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Schools backup and restore

L
Userlevel 1

Ive been playing around with Veeam the last day or so and not having much luck.  we have 2 servers running 2016 with RDX backup drives. I have installed community addition on one im using as a test server, the other one is in production running AD, DHCP, DNS etc.  We also have a small NAs we can locate in a seperate building to give us ofsite backups/copies.

So far non of the backups have worked, seems to fail on a rescan needed.

Maybe I should be using agents and not community ?  Just about all the help/instructions go into VM and more complex stuff than we need. I have only ever had to recover files twice and server once in the 15 years Ive been supporting them but its enough to know that next time I want it to be a lot easier and have backups configured so we have fairly up to date data.  Weekly would do at a pinch.  So yes critical that we have it but no ones going to lose much and its a balance with costs of loss and cost of implementattion.  Sorry for going on.

Any suggestions as to best approach?   Thanks.  Liam

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Best answer by StefanZi 8 October 2021, 08:46

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StefanZi
Userlevel 6
Badge +3

Hi and welcome.

Sounds like you are not using any virtualization but just hardware servers?

First of: RDX is not supported by Veeam, just LTO. So you won't be able to make use of these.

S if you want to back up your physical servers you will have to roll out the agent on them. You can do this managed by the VBR Community server and then create a backup job for the servers. That way you can leverage application backups for AD.

If the connection to the NAS is good enough you can run a direct backup to the NAS device.

Have a look in the Veeam Help Center and maybe start by understanding protection groups.

Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Hi and welcome.

Sounds like you are not using any virtualization but just hardware servers?

First of: RDX is not supported by Veeam, just LTO. So you won't be able to make use of these.

S if you want to back up your physical servers you will have to roll out the agent on them. You can do this managed by the VBR Community server and then create a backup job for the servers. That way you can leverage application backups for AD.

If the connection to the NAS is good enough you can run a direct backup to the NAS device.

Have a look in the Veeam Help Center and maybe start by understanding protection groups.

Yes using the agent is probably the best suggestion here as noted by @StefanZi so check out the link he posted and the help for agents.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
L
Userlevel 1

Thanks for the replys guys.  RDX is not a tape and is recognised as a usb attached HD when installed and is recognised as a drive to backup to in Veeam same as a portable drive.  The RDX was specified with the Lenovo thinksystem servers along with Veeam so what your saying is a bit of a suprise to me.

As well as trying to backup to RDX I have also had same issues backing up to an internal drive (the one veeam defaulted to on install).

Aside from the RDX issue, it seems from what you are saying Veeam is designed to operate in a VM environment and not with physical servers is that correct ?  How would it look if  the second servers main function was a backup server, would this then run community addition or would I still just be using agents ?  I would still like to use the NAS and could at least copy to RDX ?

In the meantime I will follow your advise and do more reading and maybe rebuil my test server / try a fresh install.  Cheers

 

L
Userlevel 1

Forgot to add, I only need to backup the server/servers and upto 4 PC’s on the odd occasion.

Mildur
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi and welcome.

First of: RDX is not supported by Veeam, just LTO. So you won't be able to make use of these.

 

@StefanZi

RDX is supported as a Backup Target.

It needs to be configured as a rotated disk Backup Repository.

https://www.veeam.com/kb4048

 

@liamg 
Veeam can operate virtual and physical. You decide where you want to install it and what you need to backup.

 

  1. Install your vbr server
  2. configure your nas with iscsi and connect it to the vbr server
  3. add a direct attached backup repo, which targets the mounted iscsi lun
  4. configure a rotated Backup as mentioned in my posted link for the rdx drive. The rdx drive should to be connected to the vbr server
  5. Configure protection groups for your Server and computer
  6. configure a backup Job/backup Policy to backup the Agents in the protection Group to the iscsi lun. Do not forget to exclude the iscsi LUN from the Agent Backup, or you will be creating a backup of the backup each day ;)
  7. configure a backup Copy Job to copy the backups from the iscsi lun to the rdx drive
Product Management Analyst @ Veeam Software
JMeixner
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

With the community edition of veeam backup & replication you can backup systems worth 10 instances for free.

One instance equals one server or three workstations. Or you can backup up to 500 GB of NAS data, the first 500 GB are completely free.

 

To backup physical servers or workstations you have to use the veeam agents.

So, the helocenter is a good starting point for your reading. This is the documentation for the agent for windows (the standalone version).

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/installation_process.html?ver=50

Jochen (Joe) Meixner | Veeam Vanguard 2024 | Veeam Legend 2021 - 2023 | Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) 2022 | Twitter: @JoMeix | BlueSky: @jmeixner.bsky.social
L
Userlevel 1

Thanks again. Yes I have the RDX configured as rotated disk repository.

 

StefanZi
Userlevel 6
Badge +3

Thanks @Mildur, I kind of thought RDX is tape and done - I wasn’t aware of these appearing like external USB HDDs. That’s then fully working and supported, agreed.

As the others stated: Use the Veeam Community Edition, install it on one of your servers. It acts as a manager for your backup. From there you can distribute the agents which are required to backup physical systems. The alternative would be to have unmanaged agents (same agent, but no management VBR), so I’d recommend to use the VBR in your case. So your decision is not whether to use agents OR VBR but if you use agents or agents AND VBR - agent’s will always do the heavy lifting on servers/desktops.

You can also backup the VBR server itself with an agent backup (so let VBR deploy the agent to itself :D). You can take the servers (and possible also agents) to the RDX drives and then create a backup copy job to the remote NAS (as Mildur said - prefer to use iSCSI discs on the NAS instead of SMB/NFS so you can leverage ReFS block cloning and fast synthetics).

 

L
Userlevel 1

Thanks for all the help, I have a far clearer picture now.

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