We are in the process of migrating off of VMWare over to Nutanix and so far so good.
A minor complication I have seen is that there is no PowerShell cmdlet for quick backup on a Nutanix AHV VM. We are used to running scripts to take quick backups of vmware vm's right before applying windows patches every month.
How are the rest of the community handling backing up the Nutanix AHV VM's before applying windows update to your environment?
TIA, Larry
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opsdev00
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david.domask
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Re: Veeam, Nutanix, Patching and Quick Backups
Hi Larry,
Will let others who administer Nutanix environments share their ideas; within Veeam, the most immediate solution i can think of is to temporarily set exclusions for VMs that don't need the quick backup on their normal jobs and run the jobs w/ exclusions (remember to remove the exlcusions afterwards). That will achieve the same outcome of a quick backup, though naturally it's not automated.
Will let others who administer Nutanix environments share their ideas; within Veeam, the most immediate solution i can think of is to temporarily set exclusions for VMs that don't need the quick backup on their normal jobs and run the jobs w/ exclusions (remember to remove the exlcusions afterwards). That will achieve the same outcome of a quick backup, though naturally it's not automated.
David Domask | Product Management: Principal Analyst
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mikkeland
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Re: Veeam, Nutanix, Patching and Quick Backups
Hi,
I cannot speak to your specifc scenario regarding backups-before-updates, but I would suggest looking into using the REST API for starting backup jobs outside of the regular schedule.
I manage two Nutanix/Veeam environments and one has chosen to base Veeam selections on Nutanix catagories, and the other basically has a catch-all-job. I.e. I think I could only kick-off jobs for a category (site 1) or every vm (site 2).
I have two approaches that could work for a more targed backup
Option 1
- connect to veeam via REST API
- refresh the Nutanix connection (optional - to make sure to have a complete vm list)
- create on-demand-job with limited retention and limited to required VMs
- run the job
- do the upgrade
Option 2 - based on categories.
- Have a Nutanix category called "OnDemand Backup". Leave it empty
- Have a Veeam backup job targeting the Ondemand category
- Use Nutanix API og GUI to add required VMs to the category
- refresh the Nutanix connection (optional - to make sure to have a complete vm list)
- Kickstart the Veeam job either through a schedule or REST API
Just spit balling
/Mikkel
I cannot speak to your specifc scenario regarding backups-before-updates, but I would suggest looking into using the REST API for starting backup jobs outside of the regular schedule.
I manage two Nutanix/Veeam environments and one has chosen to base Veeam selections on Nutanix catagories, and the other basically has a catch-all-job. I.e. I think I could only kick-off jobs for a category (site 1) or every vm (site 2).
I have two approaches that could work for a more targed backup
Option 1
- connect to veeam via REST API
- refresh the Nutanix connection (optional - to make sure to have a complete vm list)
- create on-demand-job with limited retention and limited to required VMs
- run the job
- do the upgrade
Option 2 - based on categories.
- Have a Nutanix category called "OnDemand Backup". Leave it empty
- Have a Veeam backup job targeting the Ondemand category
- Use Nutanix API og GUI to add required VMs to the category
- refresh the Nutanix connection (optional - to make sure to have a complete vm list)
- Kickstart the Veeam job either through a schedule or REST API
Just spit balling
/Mikkel
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