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.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/554f23aa-9474-45f1-86c9-a37fa47cde4a.png)
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
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/5d26d371-afb1-40bd-924d-98adc9e80b67.png)
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.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/30dc79a2-9d4a-40c2-a542-3410cd859d12.png)
I was soon rewarded with a new screen giving me all the information that I need to connect from my terminal.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/7553b96e-9627-420e-a17b-016064cb7514.png)
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/83a70453-4a49-48a4-829d-14e0cf2e3843.png)
The first screen was license stuff so I ticked both boxes.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/a598b143-538a-494c-8f39-b113d3ffdfdd.png)
The main menu was simple enough and I new what I needed to do “restore volumes”.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/f021ffa8-dd22-4d36-8cc1-4e975e0b0fbc.png)
This brought up a new bunch of choices that were again very straight forward.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/fd0962a2-4ad7-4215-b1bc-fbe4c8570a63.png)
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.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/6a568694-0958-42db-b1e2-d633b43814c1.png)
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/d3f026e1-840d-4a96-8924-352d1ed3b071.png)
The next screen was again very intuitive, just copy the token.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/ed77d175-fa03-4b6e-bcbf-e7fc5041d4c9.png)
After selecting connect I had to wait a bit but then was greeted with the exact page that I wanted to see.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/08fa0b4f-40de-4ed2-8f0a-ec72c01c496c.png)
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/34d6d313-0234-42ab-8ac9-7b72398aaeba.png)
After selecting my only restore point the system displayed to me the source and target.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/3d3b39b0-537b-405b-be95-cf9a45c6ad38.png)
I followed with the Restore From option.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/855d4f0f-a617-420e-a80d-9723962baa20.png)
One more confirmation.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/96c132d9-7bb7-4775-8492-f7353dc6e3b8.png)
We are off to the races.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/016bfa17-d7d4-43b2-90d7-f7dde58d5451.png)
Done! Succes!
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/90ff2b03-ab08-4ee3-a3d1-cdb721832b47.png)
However, the proof is in the pudding, and only a successful boot will can confirm that all is good.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/df7a47c8-40a4-4693-8771-7bfc891ac5b8.png)
The system booted but I saw that the K3S service was not happy.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/774334b8-0d4d-4384-9f35-0a0af3280f9a.png)
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.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/76789e9e-030e-4820-89ab-cac3a8beeec2.png)
I edited my netplan config yaml and change the network device name.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/728f155f-056a-4359-8e6b-c8fff5b7bac8.png)
I rebooted this new VM, logged in and tried a kubectl command. Boom! all good.
![](https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/veeam-en/attachment/49b0c810-d820-43c8-9290-85898eace5bf.png)
Now I can use the laptop for something else. Thanks Veeam!