for file extraction.
- I'm sure how this proposed solution for backing up shared LVM via iSCSI (exposing LVM to multiple hosts without e.g. CLVM like OnApp) can come into play. It seems to work in my test environment, but I'm not sure whether this could lead to disk corruption.
- If virtual disks are in e.g. qcow2 format and simply stored in a local directory, VAL will need to back up the entire local directory. Maybe Veeam staff could shed some light on light, but I'm under the impression some backup solutions including Veeam can also do backup by live-snapshotting an entire volume that contains virtual disks on Hyper-V/VMware instead of doing it on a per virtual disk basis? What about putting each qcow2 under its own partition/directory?
- Further testing is required if virtual disks in qcow2/raw format are stored in shared storage (e.g. NFS, GlusterFS, etc)

That said, granted there's still not perfect solution here, I think this is probably still like taking a leap forward.

On a side note, given VAL supports calling job/snapshot scripts, maybe one could consider calling fsfreeze via qemu guest agent in a VM during a backup process. However, I personally had bad experience with fsfreeze due to some bugs in the software I used on Linux, so I guess I would skip this for now as I just want to keep things simple.

I was wondering whether any other people have tried something along these lines before?

[mschau]

Hi!

Are there any plans for Red Hat Virtualization support in future?

We use more and more OpenSource products in our house from classic virtualization to container platforms and could really use a reliable backup solution like we already use for VMware...

best regards,
Markus

[HannesK]

merged with the existing topic

[datagen24]

In my environment we use KVM more than vmware ( vmware being only used now to support customer backups via Veeam) the majority of our non appliance workloads run on non intel based KVM installations.

Our biggest percentage of workloads are running on IBM power / Open Power.
With some very large I/O bound workloads running on IBM Linux One machines (s390x)

All of the above systems are running some form of KVM, mostly commercial Redhat Enterprise Virt ( exception being the s390x which is hand rolled on RHEL)

I would love to see KVM support possibly through array based backups, or some other means to make this work as I can trust the veeam product.

[HannesK]

even if we support KVM, chances are low that we would support it for power or z-series

[Emaya]

Are there any plans for Red Hat Virtualization support in future?

We use more and more OpenSource products in our house from classic virtualization to container platforms and could really use a reliable backup solution like we already use for VMware...

I second this. We use VMware at the moment are migrating some VMs to Red Hat Virtualization and would like to keep Veeam as our backup solution. Please add support!

[Gostev]

What do you use as a vCenter for KVM hosts?

[Emaya]

I'm talking about using Red Hat Virtualization Manager instead of ESXi.

[PTide]

Hi,

@Emaya

So, you are using this thing, right?

Thanks!

[ZipTX]

Jumping in on this KVM discussion as we use ProxMox. ProxMox has a central managing service (one of the hosts acts as the manager in the cluster). Our strong preference is for Veeam to support KVM as we have to use another 3rd party enterprise product that natively backs up KVM.

[PTide]

3rd party enterprise product that natively backs up KVM.

Which one, may I ask?

Thanks!

[wle1020]

As VMWare is losing customers fast, it would be nice to have VEEAM as backup solution (which works quite fine) at hand on other virtualisation platforms.
We are switching our customers to proxmox (more than 250k installations worldwide!), and have done so for the last two years, but utilising the same backup solution would give them a sense of stability.
Furthermore, it's quite easy to restore vmware vms on proxmox, so having VEEAM as trusted solution would be quite a benefit. (And VEEAM wouldn't lose customers just because VMWare delivers -not).

Best regards
W

[jmmarton]

Veeam agents can be used to protect VMs regardless of hypervisor. And with Veeam Universal Licensing, customers can do hypervisor-integrated backups when possible (VMware, Hyper-V, AHV) or use agents for everything else. VUL allows customers to use whatever makes the most sense for them to protect their environments.

Joe

[MartyZ]

Hi guys, any good news for KVM admins? We're leaving VMware too and we will miss VBR especially in MS Exchange backups case...

[HannesK]

Hi,
no short term plans. Which KVM "distribution" are you using with which management software?

In the meantime, you could use the Veeam Agent for Windows / Linux to backup your VMs

Best regards,
Hannes

[MartyZ]

Hi Hannes, we are running Proxmox 5.4-13 on Debian 9.11. Are backups through agent offering same abilities like application aware backups - so we can stick to Veeam Explorer for Exchange etc ?
Thx
Martin

[Gostev]

Yes, they do. Our agents-based backups shares the code base with host-based backups, so both the backup engine and the application-aware processing logic are the same. Thanks!

[marcquark]

Another Proxmox user here. Would love to see a Veeam integration

[wwphil]

I will also get rid of vmware in my datacenters and I'd hate to throw out veeam with it, as I'm happy with it. Will start doing tests with agent based backups and see if I can be satisfied with that for the time being. Planning on moving to a KVM based hypervisor. Most likely Proxmox, or oVirt...

[stevehughes]

I too am considering a shift from vSphere to Proxmox. It's good that we have the option to continue using veeam via agents. What functionality do we lose by doing so? I don't expect to be able to do Instant Recovery or full VM restores, but can we restore files and application items directly back into the VM when using agents? Is there anything else that we would lose?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, instant VM recovery, SureBackup, replication, as well as native full VM restores, will not be possible, but our restore capabilities from the Agent UI will still be there. And to centrally manage these agents you can use the Veeam Service Provider Console.

[Gostev]

Please note that Veeam Backup & Replication can manage agents natively for many years now.
Veeam Service Provider Console is required for managed service provider (MSP) scenarios only.

[DonZoomik]

A bit offtopic but how many KVM users have actually used VMware and RedHat/ProxMox side-by-side, at least in a bit larger environments?
I work at a company that has scrapped dozens of ProxMox nodes and switched to VMware because honestly, ProxMox IMHO is an awful product.

[grouponeconsulting]

We use Redhat/KVM in production with OnApp and could greatly benefit from Native Veeam integration. It offers a full management UI, has integration with vCloud/vCenter too.

[724tec]

We use Virtuozzo KVM and RedHat/KVM. Would be great if we could use Veeam as backup solution.

[marieelieg]

Hello,

Just wondering if Veeam has a roadmap for VBR integration with RedHat KVM (RHV: Red Hat Virtualization and RHHI: Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure)?

Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
for the foreseeable future, agents are the way to go from a Veeam perspective.

Best regards,
Hannes