Surebackup Linux VM Excluded Disk

[lobo519]

I have a linux VM with an excluded disk. When sure backup runs the VM presents a message about the missing disk. "The Disk drive for ... is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait, or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery."

pressing S for skip the VM boots and the surebackup job is successful.

Is there a way to trigger the S automagically?

[foggy]

Have you selected the "Remove excluded disks from VM configuration" check box in the disk exclusion settings?

[lobo519]

Yes

[lobo519]

ahh - I think I have a solution

http://askubuntu.com/questions/120/how- ... ge-on-boot

[foggy]

Great, thanks for sharing.

[avit]

Hi,

I'm trying to get SureBackup working but am hitting a few roadblocks. I'll start with the first issue:

I've set up an application group consisting of just 3 of our VMs - just so that I can run test jobs quickly while I iron out issues and tweak things. The three VMs I've selected are:

1. our Windows 2008 domain controller, which is also one of our DNS servers, and it's the DHCP server
2. an Ubuntu linux box which is a web server (among other things)
3. a Windows server running SQL (internally), which runs web services

The Linux box is a media server, its production VM has 2 vdisks - 1x 50GB with the Linux OS etc on it, and the second vdisk is a 1TB volume containing movies & music. We exclude this disk from our production backup job, because we don't have enough repository space, and because it's all purchased iTunes content, we don't consider it vital - we can easily re-download it all from iTunes if we ever lost it. The problem is, when the SureBackup job runs, this Linux box in the virtual lab sticks at the Ubuntu startup screen, because it can't see (mount) the vdisk that normally gets mounted to /mnt/Media. Ubuntu hangs at the startup screen with an error message - although I'm sure there's a default timeout that it will eventually reach, and boot up. But I wanted to ask on the forums, what to do in this situation - is there no way SureBackup can have the virtual lab VM mount the production vdisk Media volume? I kinda don't see how Veeam could do what I want it to do, if it doesn't have a backed up VM image that contains the Media vdisk too, since giving the virtual lab access to the production Media vdisk would presumably be considered a risky thing to do...??

NB: My application group consists of VMs added via the "Backup > from Infrastructure" option - in case that's relevant.

The more I think/type about this, the more I think my only option is going to be to just let the Ubuntu mount hang reach its timeout, so it boots up minus the Media volume. The test scripts can still be run successfully without this Media volume mounted, so it is definitely NO big deal. I just thought it would be preferable to have the virtual lab VM boot up as realistically as possible.

[foggy]

I will ask the same question as above, just to confirm: have you selected the "Remove excluded disks from VM configuration" check box in the disk exclusion settings of your job?

[avit]

Firstly please accept my apologies for not finding this existing thread first - I did a Google search first, as you're supposed to, but for some reason I didn't find this thread. Thank you for merging it.

Anyway, no that tick box is not enabled in my backup job. I saw that option previously and its relevance didn't completely sink in, plus I think I was concerned about having my VM backups not include the configuration for disks that I would need in a disaster scenario - paranoia stoked by lack of Veeam experience Obviously that was flawed logic, because the entire reason you exclude a disk from the backup is because it's not important enough to back up - so, obviously it's not important to have it immediately present during a recovery scenario either

I will give that a go and let you know if it improves the situation. Do you know if I'll have to re-run the backup job for that to take effect? That is, will the excluded disks only be excluded from *future* backups or will Veeam retroactively change previous restore points?

[veremin]

Once enabled, this option will remove excluded disks from VM configuration file during subsequent ("future") runs. Thanks.