Failover Cluster Restoration Questions

[Matthewh]

So we currently use a different product for backing up our windows failover clusters and veeam for all our virtual machine backups.

Ideally we want to use a single product for doing this and now that the licences have transitioned to a simple system that we can use our points for either VM backups or agent based ones without excessive charges and additional licence costs we are investigating it.

However from all the documentation I read veeam does not backup the quorum disk. We dont use cluster shared volumes for the SQL servers so the lack of support is not a consideration there.

My main question is on restoration, if we need to restore the entire cluster how do we do that?

It doesn't restore the quorum so I assume we need to build a new VM , create the failover cluster with the required RDM drives and a new quorum disk install the backup agent and connect it to the backup server and restore the old data mapping the disks to the new locations?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Matthew.
You can restore entire WFC nodes(aka, bare-metal restore, if you had "Entire System" backup) or proceed with your plan above and restore just data volumes on top of fresh cluster.
Btw, File Share Witness would solve the quorum disk question.
/Cheers!

[Matthewh]

Thanks Egor,

Unfortunately all our clusters already exist and changing them to use a file share witness I am not sure if we would be able to arrange that.

If we have the "Entire System" backup and do a straight restore of if how would the raw device mappings be handled? would it overwrite the existing VM and restore back to the restore point we selected or would it convert them to VMDK files?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Bare-metal restore runs from within Guest, booted via Veeam Recovery Media, and uses volumes presented to said machine - so if you have a raw volume mounted to said server(f.e. Physical server with FC LUN or RDM disk in vSphere VM) you can restore that volume back right from the recovery media. There is no VMDK conversion needed using bare-metal restore option. VM itself will be the same, vmdk\rdm content it has will be overwritten with backup content.
/Thanks!