SureBackup Questions

[ekisner]

Hi folks.. I've fought with surebackup for years. Never had it work right. For the first time however, I've managed to spin up a SB job and have everything work... well... everything Veeam related.

I spun up the lab and interestingly, the load balancer in the app group showed up as a brand new install... no config, no license, default password. Very bizarre. After a quick chat with their support, the load balancer apparently "doesn't support snapshots" (I'm frankly amazed at the behaviour). But I'm of course welcomed to take my feedback to their feature request page so that they can think about adding the feature sometime in the next 10 years.

Anyways.

I'm trying to set up a sandbox of our SharePoint environment, so we can test out a major upgrade and let the stakeholders do their own tests afterward. The load balancers are a critical part of this puzzle.

The footprint on the server is quite low. I could in concept clone one of the load balancers, change the vmnic to point to the SureBackup vSwitch, back up the configuration from production and then restore it into the clone. But... that depends on whether or not the proxy server needs to know about it or if it'll just facilitate either way.

The clone job is running now, just figured I'd start here too in case I need a workaround.

[PTide]

Hi,

If I got you right, then your plan should work. SureBackup (SB) proxy does not need to know whether the load balancers (LB) in the isolated lab have been copied manually or deployed automatically from the backup. SB proxy serves as a gateway, effectively isolating the lab network from the production so that it does not interfere with the business processes during verification. It also provides access to the isolated network from the outside.

Thanks

[ekisner]

Sadly, SB ended up not really fitting our needs.

Given that it's a major upgrade with lots of stakeholders, we need it to be running for a while for stakeholders to test functionality (probably a month). More to the point, if something like a reboot happens to the backup server, we need the lab to not get reverted back to the backup point if the job stops. That's of course assuming we take the extra step of backing up the staged backup, so that we can run that backup of backup in the Sure Backup job without interference from regular production backups. (And just so that I can say it again... backup!)

We've got an actual virtual lab now, with a pfSense firewall at the head. It works remarkably well and performs the same as the SureBackup Virtual lab did. We just clone servers, move the NIC over to the vSwitch, and we're golden.

Some form of long term SureBackup job would have been a very desirable thing. Not sure if it's on your roadmap, not sure if that's even in the same direction as your product roadmap... but it would have been useful to have it out of the box.

[PTide]

More to the point, if something like a reboot happens to the backup server, we need the lab to not get reverted back to the backup point if the job stops.

May I ask you where was your redo logs datastore configured to reside?

Some form of long term SureBackup job would have been a very desirable thing. Not sure if it's on your roadmap, not sure if that's even in the same direction as your product roadmap... but it would have been useful to have it out of the box.

Ok, noted!

Thanks!

[ekisner]

May I ask you where was your redo logs datastore configured to reside?

A datastore on the production SAN.

It is my understanding that SB will clean up the redo logs when the job ends. Is this incorrect?

[PTide]

It is my understanding that SB will clean up the redo logs when the job ends. Is this incorrect?

Yes, that is correct.

P.S. By the way, there is an existing thread that describes a possible workaround how to get a permanent lab:

Thanks!

[ekisner]

I had experimented with it. Had some issues with it, though I confess I do not recall the details of those problems.

I had not seen that thread, but it was the gist of what I was trying (I theorized that the lab machine could be used as a layer 3 device whether the job was running or not). A support ticket I submitted while having problems getting it up and running came back with a solid 'not supported/intended' from them. Maybe it was how I asked, maybe it's because it's not actually supported.

Either way, the wheel is reinvented so not much point in changing now. I appreciate your attention on the subject.