Can you recommend a free/low cost backup solution for a small qty of VMware VMs...

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RojBlake

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  • #1
    ...that is not Veeam?

    This is for my home lab, which is a pair of NUCs running vSphere/vCenter 7, connected via iSCSI to a Synology NAS, backing up over the network to an SMB share on an old Mac mini. There are only ~10 VMs, so there's nothing fancy going on here.

    I want something that "just works" and I'm at the point where I've decided to give up on Veeam, because it just doesn't. (At least not for me anyway.)
     
    Klockwerk

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  • #2
    Ah. ahahaha. Uhm, sorry.

    The team that does backups at work using the enterprise version of Veeam on enterprise hardware tell me it really doesn't work there either.

    Right, so, that's not helping. Need to know a bit more about your environment:

    1. What version of vSphere are you using? If it's a paid version there will be different APIs available than if you're using the free version. You mention vCenter and Veeam so I'm assuming paid, but it's nice to know.
    2. Can the Synology take snapshots of the iSCSI share and put them somewhere? (I'm unfamiliar with what they're capable of)
    3. Is the Mac Mini running Server OSX or something else? It'll determine what options are available.
     
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    oikjn

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  • #4
    I think the general consensus if you look across this forum is that Veeam is generally the preferred solution. We've been using it for years without issue across multiple sites. We don't use the snapshot functionality, but the backup function itself is hard to beat.

    You can separate the storage repositories from the management server and from the backup processing hosts or keep them all together. It scales well, but a "mac mini" as a backup server is likely way too underpowered to do anything useful. You need decent memory and good random IO SSDs to handle the backup processing well. From an enterprise standpoint, Veeam is a good value and great function, but it doesn't save you from the hardware costs required for actually operating a real backup solution.
     
    Paladin

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  • #5
    RojBlake said:
    ...that is not Veeam?

    This is for my home lab, which is a pair of NUCs running vSphere/vCenter 7, connected via iSCSI to a Synology NAS, backing up over the network to an SMB share on an old Mac mini. There are only ~10 VMs, so there's nothing fancy going on here.

    I want something that "just works" and I'm at the point where I've decided to give up on Veeam, because it just doesn't. (At least not for me anyway.)
    Click to expand...
    What about it doesn't work? Costs? Licensing issues? Backups fail to run? Insufficient space? Creates too much load on the host or backup target?

    Vembu and Iperious both claim to do free VMWare backup with vSphere.
    Not sure how good they are.
     
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    molo

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  • #6
    RojBlake said:
    ...that is not Veeam?

    This is for my home lab, which is a pair of NUCs running vSphere/vCenter 7, connected via iSCSI to a Synology NAS, backing up over the network to an SMB share on an old Mac mini. There are only ~10 VMs, so there's nothing fancy going on here.

    I want something that "just works" and I'm at the point where I've decided to give up on Veeam, because it just doesn't. (At least not for me anyway.)
    Click to expand...

    Nothing in VMWare land that is worth using is free. Nothing. In fact, all the good stuff is expensive-as-hell.

    But you get what you pay for. Veeam is pretty great, and comparatively cheap for what it does.

    I'm a fan of vSphere, but to make the most of it, you gotta spend some big bucks. It's the third-party support that makes it so useful.

    THAT SAID: Seriously consider moving your VMs to Azure or AWS. For a small number of VMs, it's a great deal. It's hard to justify on-prem stuff these days.
     
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    RojBlake

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  • #7
    Klockwerk said:
    1. What version of vSphere are you using? If it's a paid version there will be different APIs available than if you're using the free version.
    Click to expand...
    7.0 U2 Enterprise Plus, courtesy of my generous employer. (Although I suppose it's not entirely altruistic, since the assumption is that I will tinker about on my own time, learn new things and then use them in my work...which is of course exactly what tends to happen!)

    2. Can the Synology take snapshots of the iSCSI share and put them somewhere?
    Click to expand...
    Yes to the first; I don't think so to the second. I spent a ton of time going down that rabbit hole and could never find a viable solution. You can save snapshots to a locally attached drive, but that's no good to me. Or you save snapshots to a second NAS, but that's no good either. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be possible to export (or import) snapshots via SMB, FTP or anything else to/from just a regular, network-accessible location.

    3. Is the Mac Mini running Server OSX or something else? It'll determine what options are available.
    Click to expand...
    Just regular macos Mojave.

