Backup your physical server with Veeam! Not only will this help protect your data, but it can also free up valuable office space. With Veeam’s backup solution, you can back up a server in minutes and keep your data safe and sound.
Backup Physical Server With Veeam
What is Veeam?
Veeam Backup is a software program that helps protect your physical server from data loss. It does this by automating the tasks of hardening and restoring your server, as well as managing your graphics and media cards.
The main benefits of using Veeam Backup are that it can help you keep your data safe, quick, and easy to access. Additionally, Veeam Backup can help you recovering lost or corrupted files, as well as prevent data loss in the future.
How to Backup Your Physical Server.
Veeam creates physical backups by deploying Windows Agents to the sites that are being backed up. The deployment of Windows Agents, licensing of Windows Agents and management of Windows Agents can be performed through Veeam Backup and Replication (B&R).
Veeam B&R will connect to the computers on your network using administrative credentials and install Veeam Agent for Windows Lite. Veeam’s Agent for Windows Lite will perform local backups of the system and push the data a local backup data repository. Veeam B&R can push this backup repository data to the cloud, allowing you to have both on and offsite backups.
This guide assumes that you have previously followed our How to: Create a Backup Repository using Veeam guide. If you have not, please follow the steps within that guide to creating a backup repository, as it is essential and required for the Veeam physical backups to be created.
To create your backup:
- Click on the Home tab, followed by Backup Job:
- From the drop-down menu, select Windows Computer. This will open the Windows Job Creation Wizard.
- Choose the type of type of Agent licence that you require to backup. The two options are:
Workstation – For office or home computers and laptops.
Server – For machines that typically remain directly connected to the local backup server. Recommended for any physical machines requiring application awareness, such as SQL servers and Exchange servers.
For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be using deploying a Workstation Veeam Agent: - Name the job something that you can identify, such as “Office Computers”.
- Click to add any local machines to your network that you would like to add. As a demonstration, we’ll be backing up localhost with 127.0.0.1. You’ll also be asked to add credentials to the machines. These credentials need to an administrative credential so that Veeam Agent has permission to deploy and execute:
- Choose how you would like to backup the workstations or servers. For best disaster recovery experience, we recommend Entire computer backups.
- For the destination, choose Veeam Backup Repository.
- Choose the backup server. For the demonstration purpose of this guide, this is the local machine that we installed Veeam Backup and Replication on.
- Change the Backup Repository to the repository that you created earlier. You can also adjust the retention points here, which by default is 14 days. Increasing this value will increase the number of restore points and, hence, storage space utilized by the backups:
- Select the schedule for how often you would like Veeam Agent to perform the backup. It is recommended to set this to at least daily.
- Review the settings and apply!
Once the job has been created, it will start automatically. You’ll be able to see if the job had any issues executing by clicking on the “History” tab on the bottom left. Any failed jobs will be marked with a red “X”, which you can click on for more information.
Requirements
There is no need to deploy Veeam Agent before using this new feature. If you have already deployed Veeam Agent for Windows / Linux on several servers, you can use them in Veeam Backup & Replication without uninstalling.
If you deploy Veeam Agent from Veeam Backup & Replication, you need an account which is a local administrator of the physical machine/cloud instance.
Create the protection group
The protection group is a set of physical machines/cloud instances which are protected by an agent. In this example, I create a protection group and I populate it by browsing the Active Directory.
To create the protection group, navigate to Inventory | Physical & Cloud Infrastructure. Then click on create the protection group.
Then specify a protection group name and provide a description.
In the next window, I choose to populate the protection group from Active Directory. You can also specify an individual computer or computers from a CSV file.
Then I click on Add to browse the Active Directory and add an object such an OU or a computer.
You can specify excluded objects such as virtual machines (they don’t need an agent), offline computers or objects.
PS: I unchecked All virtual machines because, for this example, I have installed the agent on a VM. It is exactly the same process for physical machine or cloud instance.
Then configure the discovery schedule and the installation/update of the agent automatically. For example, if you have chosen an organizational unit as an included object when you add the computer in this OU, Veeam is able to discover and install agent automatically on this machine.
Then review settings and click on apply to install the agent and create the protection group.
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Veeam Physical Server Restore
Restoring from Veeam Recovery Media
If the OS on your computer fails to start, you can use the Veeam Recovery Media to recover your computer. The Veeam Recovery Media will help you boot the computer in the limited mode. After booting, you can use Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows or standard Microsoft Windows tools to diagnose problems and fix errors. You can also use a backup created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to restore the whole system image of your computer or specific volumes on your computer.
Before you boot from the Veeam Recovery Media, check prerequisites. Then take the steps below to recover your computer.
