Backup your VMWare ESX(i) Virtual Machines with Veeam for free! (VCPs)

I have been seeing posts about Veeam in blog sites and tech articles lately which peaked my interest to look into the Veeam line of products. I asked a co-worker about Veeam and he informed me that Veeam is currently free for all VMWare Certified Professionals (VCP).

From the following link you can register and download the software and license keys for both Veam Backup and Replication as well as Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.

http://www.veeam.com/nfr/free-nfr-license

I installed Veeam Backup and Replication in a Windows Server 2008R2 virtual machine, and proceeded to configure some backups jobs. If you want to install Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager - IIS  must be installed on the machine prior to installation, including IIS 6 compatibility and Windows Integrated Authentication.

For the purposes of this demonstration I selected Add Server and pointed to a single ESXi Host

Enter the Host Name or IP Address followed by the login information

After the host is connected, the Datastores connected to the host will be displayed beneath the Host Name

Once an ESX(i) host has been connected, a backup job can be configured. Start by selecting Backup from the top navigation

Enter a name for the new backup job

Select a Processing Mode, for this demonstration I have selected Network

Select the Virtual Machine(s) that will be included in the backup job

Browse for Virtual Machines

The size of the Virtual Machine(s) will be displayed

From this step hard drives and templates can be excluded from the backup job. Select Exclusions

Select the Disks Tab and the Virtual Machine and Choose Edit

All Disks can be included or individual disks can be chosen, if individual disks are required, select the Selected Disks radio button followed by the virtual disks you want to exclude and select OK.

Enter the Backup Destination settings

Enter Guest Processing, if there are applications on the guest that could possibly need to be gracefully closed during the backup, select Enable application-aware image processing and enter the guest credentials with permissions to the machine

The job can be scheduled or ran manually

This completes the configuration of the domain controller backup job

IOMEGA IX4-200D Thoughts

I've owned the Iomega IX4 200D for almost 2 years now, since this is a core piece of my home infrastructure, I felt some feedback would be appropriate.

The NAS is not designed for speed, in most reviews I've read it's usually ranked near the bottom of the pack. That said I still think it's a great device with a ton of functionality, the unit ships with Seagate Barracuda hard drives that spin at 5900 RPM, they are the low power edition of the product line. I use mine (I actually own 2) for a VMWare ESXi 5.0 environment that I run, my environment consists of 2 - 3.2 GHZ Quad Core Phenom II white boxes each with 8GB of RAM and 5 Intel Pro 1000 NIC cards. The NAS comes with 2 Gigabit NICS that can be teamed for performance or used individually for redundancy, I found this to be pretty rare for most home NAS devices on the market.

The Iomega is certified with VMWare to run VSphere and supports both iSCSI and NFS. I purchased the unit with 4 500GB Seagate Barracudas and quickly ordered 4 2TB Barracudas to replace the original drives. Switching out the drives is actually not supported by Iomega and will void the warranty however, I kept the 500 GB drives so if I ever have to ship it back, I can put the original drives back in.

The operating system of the NAS is actually striped across all disks in the device so you must be careful to only switch one drive at a time until the array is completely rebuilt. I have had a drive fail once and it was very easy to install a new drive and let it rebuild the array, on an 8TB RAID 5 array about half full it takes about 24 hours to rebuild but the nice thing is that the array is still accessible during the reconstruction.

That's all I can think of right now, I'll keep adding to this post as I have time...