Tag Archives: backup

HP IMC 7.2 – won’t backup config of Cisco Nexus 9K switch

HP, Networking, , , , , , , , , , ,
Background

I have a customer who is using HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) to monitor their switching environment. Originally they were using all HP Switching, but have slowly moved away during a refresh cycle and now use Cisco Switching, a mix between 2960X and Nexus switching.

The issue

When changing the HP IMC (Basic edition licence) over to manage the Cisco switching, everything went fine, apart from the Nexus 9K switches, which were not detected properly nor could be backed up. We contacted HP, who said the 9K switches are supported, but they would not give us any further details until we had a software support contract in place.

When we ran a manual backup of the switch we would receive the following error message;

Failed to send the configuration file from the device to the iMC Server by TFTP
The cause

The cause is down to the sysOID seen by IMC, it correctly see’s the vendor a Cisco switch, but does not identify it as a Nexus switch. The default settings for a Cisco Switch in IMC is to use CatOS commands for any operation.

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How to produce good documentation – Part 5 – Diagraming your (Veeam) Backups

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So it’s just been a little over a year since Part 4 of my how to document series was posted. I hoped to keep adding to the series, but at the same time, only do it when I felt I had relevant content to share. So this post is to show how I have documented some recent backup configurations. Note: I mainly work with Veeam, but hopefully this will give you idea’s of how to present the setup of your other backup software

Below are the previous posts;

The challenge

Note: The Visio file for these examples can be found at the end of the blog post.

Your backups evolve over time, as does your environment. Your backup schedules become more complex, and its hard to remember, what does what.

As past of my job, I setup backup solutions for customers, and then have the task of documenting how they are setup. I used to do this in a table format. It was quite simple

  • Backup/replication job name
    • Services backed up
    • Job settings
      • Storage/environment used

When you have a number of backup jobs, you have a lot of jobs and information to dig through. Its not user friendly.

Veeam backup job settings table 1 Veeam backup job settings table 2

So I re-visualised the way to present the data, I still have the detailed tables, however I also have three Visio diagrams

  • Backup Architecture setup
  • Backup and Replication jobs – Servers/services included
  • Backup and Replication job settings – high level

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Veeam Hidden Feature – Backup Validator

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So the other day I was using the Veeam Backup Extractor Tool, located in the installation folder, when I noticed another .exe file that I hadn’t paid attention to previously.

  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe

This a CLI based tool, and does exactly as the name suggests, validates backups.

You can access it by running command prompt;

  •  CD “C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup”
  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe and your arguments(to see the full options, see at the bottom)

This is a handy little tool for validating the backup files, and can probably be scripted as well. However unlike the SureBackup feature, it will not guarantee that once the files have been restored, the Virtual Machine’s operating system is intact and in a working condition.

An example of its use

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Veeam v8 – Active Directory Restore Wizard in action

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So lets look at one of the best features brought to us in Veeam 8, Active Directory Restore Wizard.

2014-11-11_11-12-09

1. Open up the restore, select application items, and then Microsoft Active Directory

2. Select your VM that you want to pull the data back from, and then your restore point for that VM.

Note: I am actually using a restore point created in Version 7!!!!2014-11-11_11-12-31

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