Veeam Datalabs is a powerful feature that can help your organization automatically validate your backup recoverability and integrity. However, setting Datalabs on your on-premises, or on the cloud environment, requires a very accurate network and routing configuration. Let’s simplify this topic.
In this blog post, I am going to take you through the steps you need to successfully configure the Veeam Datalab on a different subnet, and/or on a VMWare NSX-t. Throughout this blog, you will come to understand that the complexity is due to the network routing configuration, so mastering the network aspect of the configuration will help you successfully deploy and configure the Datalab on any network topology you may have.
Since VMware has been offering their services on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, I have become more interested in how to configure the Veeam Datalabs on these services; especially when we know that all these VMware services are using the VMware Nsx-t product at the network layer.
During my last weekend, I decided to try the Veeam Datalabs configuration in my lab and to document the process for anyone who is interesting to learn how to successfully configure such a scenario.
So let’s get started with a run through the following scenario:
Scenario:
The diagram below is the network configuration I’m using on my lab. These are the details of the scenario we will discuss on the blog today:
- “33” subnet is the lab subnet
- On this subnet I’m running:
- Veeam VDRO server
- Sql Server
- On the VDRO Server:
- Backup job
- Restore Plan
- The VDRO Datalabs:
- Attached to the NSX-t
- Demo_Segment
The Datalabs Configuration:
From the scenario presented in the previous section, our aim is to build our Veeam Datalabs on the Demo_Segment and to do so, we must configure and attach the Veeam Proxy application to this network and then assign an IP address to it. For this scenario, let’s decide that the IP address will be “192.168.88.20”:
For the networking configuration, I chose to use the “Advanced Single-host” configuration”. Then I created two Isolated networks as the VMs to be used to test the configuration with two NICs set up as follows:
One NICS is attached to a “Production network: ProdNetwork” and is mapped to “NSX_vlab-Prod”. There is no VLAN:
The second NIC is attached to “Production network: ProdSan”, and is mapped to “NSX_vlab-san”. There is no vlan:
The last configuration step in the creation of the Datalab is to assign the IP address for each network. For the first network, the production subnet default gateway IP address is: 192.168.33.1 and the Masquerade IP is: 192.168.98.0/D”:
For the second network, we will use the default gateway IP of “192.168.0.1” and the Masquerade IP is: 192.168.99.0/D”:
With the configuration we have just applied, our Veeam Datalabs is ready to be deployed, configured and ready for action as shown on the below diagram:
Prepare the Infrastructure – Routing:
As previously mentioned, following those steps outlined above will deploy the Veeam Datalab on the VMWare NSX-t environment. However, we must ensure that our traffic can be routed from the “Lab” subnet to the Datalab masquerade IPs; therefore, we must set static routes as follows:
- On the default router gateway, we add the following two routes:
- Forward traffic to 192.168.89.0/24, and
- 192.168.99.0/24 to 192.168.33.9
- On the 192.168.33.9 BGP router, we need to add the following static routes:
- Forward traffic to 192.168.98.0/24, and
- 192.168.99.0/24 to 192.168.88.20
and finally, on at the NSX-t side, we add static routes on the T1 router as follows:
Note: Next hops are to be set to 192.168.88.20 for both networks.
Testing:
Return to the Veeam VDRO server and run: Verity – Data Lab, we expect to see the following return indicating success:
Summary:
The above test proves that configuring the Veeam datalabs on VMWare NSX-t is possible; and that it can work without issues. Today, there are several public cloud services blocking access to the NSX-t manager; this blocking will make it difficult, if not impossible, to configure the Datalabs without the service provider assistance. However, if you are using NSX-t on-premises, then you are all set to go as just shown above. Whether on public cloud or on-premises, all it takes to configure Veeam Datalabs on NSX-t is to master the networking aspect of the configuration, as shown in this blog.
