I was attending the Veeam Certified Engineer course this week and tried some things in my home lab. One of the discussions in the course was, if it’s possible to add a ESXi Hypervisor to Veeam Backup & Replication. From my view it should be possible to add it and use it as a replication target.
I deployed an ESXi from a template, add a datastore for the replicas and added it to the VBR server. Afterwards I created a Replication Job to replicate VM-1 from my production ESX to the ESXi Hypervisor (Free license).
This job failed with the following error message:
Processing configuration Error: Current license or ESXi version prohibits execution of the requested operation.
So you can add a vSphere Hypervisor host to the VBR server but you can’t use it for Backup or Replication because you need the vStorage API.
I decided to delete the Replication Job and the standalone host but I got the following error when I tried to delete the host after the job was deleted:
That was interesting because I deleted the job so there shouldn’t be a job anymore. So the only way to get rid of this “ghost” job was to edit the Veeam B&R database.
I would think that the following procedure is not supported by Veeam.
Open SQL Management Studio and log into the server
Go under Veeam Database – Tables
Right click Backup.Model.Backups and select “Select Top 1000 rows“, there you will find the missing Job with a job_id of NULL
If you try to delete this row you get an error which states that there is a REFERENCE contraint in the table Backup.Model.Points.
Before you open this table write down the id of the missing job
Delete in the table Backup.Model.Points the row with the matching backup_id value
After you have deleted both rows you can delete the standalone host within the VBR server.
To verify that this will only happen when you use the free license I put an Essentials license in the ESXi host. I created the Replication Job and it successfully completed.
Then I deleted the Replication Job and tried to delete the standalone host but I got the same error message as with the free license. I searched for the replicated VM in the VBR server, right clicked on it and selected “Remove from disk”. After this procedure I was able to delete the standalone host.
Looks like that there is a little bug in Veeam Backup & Replication 7 Update 3 when you try to use a free licensed ESXi host.
422 total views, 7 views today