Surebackup from vbr 12.1 to 12.2 changes

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
We already have a support ticket opened #07432467, but currently still working on solution.

Long story short:
SureBackup is failing after we had upgraded VBR from 12.1 to latest 12.2 version.
The reason that is failing is:
It somehow expects that we have application awareness enabled on replica job for domain controllers.
In 12.1 version surebackup passed ok. We were testing replica job, and application group/domain controllers non-authoritive restore (and on replica job we didnt have enabled application awareness for DC's).
On 12.2 it doesn't pass (with same settings on replica job without app awareness that we had in 12.1 version).

Did in 12.2 version become mandatory to have app awareness configured for replica jobs for DC's in application group to pass?

B

[david.domask]

Hi Bostjan,

Thank you for the details on the issue and sorry to hear about the challenges.

The error you're getting is kind of a "general" one with regards to Domain Controllers. While performing the backup/replication with Application Aware Processing is recommended in virtually all cases, in theory the DC could come up normally even without Application Aware Processing, but it seems like not a good risk to take since it's your Domain Controller.

May I ask, why not enable Application Aware Processing for the Domain Controllers? Based on the case notes, it seems like there was an issue detecting a stable IP for the machine being tested in the SureBackup, and Support has offered a registry value which should help on the scenario, but have you tested with Application Aware Processing enabled?

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
Thank you for your reply David.

We have resolved it with workaround by adding registry key that support has provided:
»HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\SureBackup\UseLegacyStabilization = 1 «
We are currently tweaking the optimal timeout for bringing up VM's.

The reason why we don't have application awareness enabled on Replica job is because then we would have it enabled on two places and that would probably cause an issue. Let me explain what I mean:
We already have it enabled on Primary backup job (and this includes for example dealing with dumping transaction logs on SQL servers).
Since we are doing replicas directly from production servers (and not from backups) I think that enabling application awareness on replica job will create an issue for dumping SQL transaction logs since application awareness on primary backup is already doing that. Is my assumption correct?

[david.domask]

Thanks for the explanation, and you are correct, having multiple jobs processing the logs would cause interruptions in the log backups.

However, you can set Copy-Only or just disable AAIP for the SQL servers, which should prevent interruptions.

Similarly, you might consider Replica from Backup, which would read the data from the backup file (which already had Application Aware Processing on the primary job as I understand it), thus avoiding the processing on the production machine twice.

Let's see the results of the registry value, but consider the available options for ensuring that at least your Domain Controllers have Application Aware Processing performed so the replicas are application consistent.

Thanks!

[BostjanUNIJA]

David thank you for the good ideas.
With best regards