Veeam

Veeam Backup and Replication v7 Deep Dive #BCO5362

/ René Bos / 2 Comments

This session, provided by Doug Hazelman and Anton Gostev is all about the new Veeam Backup & Replication v7, launched not even 2 weeks ago.

Veeam v7 Deep Dive

Veeam v7 Deep Dive

I have published an article right after the launch about upgrading your existing Veeam installation and the new features I could find in the first few minutes. Check it out in the related articles section at the bottom of this page.

During this session I learned some new things and added some actions to my to-do which I will perform when I get back from VMworld. I will share these items with you, hopefully helping you to improve your environment with Veeam B&R v7 as well.

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Upgrading to Veeam Backup & Replication v7

/ René Bos / Leave a comment

Yesterday Veeam released Veeam B&R v7, announcing a lot of cool features, including:

  • Tape backups
  • vSphere Web Client Plugin
  • WAN Acceleration
  • Support for VMware vCloud Director
  • Self-Service Portal
  • Hyper-V Virtual Lab
  • Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

Next to the technical improvements there is also a new license edition: Enterprise Plus next to the Standard and Enterprise editions which were already available.

I just downloaded the ISO file from the Veeam website, which is roughly 800 MB.
Using a Windows Server 2012 OS as base, I opened the ISO from within the OS (Still think this is a really cool feature in 2012!)

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Choosing upgrade from the setup wizard took about 5 minutes in my lab environment, which is running Veeam B&R 6.5. Didn’t see any errors, warnings or hickups during the upgrade. Flawless!

I had to re-supply the license file and reboot my machine after completing the setup.

Running the Veeam user interface after upgrading shows a new loader but the UI itself is exactly the same as the previous version.

Clicking around does however reveal some improvements:

  • Storage plugins for HP 3Par and StoreVirtual
  • Instant job summary and throughput statistics when selecting a job item
  • Parallel processing, making it possible to backup multiple VMs/disks at the same time in a job instead of the default sequential way
  • Cloning backup jobs

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I actually didn’t have Enterprise Manager installed, but to tell you more about it, I have installed this on my lab VM. After registering my Veeam B&R server it discovered my vCenter Servers, jobs and VMs automatically.

Features like the Self-Service Portal are unlocked by using the Enterprise Manager.
From what I can see now, you can add users or groups (local/Active Directory) to specific roles and give them permissions to request a restore of VMs or specific guest files.

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And, I was very curious about the vSphere Web Client plugin. The installation is very straight forward and requires Enterprise Manager. After installing, you can use the plugin from the home screen of vSphere Web Client and see a summary of your jobs managed by Enterprise Manager. There is however no possibility to start and stop your jobs from the vSphere Web Client or start backups of a single VM (would be cool!).

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I’m happy with the new release and will encourage people into upgrading to this new release.
More information can be found on the website of Veeam. To do so, click here.

Thanks for reading!

Veeam Management Pack for VMware 6 ASP NET error

/ René Bos / Leave a comment

Hey everyone,

I tried installing Veeam MP6 on an existing server with Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS and ASP.NET 3.5. I kept getting an error stating “Error during ASP NET enabling. Error = 2”.

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The same error appears in the VesWizard setup logs located in C:ProgramDataVeeamSetupTemp.

[10:27:33:21]: ***Veeam***  NT64 property is set
[10:27:33:37]: ***Veeam***  Internal error
[10:27:33:52]: Error during ASP NET enabling. Error = 2

After investigating I needed to install .NET Framework 4.0 or later on the machine.
Currently the latest setup files for .NET Framework 4.5 can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653

Note that installing .NET Framework requires a reboot of the machine. Everything is running fine at my machine right now!

Upgrading to LeftHand OS 10.5

/ René Bos / 5 Comments

Last night I performed an upgrade to SANiQ *ahum* LeftHand OS 10.5 from SANiQ 9.5 on 16 HP LeftHand P4500 G2 storage nodes and want to share a couple of things I learned from this process.

Before actually upgrading I spent some time analysing the possible risks and impact.

HP states that when using the CMC (Centralized Management Console) no downtime whatsoever should occur. This is possible due to the fact that CMC never reboots storage nodes simultaneously when they are the ones responsible for a specific LUN (which is, ofcourse, protected by Network Raid-10).

The possibility that we would suffer data loss was nil and reading other people’s experience with upgrading the storage nodes in combination with VMware was nothing but positive.

Still we wanted to take no risk at all and scheduled an extra backup, right before upgrading the nodes. The backup was performed after regular office hours (6 PM) so if disaster would strike, the least amount of user data would be lost. Running all (7) Veeam backup jobs at the same time took a while to complete (5 hours approximately) and after that I was good to go.

I started the upgrade process around 11 PM and actively monitored all of our systems. Not a single error or warning came by and no downtime was experienced (except the storage nodes themselves of course while they were rebooting).

The HP FOM (Failover Manager) was upgraded first and next the storage nodes were upgraded. They all power cycled and some had to restripe before the process continued. After all nodes were rebooted and upgraded, CMC installed another patch on all systems after they all had another power cycle. This process took about 5 hours to complete.

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I performed a check after the upgrade completed and concluded that only minor issues occured:

  • SQL service on two VMs was stopped, not sure if this is a coincidence or due to the upgrade. Manually started the services OK.
  • Disk access lost on some ESXi hosts, but shortly after the access was resumed automatically.
  • One VM was marked as ‘inaccessible’. Removed it from inventory and re-added it to solve.

So, no major issues but quite some time to complete.

Oh; you should increase the Bandwith Priority of your Management Group inside CMC to increase the speed which will be used to restripe your nodes. I changed this from 16 MB/sec (default) to 40 MB/sec to decrease the total time needed to restripe.

My conclusion is that CMC is a great tool to perform an unattended upgrade of storage clusters. I would trust the tool even without running a backup prior to the process. Still I would recommend running the upgrade in off-hours due to the path failovers, restriping and possible latency spikes.