As probably everyone at this awesome community knows : instant recovery of Veeam is great!!!
This is one of the many reasons why Veeam has to be chosen over the competitors : you can read this in a previous sticky post of mine : Recap : 15 reasons to choose Veeam over competitors | Veeam Community Resource Hub
Well I have a true time story showing that this functionality can save a company big time!!!
At the service-desk of my company (an MSP), a priority 1 incident case came in of one of our customers, so SD First Line created an P1 incident case.
By chance that day I was planned at third line of SD and was not planned for projects at customers...
Regarding the urgency and the fact that our companies Veeam backup-expert was present that day at SD, the case came directly to me...
Who is the customer : the customer is a secondary school
Used infrastructure : they are using standalone Hyper-V hosts with local storage (don’t ask me why they are not using shared storage, but that’s another story)
Issue : they are using RAID5 on the data-volume (where the .VHDX files = HyperV virtual hard-disks are located) of their hyper-v hosts
As you know : in a RAID5 setup, only 1 disk may fail...
On their most critical server 2 disks are stuck, so the volume is broken and all data lost on that hyper-v server
On that server a couple of virtual machines were running including one of their most important server : their big file-server
That was not all : also the hyper-v server was not in warranty anymore , they decided 6 months ago not to extend this warranty anymore for this server...
Analysis :
I checked the backups : no problem, they were successful the evening before.
No problem I decided, I will do a full recovery for the less critical (larger RTO) virtual machines on the storage of the other hyper-v hosts and perform an instant recovery (less RTO) for the most critical virtual machines
Problem :
The most critical virtual machine that had to be restored as quickly as possible was their big file-server (more than 6TB)…, the problem was that none of the other hyper-v servers was having enough storage to provide this file-server, so instant recovery is the solution, but at hyper-v the whole storage must be provisioned on the hyper-v host (one of the most disadvantages against vSphere where you can run the instant recovery on your backup-server without provisioning on your vSphere ESX-host) even if you are running the virtual disk on the backup-server...
No other storage was available...
Solution :
Ok I discussed this with the customer and told them that I had an out-of-the-box (TEMPORARY) solution for this problem .
I asked them if they had a large USB-disk…
Yes they had.
I told them to connect it on the hyper-v server and told them that their file-server will come online in less than 15 minutes, slow but it will work!
And it did !!!
After less than 15 minutes their file-server was online running on the backup-server with provisioning the storage on the USB-disk and performed in the meanwhile a sync in the background. After several hours all data was transferred on the USB-disk and the file-server was running on the USB-disk.
I told the customer that they had to order as quickly as possible a new server or new hard-disks for their server because that USB-disk won’t live long running like that
The answer of the customer : they will do that urgently and thanked me a lot and told that I was a wizard to bring their file-server back online in that short amount of time
After 1 week :
After a week my colleagues called me to ask if I would contact that customer again, the customer asked for me.
I called the customer back and do you want to know what they asked me ???
If I would do it again what I did before because the USB-disk was broken . They already bought a new USB-disk in the shop and connected it to the server and ordered that day a brand new server...
Conclusion :
Veeam Instant Recovery → it just works and can save a company !!!