4 December 2019

ReFS allocation size

I was reformatting a drive for some Veeam backups and was trying to recall what I had set the ReFS allocation unit size to when I initially setup the drive. Well, I could not remember to save my life. Luckily, with a little command line action, it’s easy enough to find out what it was set it to.

The command line tool to use is fsutils. To see what options are available to us when using fsutils, we can run the following command.fsutils fsinfo /?

Using “E:/” as the drive we are checking out, we can run the following line to discover information about the volume itself. fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo E:

To view the specific ReFS info on this drive, we can run the following line. fsutil fsinfo refsinfo E: Take a look at value for the “Bytes Per Cluster”, this is where we can see that when this drive was formatted, it’s allocation unit size was set to 65k. 65k is also the recommended setting for Veeam destinations if you are using ReFS.

4 October 2019

Veeam Backup O365

While I’ve spent more than a few years working with Veeam’s Backup & Replication (VBR). But I’m pretty new to Veeam’s Backup O365 (VBO365). I recently learning about some of their differences while setting up a new install of VBO365 in an environment which already used VBR.

One is that unlike VBR, VBO365’s repositories don’t support drives have data deduplication enabled and running on it. It can be on a Windows server with the data deduplication role installed, that won’t break anything. But the disk volume that the repositoy lives on can not have a running data dedupe task, as you risk a change of corruption in your backup file.

The next is that it’s recommend that the VBO365 application is installed on it’s own VM. It can be run on the same VM as your VBR, but it can be resource intensive so they recommend it be running on it’s own.

The VBR backup job that is running against your VBO365 VM needs to be application aware. On top of that, they recommend running pre-job and post-job scripts to stop and start the VBO365 services. This means before the VBR job runs, it’ll need to run a script to stop VBO365 services (there are three services, though the RESTful API is probably already off by default). Then once the VBR job completes, it’ll need to start up it’s VBO365 services (there are two of them).

Luck for you and me, VBR can easily be set up to run the pre- and post- job scripts. And even luckier for you, I have already put together the Powershell command you’ll need to stop and start those services

Stop Services:

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver”} | sort-object Status -desc | stop-service

Start Services:

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver.Service”} | sort-object Status -desc | start-service

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver.Proxy”} | sort-object Status -desc | start-service

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