Dear Community,

After upgrading my VBR server, I faced challenges upgrading the associated GCP appliance due to tricky infrastructure and policy level restrictions.

I worked with Veeam support for over two months, sharing multiple log bundles, conducting several remote sessions, and troubleshooting persistent upgrade failures.

I would like to highlight the key issues, steps, and eventual resolution to help others facing a similar situation.

Challenges Faced:

• The GCP appliance upgrade consistently failed due to missing permissions and internet access on newly created instances.
• Policies at the organization/project level restricted public internet access, which was mandatory during the upgrade process.
• The appliance couldn’t reach Veeam repositories and update servers.
• Sessions with Veeam support revealed dependencies on temporary VM creation and public IP accessibility.

Here are the summarized steps and system actions during the successful GCP appliance upgrade:

1: Temporary Resources Deployment.

• Temporary VM instance and storage bucket were created.
• Snapshots of existing VMs were taken before upgrade.
• Required files were uploaded/downloaded between bucket and VM.

2:Upgrade Process.

• PostgreSQL and core components were upgraded.
• Snapd components removed and new packages installed.
• Temporary IAP tunnel established to finalize setup.
• Instance rebooted and disks replaced.

3: Post-Upgrade.

• Old disks cleaned up and deployment finalized.
• Backup appliance updates installed and services reinitialized.

Key Takeaways:

• Make sure internet access is temporarily allowed for all newly created VM instances involved in the upgrade process in addition to service account and IAM permissions must be configured correctly before starting.

This my experience shows the importance of having both platform knowledge and collaboration with support teams when managing cloud based backup infrastructure. I hope this summary helps others streamline their GCP appliance upgrade using Veeam.