Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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McKITGuys
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Advice re rebuilding Veeam servers

Post by McKITGuys »

Hi all,
I took over a setup and have been working to pull the client's 2 Veeam servers out of their domain (as a best practice). I got stuck about a month ago because once I pulled the servers out of their domain, dns resolution caused problems (for one, not being able to copy jobs between them). These servers seem to have other problems which I have not been able to resolve via tech support (e.g. there is a "phantom" IP stuck in the database that every now and then causes the licensing to choke as Veeam thinks we are still backing up this host, and it does not exist anymore - also could not be resolved via tech support).

I am thinking of just rebuilding these VBR servers from scratch instead of trying to get around the problems. I will remove VBR from the servers, remove the servers from the domain and then reinstall and start rebuilding them. Questions/advice:

- I have 2 months of backups - how do I get these back into a new, fresh Veeam database? is this possible?
- how do I get DNS resolution working between 2 servers not in the domain? It seems once a server is out of the domain, it will not longer use the Win domain DNS server even if you point to it in the network setup by IP? Someone previously suggested adding in entries to the host file for each server. That does not seem like a good maintainable solution (and would I have to put in entries for the VM hosts, VCenter etc?

Any advice gladly accepted!
Albert
rennerstefan
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Re: Advice re rebuilding Veeam servers

Post by rennerstefan »

Hi,

1) you can rescan the repositories and with that backups you still have and they will show up as “imported” in the new vbr server. You will be able to perform all recoveries etc.

2) DNS should always work, even for servers not domain joined. The only thing is that you have to create the dns records on your own for those to make sure they are available. Check your dns config and you should be fine.

I would not recommend to use hosts file as this will always be an issue at some point.

Thanks
Stefan Renner

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McKITGuys
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Re: Advice re rebuilding Veeam servers

Post by McKITGuys »

Thanks.

So just to go further on this:

1) for a rescanned backup job that is now on disk, does that import everything such that doing a process like restoring a single file for a person will work? not sure if the database contains all the files and folders for a VM once done and therefore if it does, is that whole list of files rebuilt? If the database does NOT contain a list of every file/folder within a VM, I assume that this is built from scratch every time a file restore job is run (just asking for clarity)?

2) on that, our old backup system (Sonicwall CDP device), it allowed a search where you could put in a file name (and/or folder path) and it would return to you all the times that the file was backed up in a list e.g. if the person had worked on the same document with 3 different revisions, over 3 different dates, it would show you the list of the versions and when backed up; is that possible to do with the file explorer?

3) if I rebuild the server, how would the database entries for tape jobs get rebuilt? Would I have to someone insert every tape that we have and have VBR read that tape to find out what is in it?

Thanks,
Albert
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