- Boot from the Veeam Recovery Media.
- Select the network adapter or wireless network.
- Launch the Veeam Recovery Media wizard.
- Specify the backup file location.
- Select the remote storage type.
- Specify remote storage settings.
- Select a backup.
- Select a restore point.
- Select the data restore mode.
- Map restored disks.
- Resize restored volumes.
- Start the restore process.
Perform Bare Metal Recovery
To recover the entire computer system on new or existing hardware, you can use bare metal recovery. Bare metal recovery can be helpful in the following cases:
- You want to recover your computer from scratch after a hard failure.
- You want to recover data on a new computer without prior OS installation.
To perform bare metal recovery, you must have the following:
- Veeam Recovery Media — a bootable recovery image
- Backup of the computer whose data you want to restore
This scenario describes how to perform bare metal recovery on the computer without the OS and software installed. For bare metal recovery, we will use the USB bootable drive with the Veeam Recovery Media, and a backup stored in a network shared folder.
- Power on your computer. Make sure that the USB drive is set as the primary boot source.
- Insert the bootable USB drive with the Veeam Recovery Media into a USB slot on the computer.
- Restart the computer. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows will load the Microsoft Windows RE from the Veeam Recovery Media.
- In the Veeam Recovery Media view, click the Network Settings button and select a network over which you want to connect to the shared folder with the backup file. Click OK.
- In the Veeam Recovery Media view, click Bare Metal Recovery.
- At the Backup Location step of the wizard, select Network storage. Click Next.
- At the Network Storage step of the wizard, select Shared folder. Click Next.
- At the Shared Folder step of the wizard, specify settings of the shared folder where the backup is located. Click Next.
- At the Backup step of the wizard, select the necessary backup in the shared folder. Click Next.
- At the Restore Point step of the wizard, select a restore point from which you want to restore data. Click Next.
- At the Restore Mode step of the wizard, select Entire computer.
- Click Next, then click Restore to start the data recovery process.
- Once restore is completed, click Finish to close the wizard.
- Reboot the computer.
Veeam Backup Physical Server Linux
Veeam Agent for Linux is a tool that backs up physical Linux systems such as a workstation, a server or machines in the public cloud. This tool creates image-based backups that are stored in VBK format, the same as in Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows. Veeam Agent for Linux comes with its own snapshot and change block tracking (CBT) driver that allows for creating incremental backups without rescanning.
Veeam Agent for Linux use requirements include:
- CPU: x86/x64
- Kernel: 2.6.32 or higher
- OS: 32 and 64-bit versions of:
- Debian 6.x-8.x
- Ubuntu 10.04-16.10
- RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux 6.x-7.x
- Fedora 23-25
- openSUSE 11.3-13.x, Leap 42.1-42.2
- SLES 11 SP2 – 12
The installation has become much easier since the beta: no more installs of manual packages! You are now able to install Veeam Agent for Linux and update it via the Veeam Repository. Be sure to check out the release notes for more installation instructions.
After you install the product, you have two options to interact with it: Via a step-by-step wizard or through the command line.
Creating Job for Linux Computers
To back up data of a computer protected with Veeam Agent for Linux, you must configure a Veeam Agent backup job in Veeam Backup & Replication.
Before configuring a backup job, check prerequisites. Then use the New Agent Backup Job wizard to define settings for the backup job.
- Launch the New Agent Backup Job wizard.
- Select the type of protected computers and the job mode.
- Specify job name and description.
- Select computers to back up.
- Select backup mode.
- Specify backup scope.
- Select backup destination.
- Specify backup storage settings.
- Specify advanced backup settings.
- Specify secondary backup target.
- Specify guest processing settings.
- Specify the backup schedule.
- Review backup job settings.
Tips for Backuping Your Physical Server.
Backup your data twice a day to ensure that your data is always safe and available. This can include everything from your operating system files to your application logs. backing up your data will also help protect against potential data loss in the future.
Backup Your System twice a week
Backup your system twice a week to ensure that you have frequent backups of all of your systems and applications. This will help you keep track of which systems need backup and when, and make sure that any critical applications are always backed up.
Backup Your Applications twice a month
Backup your applications twice a month to keep them backed up and available at all times. This will include both the individual apps you use most often, as well as the entire application stack (application servers, middleware, etc). By doing this, you can avoid data loss or unexpected downtime in the future.
Conclusion
Backup and backup your physical server to protect your data, systems, and applications. Backup twice a day is enough for most people, while backuping your system and applications every week will keep your servers up and running. Be sure to backup your data regularly, especially if you have any sensitive or important data on them!