This article is intended for administrators wishing to understand how to backup VMs running on SvHCI with VEEAM agents.
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Backup of Guest Virtual Machines on SvHCI
With SvHCI 1.3.x the only way to achieve Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is to utilize a third-party product.
This being guest operating system backups of individual virtual machines via an in-guest agent.
Each backup vendor provides different methods for this, however SvHCI 1.3.x doesn't offer a VM snapshot mechanism, or an external API for VM backup.
Bearing this mind, the use of in-guest agents enables virtual machines to be backed up as normal, with varying features depending on the vendor.
Worked Example: VEEAM
Veeam is a very popular backup product that focuses on protecting virtual infrastructure.
It provides workflows and processes for managing those backups, as well as disaster recovery and full site replication. Veeam itself is a huge product with a lot of options, but we will focus here on the basic backup story, how that works with in-guest agents, and run through some examples setting this up with SvHCI as the underlying hypervisor.
We will cover the recovery process in a separate document, where these options and processes are explored in more detail.
Step 1: Install Veaam
Veeam is generally installed in Windows as a guest VM within the infrastructure. In this example, it is outside the SvHCI cluster, but on the same local network and able to communicate with the two hosts over fast networking.
In our example, Veeam has its own local storage, however it offers the ability to consume external storage as a backup repository, however this document won't go into architecture in more depth than the below.
Typically Veeam will have more than one location for backups, with a local drive the first destination, and often an off-site second location for recovery, an external backup repository or SAN, and in some cases direct connections to dedicated hardware provisioned for disaster recovery. Veeam includes options for these secondary and tertiary locations, so they all integrate as part of the overall workflow for an organisation.
For this example however, we are just going to perform basic full backups of the guest Virtual Machines, and show how the VEEAM in-guest agents are deployed and work.
Once installed and licensed, log into the Veeam Backup and Replication console with the details provided on installation:
Typically with a VMware vSphere environment you would login to vCenter at this point, and the Veeam server maintains an active connection to the hypervisor, within which all operations are performed. When attempting to add items under “virtual infrastructure” the options do not include the StorMagic SvHCI hypervisor, therefore we must treat the SvHCI guest VMs as if they were physical infrastructure, and install agents to perform the backups.
This means that the Veeam server will login and connect to each individual virtual machine rather than the hypervisor underneath it.
This approach involves managing each VM individually, so at large scale, can become complicated. Veeam includes an option to create a “protection group” which we will use to organize the jobs and associate them with each other for scheduling.
The protection group will be a collection of individual computers (in our case virtual machines within SvHCI) and allow jobs to be created that represent the site’s overall backup and protection strategy.
In our case, we should select the “individual computers” option:
Add the IP address of your VMs, and use the “Add” button to add login credentials, being careful to select the correct option (SSH for Linux, Standard account for Windows) and, optionally, store these credentials for future use.
Note that I have three accounts stored, one for my vCenter, not being covered in this article.
Additionally I have one for my Windows guest VM and one for my Ubuntu guest VM – labelled accordingly to assist with organisation.
Use the “Test Now” button in the bottom right to test that these credentials work, ensure this test passes before moving on to the next section.
Note: For windows guests, file and printer sharing needs to be opened on the firewall (for ICMP/ping) and RDP enabled to allow remote login from the Veeam server – see System Requirements - Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows Guide for requirements).
On the next page, we decide on schedules and set up the agent installation. Agent installation happens remotely, via this wizard, assuming the correct credentials and the login test has passed.
For reference the “Distribution Server” is the Veeam server. In larger deployments there may be more than one backup server within the infrastructure, and so it may be that one is preferred for use over another due to its proximity to the source machines.
Additional options are available here for installing application-aware plugins, for example SQL and file servers both have some additional options. For the purpose of this document, I am performing just basic backups and will not be configuring any additional advanced options like this, but be aware that those options exist, as they do with agent-less backups with hypervisor integration.
Under Advanced options there are some more additional features for the protection group, including bandwidth throttling. These are being left at defaults for this exercise.
The next page confirms any actions that need to be performed on the backup server before the group can be created.
Click on "Apply" and let the system go ahead and install the agents and create the protection group.
Note: This has not set up any backups yet, this process is simply about giving the backup server access to the virtual machines so that we can continue.
Click "Finish".
The discovery job is then started to begin the process of bringing those VMs into the Veeam infrastructure:
As can be seen below, one of them worked correctly, and one had a problem.
Troubleshoot these connection issues before moving forward.
Note: Any Windows virtual machine that was built with BIOS rather than the required UEFI support will fail to deploy the Veeam Agent. See here: UEFI firmware requirements | Microsoft Learn for more details.
Once the protection group has been created, select “Create Job or Policy”
Select “Managed by agent”
Provide a job name.
Select "Add..."
Adding the Protection group...
Select "Entire computer" to create a restore image, or file-level backup for granular access to the data only. This guide leverages the Entire Computer backup, such that we can do a full VM restore in a later document.
Select to backup to "Veeam backup repository"
Select the local Veeam server
Select the backup repository
Guest processing options left blank for this example, but change/edit according to your workloads as desired.
Set a schedule for ongoing backups
And review the Summary
Right click the job and “Start” or click the “Start” button on the top ribbon
The job may be monitored for progress as below, and will show up alongside all other backup jobs in the history, alongside any other physical machines or virtual infrastructure.
Complete backups below:
See Also
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