Anyone who ever worked with Veeam Backup & Replication knows that it is a great product when running virtual environments. It's great in what it should do; backup and restore VM"s, data in VM's or even application items such as AD objects or mailboxes. A great feature of Veeam Backup & Restore is, if you have the correct license, the SureBackup functionality. It gives you the ability to test if the backup is consistent and an eventual restore would run with the required functionality. Basically it starts VM's in a lab environment, seperated by a specialized proxy which can present the required networks to the started VM's blocking traffic to resources other than the Veeam BAckup & Replication server.
I've been working with SureBackup the last few weeks to create a lab environment in which I have a DMZ and several VLAN's. In that environment I'm able to start a great variety of VM's and test their specific functionality, but doing so I ran into a few issues.
- First of all, it's important to have the lab set-up as an Advanced Single Host. That way you're able to set-up the needed networks. Veeam has some articles about this you should read carefully
- Second, when creating an application group it's possible to check one or more roles for an application group VM. Don't do this for Domain Controllers, because they will most certainly fail the checks. Just increase the maximum allowed startup time and/or the application initialization timeout to meet the time to boot the VM including the funtionality to check
- Third, it's possible to add extra custom checks to Veeam SureBackup. Through some testing I was able to add a custom check for file share, VM service and VM process. The first one is just a simple batch file, the other two consists of a batch file calling a powershell script which is checking a service or process running.
Using the standard checks, added with some custom checks, anyone should be able to do some consitent checks and so creating a great disaster recovery plan, as you can see below!
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