CentOS 7 and BTRFS support - kernel version?

[gothaggis]

CentOS 7.6 ships with kernel 3.10. Looks like the Veeam Linux Agent needs to have at least version 3.16 for BTRFS support. Using elrepo, I updated my server to the latest 4.4.176 (kernel-lt) - while this got BTRFS support working (had to reinstall veeamsnap though) - now I am having all sorts of network issues, which seem to be related to that kernel. Reverting back to 3.10 fixes it, but then of course, I can't use the agent.

Any other options out there? I suppose I can try using kernel-ml, but not super jazzed about that. Anyone successfully backing up BTRFS volumes and CentOS 7.6?

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Depending on the amount of data, file backup with disable snapshot option can be a workaround

Best regards,
Hannes

[nielsengelen]

Please contact support for assistance to see what is going wrong with the latest kernel in terms of networking (if it related to VAL).

However, you could force installing a supported kernel and see if that resolves the networking issue. For example, 4.4.175 is still available via the repositories and can be installed (see https://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el7/x86_64/RPMS/).

[gothaggis]

Update, i called support and they told me about the option to use file level backup. I'm backing up about 30TB of data.

I found that kernel 5 does not work (seemed to have compile issues with veeamsnap) - but Kernel 4.19 worked and I didn't run into the same network driver issues that I did with 4.4.

That being said, the performance of the agent seemed quite slow - guess I am used to native BTRFS snapshots, which only take a few seconds to generate. After 15 hours, it had backed up about 25% of the 30TB.

[HannesK]

yes, the file backup is probably not fast enough today for 30TB. A working kernel version can solve the issue.

[nielsengelen]

Geoff, file level backup is known to be slower as we have to go from folder to folder (sort off). I would suggest working with support to find a proper solution so you can leverage the BTRFS features introduced in version 3. It could be they can provide a hotfix or some tweaks so your backups won't take 60 hours.