Hi Everyone,
Recently I took an old powerful desktop and leveraged Proxmox in order to turn it into a cheap and non intrusive (furniture wise) virtual lab. My previous lab was an old but pretty powerful IBM Thinkpad. I was not using virtualisation just various flavours of Kubernetes on an Ubuntu 20.04 server OS.
I had done quite a bit of work on my old lab despite its humble characteristics and I was also thinking about re-inventing this laptop with some mini Linux distribution or even FreeBSD.
I had already setup a VBR server in my Proxmox setup with a Linux repository so I added my Thinkpad to a protection group, installed the agent and ran a full backup. This was easy enough and I believe has been covered here many times so I will jump to the BMR restore.
I downloaded the Linux recovery media from Veeam and created a new empty VM in Proxmox and set it to boot from the ISO
After booting the VM I connected the console where I saw a message stating that if I was patient a ssh server would be started so that I would be able to use a terminal on my laptop.
I was soon rewarded with a new screen giving me all the information that I need to connect from my terminal.
The first screen was license stuff so I ticked both boxes.
The main menu was simple enough and I new what I needed to do “restore volumes”.
This brought up a new bunch of choices that were again very straight forward.
I decided to create a recovery token for simplicity sake so I went back to my VBR server and took the necessary steps to get this done.
The next screen was again very intuitive, just copy the token.
After selecting connect I had to wait a bit but then was greeted with the exact page that I wanted to see.
After selecting my only restore point the system displayed to me the source and target.
I followed with the Restore From option.
One more confirmation.
We are off to the races.
Done! Succes!
However, the proof is in the pudding, and only a successful boot will can confirm that all is good.
The system booted but I saw that the K3S service was not happy.
This is where having Hypervisor experience really helps. What changes when you do a p2v conversion, yes network cards!
Sure enough in this system the card is ens18.
I edited my netplan config yaml and change the network device name.
I rebooted this new VM, logged in and tried a kubectl command. Boom! all good.
Now I can use the laptop for something else. Thanks Veeam!
