Backup a VM w/ EB?

[rreed]

Morning all. Here's the deal. Long time B&R user, recent EB user for my home laptop (saved my bacon when HDD failed), happy w/ both. Our SQL vendor has warned us thoroughly away from using snapshot-based backup solutions for our SQL server, to which we have agreed (they'll be supporting built-in SQL backups hence forth). We'd like to backup the OS of our SQL VM to at least have that in case of disaster but again are not allowed to use snapshots so my thought is to use EB.

Do we know if EB works on VMware VM's? How does BMR work or would it even apply? I know it makes an ISO, the VM to which I could connect and boot, then presumably restore normally from there. Thoughts? Input please?

[Dima P.]

Hi rreed,

We'd like to backup the OS of our SQL VM to at least have that in case of disaster but again are not allowed to use snapshots so my thought is to use EB.

VEB creates a VSS snapshot in order to take the backup.

Do we know if EB works on VMware VM's?

Basically, it acts the same way as it installed on usual physical computer.

How does BMR work or would it even apply?

Create an .iso and then mount it to the blank VM with the virtual disk enough to fit the backup. Make sure that its attached to the same network as you repository to get access to the backup file.

[rreed]

Excellent, many thanks Dima. I'll take this back to our SQL vendor and see if it passes muster. The concern was the VMware snapshot, hopefully VSS snapshots will be okay. Yes, we'll be using B&R to manage it and it will use an existing repository.

Has Veeam tested EB backup/restore on a VM?

[PTide]

Has Veeam tested EB backup/restore on a VM?

Yes, we can backup and restore. You can even restore your VM directly to Azure.

Thank you.

[yosemity]

For example, in my case, VEB twice helped to restore a Primary AD controller from backup. "PDC" was running on a virtual machine ESXi. VEB via VSS work perfectly, USN roll back has not occurred.

[rreed]

Awesome, thanks everyone. Looking forward to it.

[Dima P.]

rreed,

You are welcome! Do not forget to update the thread to let us know how it goes. Cheers!

[UBX_Cloud_Steve]

We have some clients using Linux on baremetal servers that we would like to migrate to virtual machines.

Can physical backups be restored as virtual machines or vice versa?

Do people use Veeam as a migration tool?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[PTide]

Hi and welcome to the community.

Although Veeam Endpoint is not a migration tool, it may serve as one. Please take a look at the links in this thread to see examples.

Thank you.

[rreed]

Afternoon, team. Do we have a write-up on this please? We're setup and doing a VM backup w/ VEB (piped into B&R console, great, do wish I could retry, etc. from the console and get stats as well though ), now we're trying to do test restore.

I build a new blank VM, point the CD-ROM to my recovery ISO, works fine, boots to it, asks me where my backup files are. I tried network, but it wants network drivers - did select that during the recovery media phase - but it can't seem to find the drivers and wants me to tell it where they are. I don't know, it's a VMXNET3 card. I thought it would know where they are since they were included on the recovery media. So, while I can boot to the recovery media, I can't get to my backup files.

I tried adding a second CD-ROM to the VM and pointing it to the .vbk file but of course VMware only wants .ISO's for its CD-ROM's. Thanks, VMware! I just want to point to another file. I can point to generic files on a Datastore, but do I have to copy 50+GB backup files to my Datastores in order to mount them?

[rreed]

Ah, looks like there are two different "Load driver" places. The one on the first Network Storage/Local Storage dialog works. Previously I had been simply selecting Network Storage before loading the driver, it gave the the option w/ a button somewhere after the fact but couldn't find its drivers. If I used the blue link on the main dialog box, that one found and loaded it fine. Continuing on...

[Dima P.]

By going to Tools > Load drivers you can manually add the needed driver prior running Bare Metal Recovery. You can get the generic VMXNET driver from any machine with VMware tools (C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\vmxnet).

[rreed]

Thanks Dima, got it figured out. Works great, I'm able to BMR a VM just fine w/in about half an hour. Comes up just fine after restore. Pretty happy, well done Veeam.

[rjaworski]

I have just tested a restore from VM image to a physical. I had to run sysprep but its working like new, great deal!

[Dima P.]

Richard,

Out of curiosity, what VM was restored to physical machine? Thanks.