Bare Metal Recovery - Issues with adding network drivers

[TheExpert]

Hi all,

I want to test Proxmox VE. So I want to do a bare metal restore of a VM running on VMware ESXi to Proxmox. I do daily backups of this VM with the Veeam Agent for Windows 5.0.3.

I added the virtIO and also the vmxnet3 network interface to the VM on Proxmox. And I added the virtIO ISO file as second CD drive to the Proxmox VM to be able to add the virtIO drivers to the Veeam recovery environment.

The Veaam recovery environment is booting fine but it doesn't list any network interfaces. Even not the vmxnet3 that is used by the origin VM from which I created the recovery media. I see that the VM finds the network interfaces but doesn't install the drivers. When adding the virtIO or vmxnet3 drivers manually it takes a long time until I get a success message but then again there are no network interfaces listed for going on with the bare metal restore. This also doesn't work with an Intel E1000 network card.

I also added the virtIO storage driver and this is working fine. The Veeam recovery environment adds then the QEMU virtual SCSI disks. So the process of adding drivers is working.

I then tried this procedure with a second VM on Proxmox cloned from the VM above so the settings are the same. This VM is running Windows 10 PE to see if there are issues with the virtIO network drivers but in this case I can successfully add the virtIO network drivers and the VM is connected to network.

What can I do to get the network interfaces added to the Veeam recovery environment?

Thank you

[Mildur]

Hi

First I must say, I don‘t have any experience with Proxmox. So my answer is more a general answer to the question, what can be done when manual driver addition is not working.

If manual driver addition is not working, I would create the recovery media directly from a windows vm running on the proxmox server. The media creation wizard will automatically include the existing drivers for storage and network interfaces on the vm to the iso. This way you will have a recovery media which should work for proxmox VMs.

Can you try this in your infrastructure?
- Create a vm with a windows os (server or client) and the required nic type on your proxmox server
- install the veeam Agent to this vm
- create a recovery media with the wizard and choose to add the hardware drivers
- create an empty vm with the required nic type
- use the previously created ISO to boot in to Veeams recovery environment and restore the agent backup from the other machine

[TheExpert]

Hi,

thank you for your answer. As I wrote I already added the vmxnet3 network interface to the VM on Proxmox VE, too. This I've done because the VM is coming from VMware ESXi and uses a vmxnet3 which is also added to the Veeam recovery media. But the recovery environment doesn't install the driver for the vmxnet3 - neither automatically nor manually. And I can see that the the vmxnet3 driver is added to the Veeam recovery media. So I don't think that your way will work with creating a new recovery media on a new Windows VM for Proxmox with the virtIO network interface.

Kind Regards