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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. 

Old Thinkpad
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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

New VM
 

 

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 waited for the SSH

I was soon rewarded with a new screen giving me all the information that I need to connect from my terminal.

SSH Info
I logged in

The first screen was license stuff so I ticked both boxes.

Licence

The main menu was simple enough and I new what I needed to do “restore volumes”.

Restore volumes
 

This brought up a new bunch of choices that were again very straight forward. 

List of Restore Sources
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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.

I created a recovery token from my backup
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My token

The next screen was again very intuitive, just copy the token.

Token

After selecting connect I had to wait a bit but then was greeted with the exact page that I wanted to see.

Backups
 
I had only one restore point

After selecting my only restore point the system displayed to me the source and target.

Source and Target

I followed with the Restore From option.

Ready to Go

One more confirmation.

Enter to start restore

We are off to the races.

Off we go

Done! Succes!

Done

However, the proof is in the pudding, and only a successful boot will can confirm that all is good.

Booting

The system booted but I saw that the K3S service was not happy.

K3S failed to start
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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.

ENS18

I edited my netplan config yaml and change the network device name.

New 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!

Awesome! I was going to create a Linux Agent Restore post to follow up from my VAL Backup post, but why when you did such an awesome job 😊


 Veeam - what can it not do!  Nice to see it help repurpose things for you.  Great article. 👍


yeah it really brings the fun back to computing!


Hi @Madi.Cristil @safiya 

I must have posted this in the KubeKorner by mistake. The topic is Linux Veeam Agent though, so can someone move this out to the general blog post area? 😃

 

Thanks 


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