Veeam

How to automatically remove VMs from backup

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It’s been some time since my last blog post in general, and a lot of time has passed since my last Veeam blog post in particular. I just recently stumbled across something in Veeam Backup & Replication that I wanted to share with you. When you check my latest home lab generation (I did a rebuild and also exchanged some coins for refurbished hardware), you can see that there was something going on.

But why am I talking about Veeam Backup & Replication? Well, because I’m using it in the free “Community Edition” for my homelab. And because I still love Veeam. And when I read social media posts like this one, then I get watery eyes.

What is this Community Edition?

With this free gift from Veeam, you can protect up to 10 workloads. No matter if on VMware or Hyper-V, you can protect Windows and Linux servers, laptops, NAS, and more. You can enjoy (more or less) all the awesome features of the Enterprise edition, like:

  • Effective protection for virtual and physical workloads on-premises
  • Restore VMs quickly and get fast granular file and application-item restores with Veeam Explorers for Microsoft applications
  • Create bootable copies of workloads onsite or in offsite locations for migration and disaster recovery
  • Restore and/or migrate on-premises Windows/Linux VMs, physical servers, and endpoints to AWS, Azure, and Azure Stack
  • Verify that backups are free of malware before restoring them to production
  • Simple and powerful file protection of unstructured data through an easy-to-use wizard-driven approach
  • And many things more!

Sure, some really cool stuff is limited to the Enterprise edition (like various storage integrations, etc.). But still, it’s an awesome piece of software that’s free forever (the Community Edition), and fits perfectly for homelabs.

But enough marketing, you know the good stuff anyway. Let’s get back to the topic.

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Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows – The network location cannot be reached

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This blog post is the first with Veeam as a topic for years! I can only hope that it helps at least some people struggling with the same problem I had.

I’m a PC gamer. Still. When I find some time for fun and games, you may find me on the grounds of Battlefield 2042, or maybe I’m driving a tractor in Farming Simulator 2022. My gaming computer is still capable of playing the most recent games. Maybe not with the best graphics and most recent graphic technologies, but they run and make fun.

Anyways.

On this gaming PC, I’ve installed the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows (the free one). Since ages. It works well, but sometimes, the backup fails. Even if you have your games available on demand to be downloaded at any time (Steam, EA, Ubisoft, etc.) and don’t need to install the games from DVDs anymore, it is still annoying if your disk goes bad or something screws up your Windows. I’m using a Synology NAS as my backup target, connected over a 10 Gbit/s ethernet link. The computer itself is equipped with some Samsung NVMe SSDs, so even a full backup is done pretty quickly.

The point is that the computer always takes some time until the network connection is ready and working fine. That’s by design. You log in with Windows Hello, for example, the Desktop is loading, and somewhen the LAN connection is also ready. But Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows already started its job (in case it’s scheduled and if it has missed that time slot) before the network is ready. And this job will fail because the network is not yet ready.

Error: [PCNAME] Failed to get disk free space. The network location cannot be reached.

I searched for a while on the internet and stumbled across a Veeam forum post. There they mentioned enabling the “When backup target is connected” function.

I enabled this feature and tried it out. It worked.

The backup job will now usually succeed.

Yes, usually. Veeam Agent still starts the job before the network is ready (directly after logging in to Windows). And this job may fail. But the job will start again as soon as there is connectivity to your NAS (SMB share). And this time, the job runs just fine and successful.

Veeam Vanguard Summit 2019 Prague – Day 3 Recap

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CDP – Continous Data Protection

Anthony Spiteri kicks off the third and last day of the Vanguard Summit in Prague with CDP. It’s all about the filter driver. There are many competitors out which put their CDP solution out, but some of them still have issues sometimes, like pink screens of death when on the ESXi hosts. Veeam worked closely with VMware to get the stuff done right. Because when you’re going into the I/O stack with a data protection solution, you have to be sure what you’re doing.

CDP is a VMware-only available solution, there is no CDP for Hyper-V, at least not currently. That might change, but not soon. In Veeam you can leverage the usage of VMware tags for your data protection. You create backup jobs that will use these tags, and depending on these tags you’re able to protect your workloads with the needed RPO / RTO.

