Category: IT

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”

Home Lab – Part Two

After a bit of mucking around I’ve managed to get VMware installed on my two home-brew servers.  The first server was completely straightforward and installed the latest version of ESXi6.5.  The second took the image, but on boot failed due to a lack of a network driver, with an error talking about nfs41client.  After a bit of googling I found an article showing how to resolve this by adding a network driver to ESXi6.5.  I followed the steps in the article and the host booted.  If anyone else has this problem please take a look at the great blog available here – http://www.computertechblog.com/adding-realtek-r8168-driver-to-an-esxi-6-0-iso/

Unfortunately my NAS, problematic little beast that it is, has decided that the HDDs in it are no longer useful, and has failed them.  I’m looking into this at the moment, however I think it is time to admit that the iomega needs to go the way of the Dodo.  I’m going to attempt to fix it this week.  One last chance…

IT Home Lab – Back to Physical

I live in Perth WA (Western Australia), and work in IT.  Perth is a beautiful place and as per the posts about my trip to the far North West of the state, it is pretty vast area, and largely untouched.  This is one of the reasons I love living here, however it brings me to the tyranny of distance.  My work lab is in Sydney, and due to the sometimes flaky internet connection I have at home, this can cause me problems in access and working in the lab.  So I’ve decided to build my home lab from the odd bits and pieces that I have picked up over the years.  The point of the lab is to run an environment that will allow me to deploy new software and see how it goes.  The first step though is to build it from scratch.

Back to Physical

The physical components of the lab are essentially old bits of kit that I’ve had lying around for years, cobbled together on a shoestring budget.

Every IT environment is made up the same core components, Storage, Compute, and Network, with additional components such as the rack it is all in, UPS, physical security and so on.  As this is a home lab I’ll be focussing on the core components, and will outline the future growth plans in a later article. Continue reading “IT Home Lab – Back to Physical”

IT Musings

After a bit of prodding from some friends and colleagues I’ve decided to add some posts around my day job as a Systems Engineer at Veeam.  Any and all posts on the site will be my opinion, and in no way reflect the opinions of my employer.  That being said some will be about Veeam and hopefully some of them make sense and are useful for others.