Programming in a small software company

vSphere and Veeam one week later

December 4th, 2010

My issue with Veeam Backup not sending emails was resolved by using a different email server.  Veeam support was OK; they responded to my emails, but they don’t see too technically savvy.  They do respond within a few hours though!  In todays world, that makes them top 10%.

Veeam is running nightly and backing up 6TB of VM’s.  The ESX “dirty block” tracking does a good job, so this is taking between 30 min and 2 hours to complete.  The resulting files are fairly small.

I tested Veeams “instant recovery”; note: this is the feature that disables NFS shares on Windows Servers.  It allows you to select the backup date of the VM that you want to restore, then you pick your vSphere Server and say go.

After it’s restored, the VM runs off the Veeam image via NFS (read only) and you may use it directly.  There is an option to store disk edits locally or on your vSphere server.

The restored VM runs a little slower, as you would expect, but it does work.  It’s a very nice feature.

Sure Backup is the primary reason that I picked Veeam as my vendor.  What is does is mount the backup image, boot it up inside of a private network, and verify it works (ping and script). 

I’m running into issues with some of my VM’s because they have static IP’s.  I’ll get those figured out one by one.

The second issue I ran into was a group of broken disks I received from Newegg.  I should be getting replacements next week, so once they are in, the backup server will be fully populated.  I do have confidence that the disks in the drive array now are fine.

The end of all this IT work is in sight now!

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