V6 - Setting Networkmode for certain VM's (feature-request)

[stevenrodenburg1]

Bonjour mon amis,

Small nag in V6.

Proxies in our site are all hard set to Virtual App mode with optional fallback to Network mode. This is fine for basically all VM's as HotMode works flawless.

However, we have a couple of strange chickens in the farm. They are virtual appliances. Forget about installing VMtools or anything. They just "exist".
Hot-adding always fails (which is perfectly understandable) and Veeam says so in the log (that it is not supported for the disk).

The nag is this:
In v5, one could choose the mode inside job-definitions. So these chickens had their backup and replica jobs set to network-mode and jobs always completed without warning.
In v6 it is not possible to make an exception for a specific VM inside the job. It will try HotAdd, will always fail and fail-back to Network-mode as configured.
The jobs always complete properly, that is not the problem. But they always end with a warning (because of the HotAdd failure).

Feature-request: The ability to overrule the default proxy's mode setting to "network" for special VM's like these. (functionality-wise: just like in v5)

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Steven,

Job mode functionality has been offloaded to proxy servers in v6, so If you want to explicitly use network mode for some your VMs, the only option would be to create a new backup job and deploy a new backup proxy for that.

Thank you for you feedback anyway!

[ThomasMc]

As an alternative you could change it on the fly

Code: Select all

$proxy = Get-VBRViProxy -Name "ProxyName"
#Modes 'Auto', 'San', 'Hotadd', 'Nbd'
$proxy.Options.TransportMode = "Nbd"
$proxy.SaveOptions()

Get-VBRJob -Name "Job Name" | Start-VBRJob

$proxy.Options.TransportMode = "Auto"
$proxy.SaveOptions()

But of-course the whole job would run in network mode

[stevenrodenburg1]

Thanks Thomas,

How to apply your script? I assume you schedule / kick-off jobs from the CLI ?

Do you have a more complete example?

The whole job running in network-mode is ok. The job will only contain these appliance-VM's anyway.

[ThomasMc]

Just tested this one out and worked as expected so just edit the Job Name and Proxy and save as ps1 file

Code: Select all

asnp "VeeamPSSnapIn" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$proxy = Get-VBRViProxy -Name "ProxyName"
#Modes 'Auto', 'San', 'Hotadd', 'Nbd'
$proxy.Options.TransportMode = "Nbd"
$proxy.SaveOptions()

Get-VBRJob -Name "Job Name" | Start-VBRJob

$proxy.Options.TransportMode = "Auto"
$proxy.SaveOptions()

And just use a Scheduled Task to kick it off (e.g http://www.ilovepowershell.com/how-to-r ... uled-task/)

[taylorbox]

[merged]

Most of our VM's are backed up using virtual appliance mode, but some VM's require network mode (because they use IDE disks instead of SCSI, and I can't switch them to SCSI at this time).

I'm using the Veeam server itself as the backup proxy with automatic mode selection and failover to network mode enabled, so of course the VM's that require network mode are still backed up okay (via failover to network).

However, the job completion email that Veeam sends out always says "WARNING: Hot add is not supported for this disk, failing over to network mode" for those VM's.

We really don't want to see these warnings every single day in our backup job email reports. In Veeam B&R 5 the backup mode could be selected per job, so we could avoid this situation by simply creating a separate job for VM's requiring network mode.

Working with tech support, we added the local Veeam server itself to the Servers list using its loopback IP address (127.0.0.1), so now I can create jobs using the backup proxy named after the loopback IP address and which is set to network mode.

But is this the best way to do this?

I'd simply like all job completion emails to just say Success when in fact they're successful, regardless of which backup mode was used.

We're using Veeam Backup & Replication 6 running as a VMware virtual machine (vSphere 5).

Thanks,
-Taylorbox