Why Veeam Instant Recovery is so great --> a real case (IT JUST WORKS) !!!

  • 8 September 2021
  • 7 comments
  • 206 views

Userlevel 7
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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 :hugging: 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 :blush: 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 :disappointed_relieved:, 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 :wink:

 

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 :wink::blush: .

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 :smile:

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:blush:

 

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 :thinking: . 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 !!!

 


7 comments

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Ah yes, the famous USB disks.

Several years ago a member of the higher management of a big automobile company asked me why “my” storage is so expensive per TB. He could get a TB USB disk for much less…

Told him that the 1000 port USB hub to connect their PB storage is the expensive part… 😎

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Veeam - “It Just Works”  as they say.  Great story to hear of Veeam to rescue. :smiley:

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

@Nico Losschaert : Thanks for sharing the story !

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Great post @Nico Losschaert and thank you for sharing with us!

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

thx @Inder and @chris_eromosele  !

Userlevel 7
Badge +13

Great Story @Nico Losschaert! I hope the new server has already been delivered and your not restoring the environment every week 😅

@JMeixner Who hasn't been in such discussions 🤣

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thx @Chris.Childerhose and @JMeixner !

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