SureBackup Job on VMs with isolation.tools.setinfo=true

[jumave]

Hi,

it did my first tests with SureBackup Jobs on VMs with isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=true. The Job failed on waiting for IP-address on the VM to be verified. If I set isolation.tools.setinfo=false all works fine.

As stated in vSphere Security documentation setting isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=true "is appropriate when guest operating systems must be prevented from modifying configuration settings." You surely want to prevent this in a service provider environment thus setting this to false permanently is not a solution in such case.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to let the SureBackup Job set isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=false before powering on the VMs to be verified?

[Dima P.]

Hello,
Thank you for your question.

The architecture of SureBackup is quite simple: The proxy appliance is a VM that acts as a gateway routing requests from the production network to the isolated network. To connect to isolated networks, Veeam Backup & Replication adds to the proxy appliance a vNIC adapter for each network. Each vNIC adapter gets an IP address from the network to which it is connected, which is typically the same as the IP address of a default gateway in the corresponding production network

By setting isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=true you would stops the Virtual Center client from displaying any information about the Virtual Machine like IP Address, DNS information etc - so this would ruin the connectivity inside the virtual lab and that’s why the job fails.

In my understanding using set isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=true is good when you need to test single VM inside the production network, but this is not the case when you got the isolated virtual lab set up in your environment

Hope that answers your questions.
Cheers!

[foggy]

Wouldn't it be a good idea to let the SureBackup Job set isolation.tools.setinfo.disable=false before powering on the VMs to be verified?

As far as I understand, you are suggesting to switch this parameter for VMs started in the virtual lab in cases where it is set to 'true' for the original (production) VMs. This probably requires deeper analysis, I will discuss this with our R&D. Thanks for the feedback.

[foggy]

As an update on this, in v7 isolation tools set of parameters will be removed from the VMX file on registering the VM during SureBackup or SureReplica task. This will prevent corresponding job failures in situations when Veeam B&R cannot get VM details.