Granular Restore

[sandroalves]

Hello friends,

I'm still a beginner in the Veeam product and so I still ask some basic questions, but my intention is to confirm whether my understanding is right or wrong.

Does Veeam back up granular without an agent or with an agent?

In the case of linux do I need the agent to restore granular?

Is there any need for an agent for specific cases, such as Active Directory, SQL or Linux Oracle for example?

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Sandro.

1. Backup granularity depends:
- without agent, it will be granular down to a Virtual Disk - that is, you don't need to backup entire VM, but can select only special .vmdk of yours.
- without agent, you can also skip certain guest OS files using Exclude masks. Be careful with this feature, as it increases backup time.
- with agent you can go granular down to a specific file\folder inside guest OS, giving you deepest level of backup granularity there is.

2. To Restore data, you don't need agent at all. Veeam Backup and Replication can read backup content and restore anywhere by network, that is, you can set \\server\disk$\folder as a destination, and only to provide correct access credentials for us to make it happen!

3. If we are talking virtual environment here, no agent is needed to backup virtual servers like AD, SQL, Oracle so on. You get full power of image-level backup and all granular restore features down to an application item(like AD users, MS SQL tables, Oracle DBs so on).


/Cheers!

[sandroalves]

Hi,

yes, my environment is fully virtualized with vsphere.

For linux virtual servers does granular restore also apply? Or do I need a linux proxy or something similar to have granular?

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

For Linux machines you can expect File-level restore as well as Oracle on Linux DB level recovery to be available without agents.
Since Windows(say, VBR installation) cannot read linux formatted partition, Veeam requires a helper appliance in order to retrieve Linux guest OS files - it is configured once and deployed on the spot when you launch Linux File-level Recovery wizard. In v11 you will be able to set any existing linux host as a "temporary mount machine".

/Thanks!

[sandroalves]

Hi,

I did a test using linux restore and noticed that he created a device. The most interesting thing is that I made it for a Windows VM and I was able to read the Windows content also using this mechanism for linux. Super interesting! It mounts logical volumes in linux format (SDAs).

In the case of real linux I will be able to restore files using this mechanism directly in linux just like I do with windows?

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Sure thing!

Destination selection is still available for any OS.

/Cheers!

[sandroalves]

Hi,

complementing a doubt that came to me.

In the case of oracle database backup, is there no additional procedure necessary, such as running a script before and after to change the database to dump mode to guarantee the integrity of the databases?

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

No additional scripts required, but some tuning should be done to allow us processing of the transaction logs.
Here is the guide.