Category: Home Lab

Protecting Office365 with Veeam

Just about every day I speak to a client who is looking to migrate to Office 365, or who have already migrated to Office 365, and have not considered Office 365 Backup. Typically it is a first step in with Mail, and maybe as far as SharePoint and OneDrive. In a few advanced deployments this has included Dynamics Online as well.

I’ve seen Office365 deployments, and worked with a few as well however to continue with my home lab I decided to deploy an O365 Mail instance rather than Exchange On Premise.

The first step was to set up a free trial account with some users. This really couldn’t have been easier. After finding the registration link it was a case of adding the details where required and then I had a working email account and Admin portal. I added some additional users and I was done. For an admittedly small and simple deployment it took around 15 minutes to set up and have working. Continue reading “Protecting Office365 with Veeam”

Connect Veeam to a Cloud Service Provider

Veeam has the ability to connect to numerous Cloud and Service Providers globally built right into the console. You can select an SP based on the type of service that you would like, either Backup-as-a-Service or Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), and how much you want to pay for that service. Once selected it as simple as the Service Provider giving you three items, a URL or IP address to connect too, and a username and password to access the Service.

Continue reading “Connect Veeam to a Cloud Service Provider”

How to add Infinidat Storage plugin to Veeam

Veeam Backup and Replication added the ability to utilise plug-ins from different Storage Array manufacturers in version 9.5 update 3. This should allow Storage partners to be added much faster than in previous versions through the use an API release to the Storage manufacturers.  The first cab off the ranks is Infinidat.

How then do you use one of the plug-ins?  Looking into the console there is no reference to it.  The secret is to check on your Available Product Downloads through the support portal available at https://my.veeam.com

Here you will find the Product Downloads that you’re entitled to, and can download the plug-in directly.

Additional Storage Plug-ins

Continue reading “How to add Infinidat Storage plugin to Veeam”

Veeam Agent Failure

I’ve recently been hit by a power outage which has knocked my entire lab offline (no UPS) and caused some problems to spring up. This was compounded by my Veeam license keys running out at the same time.  The big problem seemed to be the one server with a Veeam Agent on it.

After fixing (most) of the hardware issues I moved onto the license keys and had these resolved pretty quickly. Note that the free edition was working quite happily, however some of my jobs were not because they utilised the Server Edition of the Agent.

NOPS01 RPC error

On looking into this a bit more I could see that I was receiving an error about RPC to the nominated server, the NOPS box from my previous post on Agents – https://wp.me/p9GJYv-6y, this seemed a bit strange so I kicked the job off again and went to look in more detail at what was going on.  Whilst the job was running I discovered the first issue, the server was powered off. D’oh! Putting that one down to baby brain I powered on the server and tried the backup again, which came out with the same error.  I’ve seen this error before with firewalls so I ruled that out.  I applied some new NFR licenses onto the VBR server and gave it a reboot to ensure all the services were running correctly and still no dice. Continue reading “Veeam Agent Failure”

RDMs, Clusters, and Veeam

VMware has the ability to pass through from shared storage the raw settings of a LUN to a single VM.  This Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is achieved using a proxy file inside of a VMFS volume.  The benefits of this include being able to send disk commands to the storage, and support for clustering technologies.  In the Veeam world this has stopped backups from working as Veeam has traditionally accessed VMware snapshots to perform backups.

With the addition of physical agents, centrally managed through either the Veeam console or through Veeam Availability Console, these VM’s can now be protected, providing cluster aware backups on RDMs, inside of the virtual world.

Before we dive into protecting RDMs, lets take a look at what they are, how they are different, and some competing technologies.

For block storage presented to VMware, there are four major ways to use the storage.  RDMs, independent disks, vmdks, and VVols. Continue reading “RDMs, Clusters, and Veeam”