SureBackup & U-AIR hand holding

[mjgreen81]

Hi All,

I am new to Veeam backup and am currently trying to configure the U-AIR wizards to allow me to restore individual Exchange items etc (and eventually SQl & AD). We don't have an enterprise server so I will be looking to do everything on the one server, bypassing the virtual lab approval process.

I am making some good progress but just need some hand-holding while i go through the configuration, hopefully you guys can help me with that!

So far I have setup:

An Application Group
A Virtual Lab
And I have just finished setting up my SureBackup which is set to run for the first time tonight.

Ideally I would quite like to test this today but I am worried about the impact running a surebackup job during working hours would have? As the SureBackup job us is running in the Virtual Lab I am guessing this has no effect on the 'live' vm's?

Should I wait for the this to happen overnight or is it safe to run the surebackup job during working hours? I just cant quite get my head around what the surebackup job does and whether it uses the .VBK & .VRB backup files or the 'live' VM's.

Any advise appreciated.

[foggy]

Mike, if you are concerned about overlapping backup and SureBackup jobs, then backup job will automatically stop any running SureBackup jobs which are locking the backup files that it needs to update (so backup jobs will always complete fine). No impact on production in terms of performance also, unless you are storing backups on production storage or have limited hardware resources.

I would recommend to review the sticky FAQ and product user guide for better understanding of how SureBackup works.

[mjgreen81]

Ok great thanks. So I should be able to run the Surebackup job which is due to run for the first time overnight tonight, now (4.10pm) without any impact?

What actually happens when the surebackup job runs?

[mjgreen81]

I am also a little confused by the folllowing in the sticky:

"Q: I am the only admin in a small environment. Do I have to use the requests workflow in order to be able to restore application items?
A: No, obviously we do not want you to spend time creating and approving lab requests for yourself. As backup administrator, you can simply right-click any VM in the running SureBackup job session, and start application-item recovery procedure immediately. Just make sure AIR wizards are installed on your Veeam Backup server."

Does this mean that the Surebackup job session has to be 'running' to allow the AIR procedure (currently the status is 'stopped')?

[veremin]

If you’re not ok with thinking about SureBackup as “Veeam magic”, below is a general description of this process.

SureBackup is a special VB&R functionality responsible for automation and simplification of backup verification process. It allows you to start VMs from backup-files in an isolated environment and to perform reliability/availability tests.

VMs are run directly from backup files without being restored to production datastore. It can be done owing to utilization of the Veeam vPower NFS service which is a Windows service that runs on a Windows-based backup repository server and enables it to act as an NFS server. This service allows Veeam Backup & Replication to mount a compressed and deduplicated backup file as a regular VMDK file directly to the ESX(i) host via NFS, so transparent access to the backed up VM images is guaranteed to ESX(i) hosts.

During verification process, VM image stays in r/o state, with all of the changes being written to redo log file that are stored on specified datastore. After compeletion of recovery verification, redo logs are removed.

According to User Guide, firstly you should follow these steps:

1. Create an application group required to verify full functionality of backed up VMs. That said, Application group should contain VMs running applications on which VMs to be verified are dependent.
2. Create an isolated virtual lab where VMs are going to be tested.
3. Create a recovery verification job.

During SureBackup job run, VMs from the application group are started from backups in the required order and remain running while VMs from verified backups are booted and tested.

More detailed information can be found in the corresponding User Guide.

Does this mean that the Surebackup job session has to be 'running' to allow the AIR procedure (currently the status is 'stopped')?

As to your question, yes it has to be in “running” state.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

That is very helpful, thank you.

So I understand that if I were to go through the formal workflow of requesting a (e.g.) 30 min session on the virtual lab, the VM's which have been created in the vLab will be deleted and eveything removed after 30 minutes.

As I want to bypass the formal workflow and use the simplified method do I have to start the Surebackup job manually and stop it manually when I have recovered my item?

[foggy]

SureBackup job is launched automatically by the request of the corresponding U-AIR wizard, however, you can also run it manually. In case of simplified workflow, make sure you have selected the Keep the application group running once the job completes check box as the virtual lab will be shut down as soon as the job verifies all VMs.

[mjgreen81]

Ok thank you Foggy.

Sorry for asking so many questions, it just scares me playing around with this stuff and I want to make sure I dont make any mistakes!

I didnt get time manually run my surebackup job last night before I went home so I left it to run as per the overnight schedule for the first time. Unfortunately it failed but I think this is due to the fact that the application group I used was one that had been created several months for what reason I am not sure.

So today I have created a new Application Group and configured it as per my requirements.

I want to manually run the surebackup job for the first time, but one more thing is scaring me. I dont quite understand how I can make sure that the vm's created in my vlab during the process do not interfere with my live production servers.

I have pretty much selected the default setting in my vlab proxy:

(check) Use Proxy appliance in this virtual lab

Production network = prod (our live production network)
Ip Address: obtain automatically
DNS server: Obtain automatically

Networking: Basic (automatic configuration)

Does this sound correct? I am probably being over cautious but like I say, i want to be sure that I do not interfere with our live production vm's (especially if I run this for the first time during working hours). As I have been reading up about this there seems to be an awful lot of configuration I can do during these steps but I have pretty much chosen all the default settings!

[foggy]

Mike, there's nothing to worry about, production and virtual lab networks are completely isolated, actually they use different virtual networks. The only way for a data packet to get from one network to another is to go through the proxy appliance created as a part of the virtual lab. I would suggest to review the SureBackup overview section of the Veeam B&R user guide that provides pretty good description of the principles of virtual lab networking. Btw, here is another good yet short explanation.

[mjgreen81]

Ok, thank you . Its just worrying when you are doing this with your DC and Mail server

I will give it a try after lunch and let you know how I get on

[mjgreen81]

Ok, well just tried it and unfortunately it failed.

Everything seemed to be going quite well, but then the Ping test on the DC failed with error:

"network Adapter 1: IP address X.X.X.X failed - request timed out"

The IP address displayed above is the same as my production server IP

After some time the process continued and the 3 x test scripts (DNS server, Domain Controller & Global Catalog) all failed with code 10060.

I will start looking into the cause of these errors!

[mjgreen81]

This was caused by me having incorrect default gateway/subnet mask settings in the Virtual Lab.

Im making some progress now....