Veeam IO Filter Upgrade

[LEWISF]

Hello -

I upgraded our environment to Veeam 12. During the upgrade I was prompted to also upgrade the IO filter for our VMware clusters. I did not do the upgrade because there were questions regarding how many hosts would be affected and if any of the hosts would be affected, if the hosts would have to be put in maintenance mode, and if any hosts would need to be rebooted. Can someone please let me know if this is something that can be done without disruption to our environment?

Thanks in advance.

[Mildur]

Hi Lewisf

did not do the upgrade because there were questions regarding how many hosts would be affected and if any of the hosts would be affected,

I/O filters are installed on every ESXi host in a cluster. Therefore they need to be updated on every host. Use the I/O Filter Management Wizard to check which cluster have the I/O filters installed.

if the hosts would have to be put in maintenance mode,

Yes, they have to put into maintenance.

and if any hosts would need to be rebooted.

No, they won't be rebooted. But during maintenance on the host, all virtual machines must either be temporarily suspended or migrated to another ESXi host.
If you have DRS enabled and your hosts use Shared Storage, this can happen automatically one by one. If not, you need to enable maintenance host for one host and let Veeam update the I/O filter. Then disable maintenance mode for that host. Repeat the procedure for all other hosts.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Best,
Fabian

[LEWISF]

Fabian -

Thanks for the breakdown. Appreciate the details. I know the cluster that needs to be updated. Is there a way to control which hosts are updated manually?

TIA.

LEWISF

[Mildur]

If DRS is disabled, you can set each host manually into maintenance mode for the upgrade.
The I/O filter must be updated, or CDP jobs will not work.

Best,
Fabian

[LEWISF]

Follow up to this. We removed the CDP job we were using so now I want to uninstall the I/O filter. I have the procedure. Just need to know if the hosts need to be in maintenance mode or if they need to be rebooted? I think the answer is no since the uninstall takes place at the cluster level but just need to verify.

[hexadecimal]

Yes, the filter is installed on each host in the cluster, not just at the cluster level. I can't recall if they have to rebooted (i want to say no). I've used "other methods" of upgrading the io filter (search around the forum) when I either had issues or wanted to avoid going into maintenance. Not the typical approach but it worked for me in earlier versions.