• EN

What's your favorite VBR Trick?

k00laidIT
Userlevel 6
Badge +6

We all know that Veeam Backup & Replication is great for doing exactly what it says, backing up and replicating virtual machines. What is less talked about is all the other things it enables through those and other capabilities such as Sure Backup, application aware backups and secure restore. What is that thing that you’ve done with VBR that isn’t necessarily a listed feature or use case but is a great time saver?

I’ll start with my favorite: Created a process where I launched a full Cisco VoIP HA stack (2x CUCM, 2x Unity, 2x UCCX, 2x something else i can’t remember) into a Veeam Sure Backup lab from the backups, upgrade the entire stack in the lab, shutdown and removed the production from inventory then migrated the lab ones into production, Rebooted the phones. Cut my system downtime for major version upgrades from 24 hours to 10 minutes.

Jim Jones, @k00laidIT, AWS Community Builder, Cisco Champion, vExpert, Veeam Vanguard

12 comments

coolsport00
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

I don’t get too fancy-shmancy like you did there. 🙂

I’m boring and just do backups/replications, and occasional restores. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Shane Williford - Veeam VMCA/VMCE | Veeam Legend | VUG Leader | VCP-DCV | Twitter: @coolsport00
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

One great time saver for me is with Windows upgrades.  We have some VBR servers still on Windows 2012 R2 and need to upgrade them to current, so I use the Configuration Backups to do this, and it takes all but 20 mins or so since we also have Templates in VMware for server deployments.  Definitely cuts down upgrade times.  😎

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
coolsport00
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

One great time saver for me is with Windows upgrades.  We have some VBR servers still on Windows 2012 R2 and need to upgrade them to current, so I use the Configuration Backups to do this, and it takes all but 20 mins or so since we also have Templates in VMware for server deployments.  Definitely cuts down upgrade times.  😎

Oh, nice! Good point there Chris. Ok, I do do this one. Actually, for the 1st time just a few mos ago. In moving forward, this will be how I upgrade my Veeam servers as well. Config DB restore eezy-peezy FTW! 😁

Shane Williford - Veeam VMCA/VMCE | Veeam Legend | VUG Leader | VCP-DCV | Twitter: @coolsport00
dips
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

That is a really interesting way to carry out an upgrade. Albeit, I’ve not ever tried something like that but you’ve just created an idea in my head! Thank you!

Dipen N. K. | IT Security Specialist | Veeam Legend 2022 - 2023 | www.dipen.co.uk
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

That is a really interesting way to carry out an upgrade. Albeit, I’ve not ever tried something like that but you’ve just created an idea in my head! Thank you!

I am only referring to Veeam VBR servers specifically not anything else.  But glad this one sparked some ideas.  😁

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
HunterLAFR
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

For me, the flexibility to move my vms into a different cluster easy and clean, restoring or replicating them into the new location, and boom! just like magic, no fantasy, everything back in place.

As a workaround, in some clients have vsphere license to be able to perform HA was not an option, so, failover to replica, and planned failover, where my “kind of” HA when needed to perform some maintenance to a host, limiting the downtime just to a power off / power on timing, about a minute or two.

cheers.

Luis F.- HunterLF - HunterLAFR - lfconsulting.org
leduardoserrano
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Hi @k00laidIT ! IMO, it is the ability to move the workload between different infrastructures and clouds. This rocks! 

 

Luiz Eduardo Serrano. Cloud Architect, Systems Engineer for Veeam and Object First. Veeam Vanguard/VMCA 2024/VMCE. VMware Tanzu Vanguard 2024/VCP Security/VMware User Group, 4xHPE Master ASE/Instructor, RedHat Ansible SE/Instructor, AWS Architect, Nutanix NCA, Cisco-HPE Cloud & DC champion. My blog: https://cloudnroll.com
Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Ok you knew this was coming, the ability to access Kasten console workloads from VBR and monitor jobs! Also being able to store exported vsphere csi snapshots into regular Veeam repositories is up there as well. The more I learn about SOSAPI for object storage the more I like it too. 

Also Way back when doing BMR with the Endpoint agents (as they were called at the time). I had just worked a lot with IBM Tivoli Fastback and done a ton of BMR restores (and P2Vs) but the free Veeam Endpoint Agent was much better believe it or not!

 

VMCA2022, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Ok you knew this was coming, the ability to access Kasten console workloads from VBR and monitor jobs! Also being able to store exported vsphere csi snapshots into regular Veeam repositories is up there as well. The more I learn about SOSAPI for object storage the more I like it too. 

Also Way back when doing BMR with the Endpoint agents (as they were called at the time). I had just worked a lot with IBM Tivoli Fastback and done a ton of BMR restores (and P2Vs) but the free Veeam Endpoint Agent was much better believe it or not!

 

Who knew you would say Kasten.  😉😜😂

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
Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

Mounting/restoring a disk from backup to a server is a handy feature. 

Instead of doing an in place upgrade on a file server causing downtime, I can mount the disks of the backup to a new server.  I’ll do this to seed it, then robocopy to keep things in sync. When it’s time to replace it, I remove the share of the source, do 1 final robocopy, then flip the DFS pointer to the new location.  I’ve now replaced a 40TB file server in record time with minimal downtime. 

vAdmin
Userlevel 7
Badge +2

@k00laidIT ,

Yes, I agree with you the Surebackup feature is the best in business.

The other feature that I like is the malware scan feature which is recently released.

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert, VMware Certified Professional - DCV 7, Citrix Certified Professional Virtualization (CCP-V), ITIL Practitioner
dloseke
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Interesting use of SureBackup….I hadn’t considered that.  While while not really a hack, I’ve used QuickMigration more than once to move a VM from one host to another for hosts not joined to a vCenter at remote sites.  Seeing some of these answers, I need to get more creative….

Derek M. Loseke, Senior Systems Engineer | Veeam Legend 2022-2023 | VMSP/VMTSP | VCP6-DCV | VSP/VTSP | CCNA | https://technotesanddadjokes.com | @dloseke

Comment


Terms & Conditions