Veeam

One of my customers replaced the old Veeam environment with new gear. The HW was pretty simple designed:

• two HPE ProLiant
• per server two HPE D3610 enclosures with 6 TB disks
• ~ 5km between backup server and backup copy destination

One server was designed to act as the Veeam backup server and repository, and the second server was designed to act as the backup copy destination. Both servers were running Windows Server 2019 Standard. We planned to use Windows Deduplication and ReFS, but it turned out that we have to adjust the filesystem size to get Windows Dedup working. Windows Dedup supports filesystems up to 64 TB. Due to the 24x 6 TB disks, we had to create to logical volumes to stay under 64 TB usable capacity.

I got this error in a new deployment of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4. The error occured every day at 9 pm.

24.02.2019 21:00:11 :: Error: Remote deployment and management is available for licensed agents only. Please change your backup server settings to allow managed agents to consume the license, then perform a protection group rescan.

The solution to this issue is pretty simple. Make sure that you allow the consumption of licenses for free agents. You will find this option under General > License.

To backup a virtual machine, Veeam Backup & Replication needs two permissions:

• permission to access and backup the VM, as well as the
• permission to do specific tasks inside the VM

to guarantee a consistent backup. The former persmission is granted by the user account that is used to access the VMware vCenter server (sorry for the VMW focust at this point). Usually, this account has the Administrator role granted at the vCenter Server level. The latter permission is granted by a user account that has permissions inside the guest operating system.

One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a

• HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity,
• and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016

as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus. The backend storage is a HPE 3PAR 8200.

When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.

Last week I had an interesting incident at a customer. The customer reported that one of multiple Veeam backup jobs jobs constantly failed.

The backup job included two VMs, and the backup of one of these VMs failed with this error:

Error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[VMDS-SAS-01] VMDC1/VMDC1_1.vmdk] ( is read-only mode - [true] ) 
Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters [VC/ESX: [vcenter.domain.tld];Port: 443;Login: 
[ADAdministrator];VMX Spec: [moref=vm-59];Snapshot mor: [snapshot-20226];Transports: [san];Read Only: [true]]
failed because of the following errors: Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters 
VC/ESX: [vcenter.domain.tld];Port: 443;Login: [AD\Administrator

The verified the used credentials for that job, but re-entering the password does not solved the issue. I then checked the Veeam backup logs located under %ProgramData%\VeeamBackup (look for the Agent.Job_Name.Source.VM_Name.vmdk.log) and found VDDK Error 3014:

I’m using Veeam Backup & Replication (currently 8.0 Update 3) in my lab environment to backup some of my VMs to a HP StoreOnce VSA. The VMs reside in a NFS datastore on a Synology DS414slim NAS, the StoreOnce VSA is located in a local datastore (RAID 5 with SAS disks) on one of my ESXi hosts. The Veeam backup server is a VM and it’s also the Veeam Backup Proxy. The transport mode selection is set to “Automatic selection”.

While upgrading a rather old (but very stable) Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 installation to 8.0 Update 3 (with intermediate step to 6.5), I ran into a curious error. Right after the welcome screen, this error message

appeared. A closer look into the BackupSetup.log (you can find this log in the %temp% dir. Just enter %temp% into the Explorer address bar) resulted in this very interesting log entry:

HP StoreOnce Appliances or VSA offers three different types of backup destinations:

• Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
• NAS (CIFS or NFS)
• StoreOnce Catalyst

If you use Veeam Backup & Replication, the NAS feature is possibly worth a try. Using the NAS feature, the StoreOnce appliance or VSA offers a CIFS or NFS share, which can be used as a backup destionation. Today I want to show you how you can use a NAS share of a StoreOnce VSA with Veeam Backup & Replication.To backup virtual maschines with Veeam Backup & Replication to a HP StoreOnce VSA you need at least three things: