Monday, June 15, 2020

Being a vExpert

I applied to vExpert program for the first time 2 years ago. I was kind of pushed by one of my VMUG co-leaders who was accepted earlier that year. So, I applied too. I still remember how it felt when I got the acceptance letter. It gave me joy and a peculiar sense of pride. All of a sudden there were 2 vExperts in Romania. I didn't realize the true potential of it until I had access to this beautiful community of people driven by their passion and to the resources made available to me:
  • access to a global network of techies through dedicated Slack channels 
  • VMware licenses for my lab for 1 year 
  • dedicated webinars for vExperts
  • parties at VMworld (this will wait a bit for now) 
  • more people and knowledge through the subprogram 
  • increased visibility on social media: Twitter, LinkedIn
More goodies: I got licenses and complimentary subscriptions from partners like Hy Trust, Runecast, Veeam, Pluralsight and others.

Having the tools I was able to rebuild my own lab and test new products and features. I was able to expand my knowledge with new technologies. This boosted my confidence, but it also made me think how I can give back more. 

Giving back for me it's mostly time through the blog posts, the VMUG meetings I help organizing and sometimes even speak at and the chats I have with my peers. But you can take other paths than me: be a public speaker, write a book or an article, be a customer evangelizing within your organization or at public events, be a passionate member of a partner organization. There are many ways in which you can apply, you just need to apply (here).   

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Veeam NAS Backup - File Restore Options

We are going to look at restore options available for files backed up using NAS backup job. Once you have successfully completed a file share backup, you get the following restore options:

  • restore entire file share 
  • rollback to a point in time - it is actually a fast entire file share restore 
  • files and folders - allows to pick individual files and folders

Let's take a look at each of them.

Restore file share 

Once started, the restore wizard will ask to select a specific restore point 


The location of the restore can be the original server or to another server

You will choose how to process the restore when the files already exist in destination: keep existing files, replace older file, replace newer files, overwrite. In the same tab you can select to keep the security attributes and permissions of the restored files.

Press Finish on Summary page and wait for the restore process to finish. In my case 51 files have been restored out of  750 on the share:


Rollback to a point in time
In case you don't want to go through the whole process from above, select the second restore option, select the point in time and the file share will be reverted to it:


Files and folders
This options let's you restore specific files or folder. It opens a searchable file explorer. Three different views are present in the file explorer:

  • latest - presents a list with the latest versions of the files 

  • all time - displays all versions of the file on the share 

  • selected - presents the version of a file existing in specific restore point 

Looking at the different views from above you will notice that not only file size is different, but also the number of objects displayed in each view. This is based on the actual state of the file share when the backup was taken. 

After the file has been selected, the restore the file to the same location or copy it locally. 

In case you do not overwrite the original file, you will see the files in the share


Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Backup vSAN 7 File Share with Veeam Backup & Replication 10


This is a blog post about two of the new features that were released this year in vSAN 7 and in Veeam Backup & Replication v10:
  • vSAN File Service
  • Veeam NAS Backup 

As you've already guessed, we're going to create a file share on vSAN, put files on it and backup it up with Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) using the native NAS support.

At a high level the environment looks as following:



A 2 node vSAN 7 cluster runs in a nested environment. Each node has 4 vCPU, 32 GB of RAM, 20 GB Cache SSD and 200 GB Data SSD. A witness appliance has been also deployed. VBR v10 is configured with the minimum hardware: 2 vCPU and 8GB. Both proxy and repository roles are installed on the same VM with backup server, as well as the embedded MSSQL Express DB. Network connectivity between vSAN and VBR is 1 Gbit.

The configuration of the vSAN cluster or the installation of VBR are not in scope of this blog as there are many resources out there. I've used William Lam's nested library for the vSAN nodes and downloaded the witness appliance directly from VMware site.

The prerequisites for the following steps are: a running vSAN cluster and a VBR installation. You will also need 2 IP's reserved for File Server virutal appliances (one for each node) and a working DNS server with records added for the 2 IP's

Part 1 - vSAN File Service

vSAN File Service provides file shares on top of vSAN storage. It supports NFS 3 an NFS 4 protocols. It comprises of vSAN Distributed File System (vDFS) and it is integrated with vSAN Storage Policy Based Management.

Enable vSAN File Services

At the cluster level go to Configure - vSAN - Services and press enable File Service


Select whether the File Server agent OVF appliance will be download automatically or it will be manually uploaded:

Give a namespace for file share, type in DNS server address and domain

Select a portgroup, type the netmask and default gateway IP


Type in the IP addresses for each of the nodes

Review the configuration and press finish. Installation process will start deploying the agents on each of the vSAN nodes.

Once it is finished you will 2 new components deployed on the vSAN cluster: the File Service Agents. These are virtual appliances running Photon OS 1 and Docker and they act as NFS file servers.

Create NFS file share

It's time to create the share and put some files to it. To create the share Configure - vSAN - File Services Share. Enter the name of the share, storage policy, soft and hard quota limits.

You can also assign labels to the file share. Quotas can be changed at a later time. Next define access control: what IP addresses have access to this share, what type of access and if to protect the share with root squash.

Lastly review the settings and create the share. Once created you will see it vSAN - File Services Share:


Now the file share is ready to be used. Because in part 2 we will use Veeam's NAS backup, we've added a small load of files on the share using a linux VM. First get the share path by selecting the file share and pressing copy on URL:

Next ssh to your favorite Linux VM and mount the file share:

To create random files with random size, we've used a simple script found on here and which was slightly adapted.

for n in {1..500}; do
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=file$( printf %03d "$n" ).bin bs=100 count=$(( RANDOM + 1024 ))
done

The workload tested was:
- 200 files ranging  between a few hundreds of KB and a few MB
- 50 files ranging from a few MB and few tens of M

The script can be adapted to create larger workloads with thousands of files. Since the whole lab is nested, performance testing was not in scope.

Part 2 - Veeam NAS Backup 

The architecture for NAS backup requires at a minimum a file share (in our case NFS from vSAN), file proxy, cache repository, backup repository and a Veeam Backup Server.

Additionally, secondary and archive repositories can be added in infrastructure. In our lab infrastructure all components are deployed on a single VM - the backup server.

File proxy - component that acts as the data mover transporting data from the source (file share) to the backup proxy. It is used in backup and restore activities.

Cache repository - is a location to store temporary metadata. This metadata is used to reduce the load on the file share during incremental backups.

Backup repository - main location of the backups

Add File Share 
In VBR Console go to Inventory - Add File Share

Select NFS share and specify the path to the share


Select the File proxy, cache repository and backup speed


Review the summary and finish the configuration.

Having the file share added, we will add it to a backup job. Right click it and add it to a new backup job (or use an existing one).



Select the file share to backup


Select destination repository, backup policy and archive repository if any.

Select a secondary target if required (backup copy for short term)


Enable the job to run automatically

Review the settings and run the job.


The initial execution backups up all 250 files on the share. For the incremental, we've removed and recreated the first 50 files on the share:


for n in {1..50}; do 
  rm -f file$( printf %03d "$n" ).bin
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=file$( printf %03d "$n" ).bin bs=100 count=$(( RANDOM + 1024 ))
done

As you can see the cache repository is pretty effective in determining which files to be backed up: