Restore traffic using wrong nic

[yakamoneye18]

Hey guys,

I have no Case ID because I already fixed it for now. But I have a very strange behavior, I even do not know if it is Veeam or just Windows, and I wanted to share with you and see if anyone has the same problem or maybe has a better solution.

My setting: our Veeam B&R Server is a dedicated hardware server. We have 3 active nics: Nic1 is in NetworkA, Nic2 is in NetworkB (managementNetwork), and Nic3 is directly attached to the backup storage. All nics are 10G, and 10G is working fine.

Now we have a test SQL server where we regularly refresh the database by restoring a live SQL DB via Veeam to the test server. Test server has one Nic in NetworkA, also 10G. So normally I would say the restore would just use the Nic1 of the B&R Server because it is the most direct way. But Veeam is using NetworkB, so the traffic gets routed through our firewall which only can do 1G.

To change this behavior, I tried the following:

• added a route for traffic to the IP of the test server over NIC1 with a lower metric (the routing was already okay, tracert would not use the firewall) - did not help
• created a firewall rule: block outgoing traffic from Nic2 to NetworkA to force the use of Nic1 in case of traffic in direction of NetworkA - did not help
• created a firewall rule: block incoming traffic from NetworkA to Nic2 - now it works (only in combination with the outgoing rule)

I really do not understand why Veeam is using the wrong nic, although the server is set to use the correct one. Is there any setting in Veeam I missed? I had this problem with our last Veeam Server (Windows 2012R2), and we recently migrated to a new server 2019 and it happened again.

Am I the only one with a problem like this? Any insights on how to change this behavior wihtout these firewall rules?

Thanks!

[Mildur]

Hello Tobias

A support case should help to check your configuration and backup server logs.
Both cannot be easily done over a simple forum post.

May I ask, do you have configured preferred network settings? Preferred networks may control which NIC is used for the traffic by the backup server.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Best,
Fabian

[yakamoneye18]

Thanks for your reply.

I will see if I can open a case, the problem is I will leave the company soon, and my successor is happy if it works without touching it, I am not sure if he wants to work on a case... I will see if I can do that before I leave.

The "prefered Network" settings may be useless in our situation: according to the window it sets the prefered network for "backup and replication traffic", our problem is the restore traffic. Even if it would also touch restore traffic, we have different jobs where different networks should be used, so we cannot say that one network should always be used as prefered network.