Hello and Welcome! 

For backup tests, I’d highly recommend SureBackup. More here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/surebackup_job.html?ver=110

It’s fire up VMs in a isolated environment and scripts can be run for additional testing, if required. 

Hello @dips,

Thank you very much for your prompt answer.
So it will not affect my current production environment?

Also does it inform/display all the test satus (reading each blocks, provide VMs info, etcs.)? Apologises for these questions, just because I have no experience yet with Veeam so that is why I am collecting as much information as possible.

Thank you

Hi, 

Yes, that is correct. SureBackup will run in an isolated environment but you will need to setup some additional networking on your VMware environment and specify the information into the Veeam SureBackup jobs. 

In terms of what it can do, have a look at this: How SureBackup Works - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)

Additionally, with Veeam, when you setup your backup jobs you can enable a Health Check. See  here: Health Check for Backup Files - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)

Essentially, run a backup and verify the backup files. Then run SureBackup to make sure the VMs can power on and services come up. 

Hope that helps.  

Yes use Virtual Lab and SureBackup to test things.  As noted above that is the best thing for testing restores.

SureBackup/SureReplica can help with automating your testing.

Out of the box you can:

• Confirm VMware Tools has started (this confirms the OS booted successfully to the point that services could start)
• Confirm network ping worked successfully (this confirms the OS booted successfully and the network stack started successfully, so your services will be accessible over the network)
• Port checks (Veeam offer a fair few of these out of the box as standard ports such as 53 for DNS, port 80 for web etc, but you can also use it to query any TCP port that it is responding.
• SQL Server checker script, this will validate all of your SQL databases are in an online/healthy state after booting.
• Anti-Malware scanning, this leverages any Anti-Virus installed on your Veeam server that is mounting the backups to scan for viruses, helping you guarantee that any compromise of your VMs such as disabled AV and virus payload deployed, can be detected, helping prevent established footholds on your network.
• Data integrity check, this is extremely intensive but looks for any signs of silent corruption that you may not be aware of until you have a full recovery event.

In addition to this you can also execute your own scripts if you have workflows that would support this to perform your own validations. These scripts could be as simple as invoking a test tool on your protected server or orchestrating a number of different tests via commands within a script.

Everything I’ve mentioned above is good for automated testing but I’d strongly recommend looking into @vmiss33 ’s content on Twitter and her blog as she talks a huge amount about disaster recovery and focusing on real world scenarios.

She’s also known for hitting the hard truths via memes!

Everything I’ve mentioned above is good for automated testing but I’d strongly recommend looking into @vmiss33 ’s content on Twitter and her blog as she talks a huge amount about disaster recovery and focusing on real world scenarios.

 

She’s also known for hitting the hard truths via memes!

 

Yes definitely check out @vmiss33 with VAO stuff too.

Everything I’ve mentioned above is good for automated testing but I’d strongly recommend looking into @vmiss33 ’s content on Twitter and her blog as she talks a huge amount about disaster recovery and focusing on real world scenarios.

 

She’s also known for hitting the hard truths via memes!

 

Thank you for this!

Hello guys,

Thank you very much for all your support. I am starting today, and I do hope that everything goes well.

Still a lot to read which is normal at this tsage but hope to be successful .

I let you know in case I need more support.

Regards,

Next to SureBackup you should also test:

• File-level restore
  Restore some Windows/Linux files. In my experience this is the most often used restore-scenario.
• Application Item Restore
  Like SQL DB
• Full VM Restore respectively VMDK Restore
  Here take a closer look on restore-performance of a single VMDK. This is important for restoring large VMDKs - to know how long this will take.
• Instant recovery

Thank you very much @vNote42 for the advise.

Regards,