Beginner question, opensuse agent (Part 2)

[CSVT]

Hi,
I posted my first question here : https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agent-fo ... 50416.html

Now that I received the answer and tried the installation procedure here : https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=20
I have more questions !

We have veeambackup and wmware. Like I said before, we choose OpenSuse leap 42.3 as our linux distrib. Virtual opensuse servers are backuped with veeam's tools for wmware. The problem we have is with physical linux OpenSuse servers.

During the installation, I encounterd an error with the following command from the procedure : zypper in veeamsnap-kmp-default
That module doesn't seems to exist. Is it critical to the agent or do I just ignore it ? Here's what I get when I search for veeamsnap :

S | Nom | Résumé | Type
--+--------------------+---------------------------------------+-------
i | veeamsnap | Veeam Agent for Linux (kernel module) | paquet
| veeamsnap-ueficert | veeamsnap kernel module certificate | paquet

That's for the installation part.

I then tried to run veeam anyway by executing : sudo veeam. I tried to connect to my "Veeam Backup & Replication" (we have 50 temporary licences) and created an "Entire machine (recommended)" backup. Here goes my second question :
The wizard alerts me that BTRFS is not supported. That's a big problem for us since we were thought to install all our server with this file format. Will it be supported soon ? Changing all our server from BTFRS to ext4 is not really an option for us...

I continued anyway to create a backup of the only partition not BTRFS for test purpose, the /boot partition (ext4). The job was created correctly and I lauched it. Here goes my last question for this post :
On our windows veeam server, there was an error saying : Unable to create snapshot. Not enough free space on disks for snapshot data. Demand 1073741824 bytes free. Failed to perform backup. Failed to create volume snapshot.
We have many TB of storage free for backups. Is this error concernong free space on the linux server or the veeam server ? We don't want to take a snapshot, this is not a virtual server, it's a physical server. We want to take a full backup (anyway, what we can since BTRFS is not supported).

Thanks for your help,
Alexandre Chevrier
CSVT

[nielsengelen]

BTRFS support is on our roadmap as has been requested by others.

In regards to the snapshot disk space, this is related to the server you are backing up. Not the backup server or free backup storage. Veeam Agent for Linux uses a built-in snapshot technology which creates a snapshot on the server where it runs. This allows us to create fast incremental backups etc. For more information take a look at How backup works from our userguide.

You can always contact support in regards to the free snapshot error however this means the default location is lacking free space to create the snapshot. Could you maybe do an output of lsblk -a and df -h ?

[CSVT]

Thanks for the info.

What % of free space do we need on the partitions to be able to create the snapshots for the backup ? I will need to redo the maths we did to partition our disks because we wanted to isolate the OS from the data leaving only enough space for updates so we won't waste data storage space.

I also wanted to know about veeamsnap-kmp-default, should I ignore it ?

[nielsengelen]

By default this is 50% however you can modify values and locations in /etc/veeam/veeam.ini under the [snapshot] part. By default we will create a snapshot under /tmp. This is why I asked for the output of df -h & lsblk -a to give additional feedback.

In regards to the KMP package; you can find it via http://repository.veeam.com/backup/linu ... se/x86_64/ and do a manual rpm install.
KMP packages allow us to handle kernel updates easily and load the veeamsnap package when you upgrade the kernel. It is advised to install this if not present for ease of use.

[CSVT]

Thanks,
I'll try to install the rpm. I started over a server for test purpose on ext4 only and by giving more space to all my partitions. I managed to get it working and tested it with a full restore.

[PTide]

Hi,

I also wanted to know about veeamsnap-kmp-default, should I ignore it ?

There are two options how you can install and use veeamsnap kernel module:

1. Install it from source code package.

Pros:

- dkms should handle handle rebuilding process after kernel updates

Cons:

- requires additional packages (compiler, kernel-headers) to be installed on the host which might be considered to be not very secure by some people
- not signed, won't work with secure boot at all, will also taint kernel on some distros

2. Install prebuilt kmp package

Pros:

- no additional packages needed
- is signed so it can be used with secure boot

Cons:

- although kABI is claimed to stay stable within a major kernel release, the module installed from kmp will stop working if kABI changes, so you'll need to install another kmp specifically tailored for the new kernel

Thanks