Category Archives: Veeam

Indexing guest OS files in Veeam

So you may have noticed that when you’re configuring a backup job in Veeam Backup & Replication there is an option to ‘Enable guest file system indexing’. The menu tells us it will “create catalog of guest files to enable browsing, searching and 1-click restore of individual files” which sounds quite important but then it also says that “indexing is optional and not required to restore instant file level recoveries”. So you may be thinking whats the point of it then or whats the advantage here and should I enable it?

What is it? Allows you to perform searches within guest OS files stored inside the backups without having to mount the backup files first.

How does it work? It’s worth pointing out that Veeam is agentless so this indexing happens without agents, nor does it need to scan the whole file system, instead when a backup job runs, during the guest OS freeze process, Veeam creates a catalog (or index) of the VM guest OS files by directly reading from the NTFS Master File Table (MFT). For a typical VM, the required data is captured and parsed nearly instantly, which Veeam calls Instant Indexing. After the index has been created, this information is stored on the Veeam Backup & Replication server.

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Poor performance on your File to Tape Job?

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Are you experiencing poor performance for your Veeam File to Tape jobs? It is likely caused by your SQL Express database that the Veeam B&R server is running from. It may be time to upgrade to a licensed version of SQL Server just as this customer has done below, a job that took 25 hours has now reduced down to 5 hours.

click to open a larger version

The new SQL Standard 2016 instance was installed on the same Veeam B&R server where SQL Express 2012 was running.

The secret life of VBM files

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What do they do? VBM files are an XML dump of relevant backup metadata pertaining to the relevant backup job from the Veeam DB. A VBM file will be created for each backup and backup copy job.

Why do we create VBMs? Before VBM files, Veeam would read metadata information from the backup files themselves. As Veeam was deployed into larger and larger environments it soon became apparent that this method of reading metadata information was too I/O intensive and needed to be improved, so the VBM file was born.

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Max concurrent tasks in Veeam B&R

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A quick post regarding max concurrent tasks in Veeam B&R which are tunable options in both proxies and repositories. The default max concurrent task for proxies is set to 2, for backup repositories the default is set to 4. An important thing to note is that we are limiting different things when configuring this max concurrent task between proxies and repositories.

When configuring proxies, the max concurrent tasks are based on a single virtual disk. So for example, if we had a single virtual machine with 4 virtual disks or a 4 virtual machines with a single virtual disk each, the units of resource scheduling required is the same, the units of resource scheduling required being 4 virtual disks that need to be processed.

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Deployment Projects in Veeam ONE

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Did you know that Veeam ONE has a tool called deployment projects that has the ability to simulate how a task such as adding or evicting hosts and VMs impacts your virtual infrastructure? These simulations help us to review predicted resource capacities against future resource demand, provide practical recommendations and help identify potential resource shortages. It’s a quick and easy way to check your resources before making small or large changes. Think of it as a way to perform due diligence and gain insight before making any changes to your virtual environment.

Deployment Projects can be found under Veeam ONE Reporter, to access Veeam ONE Reporter we browse to the URL of the Veeam ONE Reporter website. This website runs on the machine where the Veeam ONE Web UI component is installed. Assuming you have are using the default port it would look similar to https://veeamoneip:1239

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Remoting Channel Sink UriNotPublished. RequestUri is ‘/VeeamService’

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Sometimes you see an error and think it’s going to take all night to resolve. Remoting Channel Sink UriNotPublished.. What the hell? Luckily the pointer to the /VeeamService is the dead giveaway though.

In my case, the Veeam Backup Service hadn’t started yet. Patience is a virtue, Rhys…

Veeam Explorer for AD – the search filter is invalid

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These blog posts serve more as a reminder to myself than anything else, especially if I can’t find any other information regarding the problem encountered. So as is tradition, my next post is again about documenting an error I’ve witnessed that was simple and easy to resolve but easily forgotten (at least for me it is).

So my job involves a fair bit of demonstrating what features and capabilities Veeam has along with knowledge transfers. I especially love showing off the Veeam Explorer’s, they certainly making restoring application items a breeze for the most part. I find one of the easiest and quickest ways to demonstrate what the Veeam Explorer’s are all about is to demonstrate a quick restore using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory.

With full permission granted, I like to make a small adjustment to the ‘description’ field for an inactive user that lives on the domain, making a small typo for example. After making the change, loading up Veeam Explorer for AD, letting Veeam filter out the unchanged data between production and the restore point, finding the change I introduce and attempting to restore the original ‘description’ value back. Usually, this goes without a hitch but this time Veeam came up with the below error.

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VeeamON 2017

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Hey Guys,

What a whirlwind the last couple of days have been, between the long haul flights to get to NOLA, jet lag, attending sessions, networking and catching up with old acquaintances it really all starts to blur together. All I can say is, Veeam knows how to put on a good show and they have certainly repeated their success from last VeeamON.

The sessions included a broad range of topics and for the ones I did make it to were always packed and full of great content. In regards to new features and announcements, there were several stand-outs for me

– Integration with object-based storage (S3,Glazier,Blob + More)
– Veeam Continuous Data Protection (Zerto should be worried)
– Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2 to support SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Instead of writing about all the newly announced features including the above, I thought it would be better to simply link to all the other wonderful posts done by fellow Vanguards.

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Veeam Explorer for Sharepoint is unable to find content database

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Ran into this Veeam error today when demonstrating Veeams Explorer for SharePoint to a customer.

The customer was using a supported version of SharePoint and Veeam was configured to use a licensed version SQL 2014. After checking over the backup job settings and ensuring no errors or warnings were being thrown I hit the Veeam forums. Fortunately, someone else had seen the same problem which you can find here.

“The Application-aware logic uses NetBIOS names to locate corresponding SQL servers during backup and in some cases (where SQL server for the site collection is specified using IP address or SQL Server alias, for example), Veeam B&R still does not have the required information, even provided that application-aware backup was successful. If this is your case (I believe support will be able to verify that), you can configure SQL server mapping manually via the registry, as far as I know, there’s an ability to do that.”

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