Questions about backup and RESTORE of Windows failover clusters

[tinto1970]

Good day all,

I have and will have to deal with a customer using a lot of Windows Failover Cluster (with VMs and RMDs).

The documentation is pretty clear: you have to create Protection Groups as Active Directory Objects, add the cluster and create a Failover Cluster type job

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

I've also seen a really good post illustrating how to do it: https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-p ... -step-2497

My problem is that I did not find anything regarding the restore process... other than this pretty short man page: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Because of this, I have two questions in my mind:

1) is there some docs, posts, videos or anything like this explaining the restore process? I hope I missed it

2) I'm dealing with a situation where the BackupAdmins have created the PGs for failover clusters as Individual computers.
I fully understand this is wrong and has to be fixed, but I don't have a Time Machine so my question is: what's going to happen in case a restore from the "wrongly taken" backups must be performed? Which side effects/errors/issues are going to happen?

Thanks so much!

[Dima P.]

Hello Alessandro,

Please use the Failover Cluster job type in the future, as it helps prevent additional full backups of the cluster disk whenever a failover occurs. This eliminates unnecessary full backups of cluster disks during failover (currently, your backups may be larger due to these extra fulls).

You can absolutely use these backups for restores; just keep in mind that a backup might miss a cluster disk if it was assigned to another node at the time the backup was taken. You can verify this by opening backup content (say via FLR) or by reviewing the job sessions properties. Thank you!

[tinto1970]

Thank you very much, Dima, for your invaluable help.
Sure I'm stressing everyone here (where I started 3 weeks ago) to begin using proper Failover Cluster jobs type in the future, eventually modifying "bad jobs" already running asap.

It's very important to know we/the customer can someway rely on the backup taken in the past.

(I'm currently struggling in creating a failover cluster in my lab to get more experience on it)