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Meph1234
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Backing up failed over server

Post by Meph1234 »

Hello,

In my scenario we have an office that has a single VMWare host that we have been backing up over the MPLS link. This office is undergoing renovation and the host will be offline.

What I have done is brought its fileserver online in another state by way of failing it over in Veeam. The plan is when the server is back running in the other office I will perform a commit failback. This will be in about 2 months time.

Right now it is running fine but I wanted to know, can you back this server up while it is in the failover state? Specifically so individual files can be restored lest someone delete one?

I don't want to experiment with it as it is in production and the original host is uncontactable.
LickABrick
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Re: Backing up failed over server

Post by LickABrick »

I would suggest doing a restore of the VM to the temporary location. Keep making backups of this new VM and when the old location is ready again do a restore of the VM back to the old location.

VM's in a failover state will have a snapshot, IMO you should not let a VM run on a snapshot for long periods of time as it can take up a lot of storage and can even impact performance. See: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1025279 for more information about VMWare snapshots and its best practices.
Meph1234
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Re: Backing up failed over server

Post by Meph1234 »

Hi LickABrick,

Thanks for the suggestion and I am sure it will help others in the future. With my setup however the main problem is the size of the links.

We backup this file server to a repository in the temporary site, so restoration would be fast, however restoring it back to the original site would take a long time (1TB server, 10Mb link). Also, the original site is already offline so I can't do it even if i wanted. I was hoping a failback commit would not necessitate a full backup later.

You have given me and idea. Perhaps I can clone the server within vmware itself, and then backup the clone. It will be a bit messy and would probably necessitate full backups each time, but it is on the same site as the backup server, so it's a gigabit connection.

Thanks again
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