With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v8 we can restore directly from NetApp Snapshots. Whether it’s an entire VM, individual files, or just some objects in Active Directory, you can do it all from the Veeam console. For a guide on installing and configuring Veeam v8 with NetApp storage, click here
We’ll be testing the restore of individual files and some Active Directory objects for this blog post. In this scenario we have a couple Domain Controllers (2008 R2) and a couple of member servers with some files that we’ll delete. We also have an OU with a couple users, a member server, and a group.
Each of these VMs sit on either of these two volumes, Win_2008 and Win_2012. If you click on “Storage Infrastructure” in the Veeam Backup and Replication console, then expand your NetApp storage you’ll see a list of all the volumes available and their snapshots.
1. I’ve taken a snapshot in NetApp System Manager of these volumes. To list these snaps, refresh the volume by right-clicking on the volume and choosing “Rescan volume” or right click on the storage array and choose “Rescan Storage” (Since we have 2 volumes to refresh, we’ll rescan storage.
2. A new window will popup showing the progress
3. Once completed, we now see the new snapshot I created called “Pre-delete”
4.I’m going to delete a file from the server “Lab2008” (on the Win_2008 datastore) and “Lab2012” (on the Win_2012 datastore) that are sitting on my desktop.
5. And let’s also delete the OU “Delete Test” which contains a couple test users, a group they are apart of and the VM “Lab2008”
6. Now that those files and OU\objects have been delete, let’s go back to the Veeam console and see what we can recover. We’ll start with the files for the “Lab2012” VM.
7. Expanding “Win_2012” datastore in “Storage Infrastructure” view, click on the name of the snapshot I created earlier and we see the “Lab2012” VM
8. We right-click on “Lab2012”, hover over “Restore guest files” and then choose “Microsoft Windows”
9. Under the “File Level Restore” screen, click “Customize” in the bottom right corner
10. As long as you’re restoring to a vCenter/Host that’s already been added to Veeam, choose the host, resource pool (if any) and folder. Click “OK” then click “Next”
11. Enter a reason for the restore and click “Next”
12. Click “Finish”
13. The restore session will open and mount the snapshot/VM to the chosen host
14. In vCenter, we see these 2 tasks of creating a datastore and registering the virtual machine.
15. On the host, we see a new powered off VM with the name of “Lab2012” followed by a GUID.
16. Back at the Veeam console, the Backup Browser window appears and we can browse to the location of the deleted file
17. From here, we can copy the file to our local machine or restore it directly to the Virtual Machine. Right click on the file and choose “Restore” then “Overwrite”
18. We’ll pick “Use the following account” and choose my Lab Domain credentials and click “OK”
19. The restore process will start and you’ll see this output if you click “Show Details”
20. Logging back in to “Lab2012” we can see the file has been restored
21. Close the “Restoring files” window in the Veeam console and the “Backup Browser” window. After they’re closed, the VM will be unregistered on the host and the datastore will be unmounted.
22. I’m doing a restore from “Lab2008” but this time I will just copy the file to my local computer instead of restoring to the guest VM. After browsing the datastore snapshots and choosing “Restore Guest Files”, we’ll browse the directory structure, locate the file, right-click and choose “Copy To”
23. A window will pop up to choose the folder location on your machine and whether to preserve permissions and ownership. Then click “OK”
24. Now in the root of the C: drive we have the “Lab2008-txt” file
25. Let’s look at the “Lab2008” VM now. It was in that OU we deleted and after rebooting it and trying to login we receive the message “The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship”. We can fix that.
26. Back in the Veeam console and the “Pre-delete” snapshot for the “Win_2008” datastore, we’ll locate the “Lab-DC01” VM. Right click on the VM, hover over “Restore application items” and then click “Microsoft Active Directory objects”
27. Our host settings are saved from the last restore we did, so click “Next”
28. Enter a restore reason and click “Next”
29. Review the summary and click “Finish”
30. The Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory window will appear
31. Then the VM will be mounted in vCenter
32. Once the Veeam Explorer window for AD opens, you’ll be able to browse your Domain object. We’ll expand the “LabOU” object where we see “Delete Test” with the same 2 test users, “Lab2008” server and the group those users belong to.
33. Right click the “Delete Test” OU and choose “Restore container to LabDC.local”
34. Enter the credentials for the account with access to add objects to the domain and click “OK”
35. You’ll see the progress of the restore and then the summary of how many objects were restored
(In order for this to work your Veeam server will need network access to the live domain controller)
36. If we refresh the screen for Active Directory Users and Computers on “Lab-DC01” we’ll see the OU is back with all of it’s objects
37. In the properties for the users, we can see that group membership was retained. The group “Email Group” is located in another OU and that membership was restored as well
38. And now when we try to login to “Lab2008” with domain credentials it works with no issues.
How fast can this restore happen? From the time I opened the Veeam console until the time the OU reported as being restored took 3 minutes and 34 seconds. In an emergency where someone accidentally deletes an entire OU, a user account, a server, or anything else, they can all be restored in under 5 minutes time without the need to reset any passwords and everything will work without anyone ever noticing. Veeam is awesome and just keeps getting better and better.