Guest File Indexing - Possible Without RPC?

[brupnick]

Good morning-

I want to start implementing guest file indexing, but we have firewalls that will need to be opened between all of our domains to allow this to happen. Also, the fact that RPC requires 16,000 dynamic ports doesn't sit will with our firewall administrators (and rightfully so). There's an entry in the Veeam KB that links to a Microsoft article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154596) which describes how to modify the registry so that I can establish the dynamic RPC ports, but this requires making a registry change on every server in my environment (this could probably be done through GPO, but let's forget that for one minute).

My question is this: Is it possible to do guest file system indexing in VBR without using RPC? If not, has anyone limited the dynamic RPC ports as per that article with any success? How many ports did you specify and how many VMs were being indexed?

[Gostev]

With VMware, it is possible without any network connectivity to guest. With Hyper-V, network connectivity and RPC is required.

[brupnick]

Seeing as how I'm using VMware, that's great! How is this done?

[foggy]

Via guest interaction API. In case where network connection (via RPC) is not available, API is injected into guest through the ESXi host with the help of VMware Tools.

[brupnick]

So what do I need to do to for this to work? I ask because I created a test job that has one VM, SERVER1, that's in the same domain as my VBR server (no firewall) and one VM, SERVER2, that's in a separate domain (behind a firewall). Indexing of SERVER1 works as expected, but SERVER2 fails with a warning status and a message that reads:

Code: Select all

Failed to index guest file system. Details: RPC function call failed. Function name: [IsSnapshotInProgress]. Target machine: [SERVER2 IP ADDRESS]. RPC error:The RPC server is unavailable. Code: 1722

[tsightler]

It should require no special configuration but sometimes I've seen it fail with strange issues. Logs should tell all.

[chadtandy]

So what do I need to do to for this to work? I ask because I created a test job that has one VM, SERVER1, that's in the same domain as my VBR server (no firewall) and one VM, SERVER2, that's in a separate domain (behind a firewall). Indexing of SERVER1 works as expected, but SERVER2 fails with a warning status and a message that reads:

Code: Select all

Failed to index guest file system. Details: RPC function call failed. Function name: [IsSnapshotInProgress]. Target machine: [SERVER2 IP ADDRESS]. RPC error:The RPC server is unavailable. Code: 1722

We received those errors also when initially setting Veeam up, it was described to me that Veeam tries RPC first and then goes to the guest API connection, so if it errors out you get the RPC error. In our case it was permissions for the server not set correctly, but the RPC error sent us on a wild goose chase first.

-Chad

[brupnick]

It turns out that everyone was correct. My RPC calls were failing (as expected) and the system was failing over to VIX after all (thanks Gostev, foggy, and tsightler). As Chad mentioned, the error is somewhat misleading in that both RPC and VIX were failing, but only RPC was mentioned in the errors. My issue was that, although I thought I had granted all the permissions noted here --> http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 78&start=0, I missed Virtual machine --> Interaction --> Acquire guest control ticket privilege. Once I added this to my custom VBR permission set, the indexing worked as expected.

I have updated my development jobs so that they will try to index tonight and based on my testing results, I'm optimistic that I won't have any issues. Hopefully this will work just like my tests and I can avoid opening any ports for RPC.

Thank you everyone for your help!