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    oikjn said:
    You can separate the storage repositories from the management server and from the backup processing hosts or keep them all together. It scales well, but a "mac mini" as a backup server is likely way too underpowered to do anything useful. You need decent memory and good random IO SSDs to handle the backup processing well.
    Click to expand...
    The mini has 16 GB of RAM and an SSD, is recognized by Veeam as a remote SMB backup repository, and Veeam says that the primary bottleneck is the source. I infer from this that the mini is an adequate backup target.

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    Paladin said:
    What about it doesn't work? Costs? Licensing issues? Backups fail to run?
    Click to expand...
    Costs/licensing is a non-issue: I'm using the free version limited to 10 VMs because that's really all I need right now. The problem is that backups were either failing to complete about 70% of the time (from when I first started using it up until about a month ago), or failing to complete 100% of the time (the last month). I don't care to go into any more detail - I've spent too many frustrating hours trying to figure out why at this point - I just want to back this up some other way.
     
    RojBlake

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  • #8
    Honestly, it doesn't even have to be a VMware-integrated solution. The only VMs I have that are likely to not be restorable if not explicitly backed up via application-consistent technology are my two Windows DCs and I can rebuild those manually without much effort.

    If there's a backup product out there that works with agents on each VM, that would be fine. (My lab has Windows, CentOS and Ubuntu VMs.) The only prerequisites are that it's free or cheap (because lab environment) and that it can save to/restore from that Mac Mini, because that's what my offsite backup copies from.
     
    Paladin

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  • #10
    Iperius and Vembu might be worth a shot then. The situation you are in is uncommon, people don't generally run a VMWare setup that costs $10k or whatever but balk at paying for the entry level license for backup. For a lab situation they just treat it as disposable and don't bother to back it up at all unless there is something really important and then they just copy off the VMDK and VMX files or whatever.

    There is a free Unitrends version that might do the job and there are some complicated but free options here too:

    https://www.virten.net/2016/04/backup-s ... free-esxi/

    Primarily the ghettoVCB option.
     
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    gusgizmo

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  • #11
    The problem is that backups were either failing to complete about 70% of the time (from when I first started using it up until about a month ago), or failing to complete 100% of the time (the last month). I don't care to go into any more detail - I've spent too many frustrating hours trying to figure out why at this point - I just want to back this up some other way.
    Click to expand...

    You have a storage or network issue. Full stop. If you can't get a snapshot with veeam, you can't get a snapshot from vmware in my experience.

    The source being the bottleneck tells me you have a weak/and or/unsupported storage array on the vmware host.

    GhettoVCB is my recommendation for a home lab. https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB Not everything needs a whole freaking stack chewing up resources constantly.
     
    RojBlake

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  • #12
    I'll try those suggestions - thanks.

    Also looking at Bacula, for an open source option.

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    gusgizmo said:
    You have a storage or network issue. Full stop. If you can't get a snapshot with veeam, you can't get a snapshot from vmware in my experience.
    Click to expand...
    I create/delete snapshots manually on a regular basis and I've never run into any problems. It's only Veeam that seems to have issues doing that and only in the last month. :shrug:

    The source being the bottleneck tells me you have a weak/and or/unsupported storage array on the vmware host.
    Click to expand...
    Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm inferring that bottleneck statement similar to how I read a credit report, i.e. I'm assuming it defines the weakest element in the chain as the bottleneck, regardless of whether it's actually a problem.

    Recent example from the log:
    Code: 
    Load: Source 77% > Proxy 3% > Network 69% > Target 69%  
Primary bottleneck: Source
     
    RojBlake

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  • #13
    Flying_Carpet said:
    Aktiv backup for business
    Click to expand...
    I played around with this for a bit and it looks really slick. However, as far as I can see it's for backing data up to the NAS rather than backing up the contents of the NAS elsewhere.

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    gusgizmo said:
    GhettoVCB is my recommendation for a home lab
    Click to expand...
    This might work. I just spent some time figuring out how to create an NFS share on the Mac and mount it as a datastore in ESXi. I'll do some more testing tomorrow.
     
    Klockwerk

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  • #15
    Flying_Carpet said:
    Is Veeam that Bad?
    I'm on the verge of implementing it as our Backup solution. :/
    Click to expand...

    It's not That Bad, but I think it also depends on how complicated your environment is. Additionally, the backup team are going to highlight the bits that don't work when they want to complain to someone about their area.
     
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  • #16
    I create/delete snapshots manually on a regular basis and I've never run into any problems. It's only Veeam that seems to have issues doing that and only in the last month. :shrug:
    Click to expand...

