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IanPattison
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Lost VBM - am I screwed?

Post by IanPattison »

So last week I lost a whole VMWare host to a ransomeware attack - no problem, I have backups and they're offsite.

I recover things to the point where I can consider restoring data. Pull my latest VBK file back from offsite and get ready to do a bare-metal restore.... naturally it won't restore, because all I have is a VBK, I don't have a VBM.

It looks like I can regenerate the VBM if I have the full version of Veeam B&R, but I can't see any way to do this from Veeam Agent for Windows.

How screwed am I?
Mildur
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Re: Lost VBM - am I screwed?

Post by Mildur » 1 person likes this post

Hi Ian

May I ask how you protected your VMs? Veeam Agent shouldn't be used for VM Backups on a VMware Host.
Veeam Agent for Windows requires both VBM and VBK (+VIB for incremental backups). But you can import single VBK file to a VBR server. You can use our free community edition for the recovery.

For the restore, I recommend the following steps:
1) Install a new VBR server
2) Import the VBK files of your VMs/Agents --> User Guide
3) Use Instant Recovery/Entire VM restore to recover all your VMs --> User Guide

If you have done VM Backups, you may also use our Extract Utility to export the VM files for your vSphere VMs. You can copy them to the VMware datastore and import the VM manually. -->User Guide

Best,
Fabian
Product Management Analyst @ Veeam Software
IanPattison
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Re: Lost VBM - am I screwed?

Post by IanPattison »

Hi Fabian,

Thanks for getting back to me. I've managed to import the backup, but can't restore it (vPowerNFS trouble - I'm running free ESXi, so at least I know the problem). I'm working on extracting everything so I can take it to a place with actually licensed VMWare where I'll try this again.

I don't have an ideal environment for this. This is a single leased datacentre server running free ESXi and a single production Windows server. When I set things up I don't remember if there was no Community Edition for VB&R or if the free ESXi was the problem, but my best option at the time was Veeam Agent for Windows. So I would run Veeam agent, dropping files to a Linux VM running SAMBA on the same VMWare host (different datastore). From there I would sync the VBK (weekly) to Amazon.

It's not great, but it's the best I can do with the budget I have... That said, I'm going to make sure I take the VBM files offsite as well.

This is basically my worst case scenario here...

Ian
Mildur
Product Manager
Posts: 10086
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Full Name: Fabian K.
Location: Switzerland
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Re: Lost VBM - am I screwed?

Post by Mildur » 1 person likes this post

Hi Ian

Unfortunately, free ESXi hosts are not supported for Integration with Veeam. Only paid licenses has the mandatory vStorageAPI features enabled.
What you can do now:

1. Create a recovery media from the same OS you want to restore. Or take the one you may already have created.
2. Save it as an ISO on your ESXI Hosts datastore
3. Boot your VM from the recovery media
4. Restore your VM from the imported backup on the backup server --> User Guide

The entire process is documented here:
Restoring from Veeam Recovery Media

Best,
Fabian
Product Management Analyst @ Veeam Software
IanPattison
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Re: Lost VBM - am I screwed?

Post by IanPattison » 1 person likes this post

Hi Fabian,

Fortunately I have a licensed ESXi ecostructure at my day job. I transferred everything there, ran the instant recovery then transferred it all back (it took a while over slow links, but it's done).

I have a working VM once again!

Thanks for all your help. I'll be making sure I keep offsite copies of the recovery image and the VIB and VBM files as well.
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