Can I create a manual test lab? Trying to leverage Veeam.

[davidb1234]

We are using v6.5 right now moving to v7 soon.

I need to create an isolated test lab with internet access to do some server 2012 testing. I am trying to think how I can accomplish this leveraging Veeam.

Can I just create some new VMs and attach the NIC to the virtual lab I already have created and manually power on the virtual lab? Will the VMs have access to the proxy appliance for internet access when I manually start the virtual lab? We have no real proxy in the production network.

Has anyone tried this or is there a better way of doing this? I basically just need to set up a test Windows 2012 domain that is isolated from the production network but I need internet access.

[Gostev]

Part of the process of starting virtual lab involves creating virtual appliance configuration and pushing it to the proxy appliance VM, so you should start the virtual lab by starting SureBackup job configured with application group containing a single VM and having "continue running" option enabled. It does not matter what VM you will use for this task, can be some tiny useless one.

Internet access will work for any VM in the lab, granted you setup proxy settings correctly in the virtual lab settings, and in the Internet Options of each VM in the lab. Remember that proxy appliance will act as a proxy, so you should use "internal" IP address (isolated network side).

If you run into any road blocks, I recommend opening a support case, because this will take no more than 5 minutes to setup over webex with our support engineer, and up to a few weeks of troubleshooting over forum posts

Hope this helps.

[davidb1234]

I followed a bunch of other posts to get this far and so far most things are working but i have a couple of questions.

I added the registry entries for internet proxy virtual lab feature. I created a new virtual lab. I am able to browse the web from a VM inside my virtual lab after putting in the virtual lab appliance IP and proxy port. GREAT!

1. Since I am using virtual lab with real VMs and not backups/Surebackup job I manually just started the virtual lab from vcenter. This appears to work just fine but the static mappings feature does not work. Is this because I manually turned on the virtual lab from vcenter instead of firing it up as part of a surebackup job? Any way to get static mapping working without having to create a surebackup job with veeam backups?

By the way manually starting a virtual lab is a very cool way to have an isolated test network to test real VMs(not backups) This can be accomplished in vmware with host only networking but you won't have internet access then.

[Gostev]

Yes, static mapping can only be applied to SureBackup VMs.

[davidb1234]

Thanks Gostev. I found a different problem. I can hit the internet and check for windows updates but cannot actually download them. This is a major bummer.... Anyone know why using the proxy feature to provide internet access to a veeam virtual lab would allow internet access but not windows update downloading? Any workaround for this?

[davidb1234]

I found that you can force windows update to use the IE proxy settings using this commend: Netsh winhttp import proxy source=ie

[Gostev]

10 minutes to the resolution! That's pretty wild Googling skill right there
Thanks for updating, I am sure this will be useful to many future readers.

[nefes]

Just wanted to mention one little thing: with v7 you don't need to use registry keys since Internet access options for Virtual Lab can now be seen in GUI wizard.