    May or may not be the issue but I want to point out that VM backup products don't generally appreciate you doing your own snapshots. Your problem may be as simple as that. It's not generally good practice to leave snapshots active in any case, as the delta will grow and grow and grow over time.

    Quick rollback in veeam is very fast in my experience. Easily replaces native snapshots.
     
    Paladin

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  • #17
    Yup, never have a snapshot on VMWare for longer than you are actually using it. Make a snapshot, do what you need to do and then delete or revert it.

    I work with Rubrik for backup quite a bit now and it initially gives you warnings if there is an existing snapshot and then errors out if there is more than one nested snapshot on a VM. Hyper-V has the same problem but things seem to get even worse. (this is assuming you are doing snapshot based backups, agent managed file or volume backups are not subject to this kind of issue)

    I'll also mention that after working with Rubrik, I will bitch about all the things it does wrong or its fragile points and frustrating UI quirks or other foibles and pain points. However, it does generally work, especially if you build your environment right. Making things overly complicated, breaking the rules like having nested snapshots hanging around and stuff, then it gets frustrating and has issues but generally it works pretty well. I expect most decent backup products are the same if they have a big enough user base. Some are better some are worse but they have to work to at least some degree or no one would keep using them. Well... not for long anyway.
     
    RojBlake

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  • #18
    ferzerp said:
    You haven't provided any detail on the actual issue other than backups aren't working. There should be a log entry to tell you what type of failure it is.
    Click to expand...
    That's because I'm not here to engage in deep Veeam troubleshooting. I'm here to replace it with something else.

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    gusgizmo said:
    May or may not be the issue but I want to point out that VM backup products don't generally appreciate you doing your own snapshots.
    Click to expand...
    If that's the case then that strikes me as a serious downside of all such products. Being able to manually create/delete snapshots is critical functionality in many (most?) VMware environments. (Certainly it is at my company anyway.)

    Your problem may be as simple as that. It's not generally good practice to leave snapshots active in any case, as the delta will grow and grow and grow over time.
    Click to expand...
    I'm intimately familiar with this. It's something I have to explain to people at work on a regular basis. "No, no, it's called a snapshot but it's not really a snapshot like you're thinking it is, because..." along with the 72-hour best practice recommendation. ;) (I'm a VMware admin.)
     
    Paladin

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  • #20
    RojBlake said:
    gusgizmo said:
    May or may not be the issue but I want to point out that VM backup products don't generally appreciate you doing your own snapshots.
    Click to expand...
    If that's the case then that strikes me as a serious downside of all such products. Being able to manually create/delete snapshots is critical functionality in many (most?) VMware environments. (Certainly it is at my company anyway.)
    Click to expand...
    That's a thing you might need to change then. The 'right' way to do it, in my experience with enterprise type backup for VMWare, is to do a snapshot in the backup system not VMWare. That makes VMWare do the snapshot, the backup system ingests it and you do whatever you need to do. If you need to revert, you use the backup system to do so. If you need to extract from the backup, you use the backup system to do so. If all is well, you move on with your life. No need to worry about manually cleaning up snapshots. The backup system does that.

    VMWare snapshots are there for if you don't have any better choice and to help an external backup system do its job.
     
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  • #21
    veeam should just work, but a Mac implementation of SMB/CIFS could be an issue. Last time I tried something "fancy" with a MAC and SMB I found it wasn't actually fully compatible. If the mac is the only storage repository option, you might want to try an NFS share on it instead of SMB. Assuming you aren't having some network issue, I'd put money on the issue being with the SMB implimentation.

    Good luck with finding a backup solution for vCenter that is supposed to be run on a Mac.
     
    Klockwerk

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  • #24
    sryan2k1 said:
    7.0U2 is very new, is that even officially supported by Veeam? That might be your problem.

    Anyway, I used it professionally for years, nothing works as well at that low of a cost. Like any backup system it had it's occasional quirks but it's not broken by design. If it's flat out not working you're using it wrong.
    Click to expand...

    As long as it's version 11 of veeam it's supported in 7.02 - https://www.veeam.com/kb2443
     
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    mibosshard

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  • #27
    Paladin said:
    That actually looks pretty nice, thanks!
    Click to expand...

    I have it up and running for a year now and so far it has worked flawless (uber-minimalistic homelab ESXi with 6 VMs running on a PC Engines APU2).
    https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

    I have installed Archivare Pure on openmediavault (which is also acting as Time Capsule, on a second PC Engines APU2).
     
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