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Bootable media on leased cloud server


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My company leases a dedicated Windows 2019 server on the Ionos cloud platform. I would like to implement a disaster recovery solution using the Veeam community version. My aim is to be able to restore a bare metal backup to a new Ionos Windows server.  

I have installed Veeam v11 and successfully created a backup repository and have done my first bare metal backup. My question is: can I create a bootable recovery media that doesn’t require a USB drive, and then use that media on a new Windows Server in the cloud? Is there documentation on how to do this?

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Best answer by MicoolPaul 12 October 2021, 16:52

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Userlevel 7
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If you have used Veeam Agent to backup this server, then you can create a recovery iso in the vbr console:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/agents/agent_backup_create_image.html?ver=110
 

Boot from this iso in ionos plattform and restore your server:

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

 

The VBR backup repo needs to be accessible when you do the restore.

Userlevel 7
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The functionality you’re looking for is IPMI access to the server it’s commonly called and you can mount an ISO and specify it for your boot option. Depending on the network you may or may not have LAN access between servers, if you’re going to recover from a Veeam B&R server the IP address you attempt to reach can’t be NAT’d. For that to work it needs to be a Veeam Cloud Connect provider. If you have LAN access between the servers another option could be being able to PXE boot the image. You’ll need something such as IPMI to access the server anyway as part of the recovery process as you can’t RDP etc whilst it’s booted the recovery media.

Userlevel 1

Thanks for these suggestions. My backup repository is on a “shared storage” block on Ionos, which is on another server in the same Ionos data center, but outside of the LAN of the server I am backing up. That shared storage block is assignable, within the Ionos dashboard, to multiple servers at Ionos. From what Michael said, it seems like I could spin up a new server, assign the shared storage repo to it, and then PXE boot the recovery media ISO. Is that correct? (I also back up the bare metal backup from the repo to iDrive in the cloud - so I will also have access to the backup and bootable recovery media there.)

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Can I use a tool like MobaLive CD to PXE boot a recovery media ISO? Can I do this via RDC? When the computer boots from the ISO file, will I be able to connect to the PXE booted server from RDC?

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Looks like VirtualBox by Oracle may be a more appropriate utility for booting from an ISO file. Has anyone used it remotely to do a bare metal recovery?

Userlevel 7
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Hi @Fairfielder there’s quite a few questions here but we just need to cut through this to get to what you need.

 

Let’s break this out into a few pre-requisities:

Backup Repository:

  • How is the backup storage presented to your server? Does it just look like a normal NTFS/ReFS file share?
  • Did you have to install custom software to access it?
  • Is it a network share?

Once we know how this looks, this helps us know what the recovery process will be. It’s most likely going to be a network share with a public IP address that is firewalled within ionos based on some of the other providers I’ve seen, but we’ll need you to provide this information.

 

Once we know what the score is with the backup repository then we can move to recovery.

You’ve got two requirements:

  1. You need to be able to access the backup storage, provided it’s a network share or a disk that “appears” local, you shouldn’t have many difficulties in a bare metal recovery scenario, as Veeam’s recovery media will be able to access this natively.
  2. You need a way of getting the server to boot the recovery media. VirtualBox is going to run VMs within a physical server, and isn’t supported by Veeam as a virtualisation platform so you’d definitely be in unsupported territory there, but that shouldn’t be necessary.
    1. What you need to ask is, are you expecting to boot up a second server as your DR and immediately install your backup to it? If your primary server was a physical server, are you then planning on restoring it to another physical server, or running the server as a virtual machine in a DR is another way of phrasing this question. In my experience, swapping from physical to virtual is not something you want to do in a DR as you’ll suddenly discover unexpected scenarios such as your hosting provider not offering the VM an IP address and other networking issues in particular.
    2. If you’re planning to install your backup over the top of another server and effectively “reimage” it, you need that server to be able to boot the recovery media. This is where the discussion of IPMI enters into the equation, IPMI is available for physical servers so if your server you’re protecting is a virtual machine, this won’t be possible, however virtual machines can still boot ISOs, but the path to do so is different.

I would raise these questions with ionos directly, as this Veeam Community is public, if you’re not sure you can point the support engineer to this post and hopefully they’ll understand the context a bit better to advise what is possible within their platform.

 

Good luck!

Userlevel 1

Michael,

Thank you so much for your generous assistance! Here are some answers to your questions:

“How is the backup storage presented to your server? Does it just look like a normal NTFS/ReFS file share?” Yes.

“Did you have to install custom software to access it?” No.

“Is it a network share?” Yes. Via a feature in the Ionos dashboard that assigns both a CIFS both and NSF path to the shared storage block.

“It’s most likely going to be a network share with a public IP address”. No, it doesn’t have its own public IP.

“are you expecting to boot up a second server as your DR and immediately install your backup to it?” Yes

“If your primary server was a physical server, are you then planning on restoring it to another physical server, or running the server as a virtual machine in a DR is another way of phrasing this question. ” The former.

“I would raise these questions with ionos directly, as this Veeam Community is public, if you’re not sure you can point the support engineer to this post and hopefully they’ll understand the context a bit better to advise what is possible within their platform.” Will do.

“If you’re planning to install your backup over the top of another server and effectively “reimage” it (yes, that’s my intention), you need that server to be able to boot the recovery media. This is where the discussion of IPMI enters into the equation”. Exactly. I need to figure out how to remotely specify the ISO file as the boot media and then have access to the desktop of the new physical server after the boot.

Thanks again!! If you are available to consult in this matter, for a fee, plmk.

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Thanks for answering with such detail @Fairfielder!

 

Thats great news it’s a CIFS share. Provided the server gets its IP from DHCP and can reach the CIFS via IP or DNS and if you’ve chosen to encrypt your backups that you have the password then you’re all set from a repository perspective.

 

I’d be extremely surprised if there was no IPMI access via HTML5 or Java, as all the main server manufacturers have their own out of band management that powers this. And let’s be honest, worst case the provider could just insert the USB recovery media and drive the recovery for you provided you have some sort of support contract with them!

 

As for the fee, would be against the spirit of the community to be trying to earn money out of this. I’m U.K. based and work for someone that’s both a VASP & VCSP so I suggest if you need consultancy help check out the list of VASPs in your country, it’s an extremely high standard they need to meet to make the list so you’ll be in safe hands 🙂

Sounds like we’ve got you on the right path now though. Do test this recovery process before relying on it though to be safe! (And speed up recovery time!)

https://www.veeam.com/find-a-veeam-accredited-service-partner.html

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Ionos will not “insert the USB recovery media and drive the recovery”, and won’t give us the name of the manufacturer of the server. Looking more and more like we need a better server provider, like Amazon. Funnily, Ionos does have a nifty image creation/restoration process for their non-dedicated cloud servers, but for our RAM and storage needs, their dedicated servers are much cheaper. 

Userlevel 7
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Ionos will not “insert the USB recovery media and drive the recovery”, and won’t give us the name of the manufacturer of the server. Looking more and more like we need a better server provider, like Amazon. Funnily, Ionos does have a nifty image creation/restoration process for their non-dedicated cloud servers, but for our RAM and storage needs, their dedicated servers are much cheaper. 

Better to know now rather than in the event of disaster! I’m sure plenty of folks around here could recommend some good public cloud providers if you needed any help with that, just raise it as a new topic :wink:

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