When you set up DCP in Veeam, Veeam will install the filter driver on a cluster base. You can’t install it on the host manually, Veeam does that for you but on a cluster base. With Veeam CDP there is an RPO as low as 15 seconds possible. For a restore, you can go back to either a restore point or go back with a slider to a specific point in time.

Write for us

Ilya Afanasyev is telling us more about the Veeam engagement in regards to a program for writers. It is called “Write for us” and it is not restricted to Vanguards only but all other tech people can take part in it. You chose a topic and apply for the program. Veeam will approve the topic (or maybe not) and then it’s your turn to create a draft. If the draft gets approved, your blog post gets published on the Veeam blog and you’ll get a revenue. A blog post brings you 200$ and a white paper is worth about 1000$.

If you’re interested to write some cool blog posts or even a white paper, then visit the “Write for us” program on the Veeam website for more information.

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Veeam Vanguard Summit 2019 Prague – Day 2 Recap

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Containers and Veeam

David Hill introduces us to the topic of containers, and how Veeam can handle that. Containers make it possible to use less different operating systems. Today you’ve got patches and updates to install on your operating system, no matter if it’s Linux or Windows. With containers, it becomes a lot simpler.

It’s all about buzzwords. Being or getting cloud-ready, being cloud-native, and being it now. A few years ago it was the same with the cloud. Cloud did help to solve some problems, but some problems are still the same, just on a bigger scale. The same for containers. They will help to solve some problems, but some problems will still be problems, just on a different scale.

David explained some things about the statefulness of a container. Containers are good when they are used for what they are thought. But having just any kind of application containerized doesn’t work. When an application fails, and the container management spins up a new instance of that application, the application itself doesn’t know what happened. If you click save in WordPress for example, WordPress doesn’t know what you did before when the application crashed in the backend.

Cloud Tier

Andrew Zhelezko and David Hill are talking about the Cloud Tier. In Veeam, you can set up and define multiple types of backup repositories. You can have local disk storage, NAS, deduplication appliances, etc. You can even combine them in a Scale-out Repository. Now with the latest VBR version you’re even able to scale-out to the cloud with the usage of object storage. You’ve got nearly unlimited storage available in the cloud to store your backups. And in Veeam, that’s all policy-driven. Depending on your policy, Veeam does the automatic cloud-tiering to the object storage of your choice. And you can put that object storage also into a Scale-out Repository as a capacity tier.

That means that you might have some backups local, maybe because of compliance reasons or to meet a certain RPO/RTO time. Everything which is older than a specified time will be tiered out to the object storage.

A new feature is the Immutability of your backup files in the object storage. That means that you can lock the backups which are moved out to the cloud. That gives you protection against rogue admins or to have a certain level of compliance. No one can delete your backup files on the cloud storage. You can set the lock for a specific time, and during this time the backup files can’t be deleted. These settings have to be set on a specific S3 bucket.

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Veeam Vanguard Summit 2019 Prague – Day 1 Recap

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Welcome Vanguards!

Nikola Pejkova and Rick Vanover welcome all new and renewed Vanguards here at Prague. As we know it from last year, and maybe also from other conferences, there are the famous traffic light signals. In the following days we will see and hear much of green, yellow and red stuff, which means that they are free to publish, embargoed (publish it somewhen) or even under NDA (don’t even think to publish it or talk about it).

Rick and Nikola explained some new things about the Vanguard program to us. Veeam likes to have more engagement with the Vanguards. There will be more recap movies like they did at VeeamON, helping to build up the profile of a Vanguard, not promoting Veeam especially. Rick guides us through the agenda. There are two rooms this year, with even more sessions for all kinds of tastes of technology and interests. For the official Vanguard Dinner on Tuesday we will have our own Veeam shuttles from the hotel to the venue and back. Awesome!

Rick shares some more program updates and priorities. Such an event, and also the Vanguard program is a great opportunity to get more information directly from the source. As a Vanguard, you’re also able to give your feedback directly to the responsible persons, like feedback for beta versions, or the program itself. These persons can push it into the right channels to make it probably happen.

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