Synology Active Backup For Business – VMware Lab Protection

I have a Synology NAS at home which is used for both my home lab and general NAS purposes (file shares, Plex, etc). I recently setup the ‘Active Backup For Business’ (ABfB) package on my Synology as I wanted to try out the backup function for my VMware lab.

Excitingly for me the ABfB package supports deduplication for backup data. This is vital as I only have a two bay NAS running everything and my space is getting low. In the future I’ll be replacing this NAS with a larger bay model to expand my available storage and performance. Deduplication is typically handled as either an inline or post process fashion – what this means is either we dedupe data is it streams to the NAS or we stream the data in it’s raw full format and then later a scheduled task looks through those blocks to see which can be discarded.

Synology have chosen to go down the route of inline deduplication which is great, only unique blocks will be saved to my NAS. Additional information can be found at the following link –

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/help/ActiveBackup/activebackup_business_virtualmachine_backup_overview_reduction

Taken from the above link we have confirmation of the dedupe process –

Active Backup for Business provides built-in deduplication technology to greatly enhance data storage efficiency. In addition, full synthetic data storage, which leverages the Btrfs file system, also helps reduce storage usage.

There are different deduplication mechanisms in the market. To ensure maximum storage and resource efficiency, Synology Active Backup for Business uses target inline deduplication with hash-based duplicate detection. Inline deduplication scans the data and deletes the duplicated blocks before it is written to a backup repository. Since this technique clears repetion backup data, it helps to reduce the requirement of storage in a respository. To identify identical blocks, this technique uses cryptographic algorithms such as SHA-256 to calculate a hash for each block, which is the divided fixed length backup data. The blocks with same hashes are considered to be identical and therefore deleted.

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/help/ActiveBackup/activebackup_business_virtualmachine_backup_overview_reduction

If you want to check the requirements for ABfB – https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/help/ActiveBackup/activebackup_business_requireandlimit

I will provide a brief walk through of setting up ABfB to connect to VMware vCenter and running backups.

First off you need to ensure ABfB is installed via Synology Package Center, in my case I have already installed it –

Synology Package Center Active Backup for Business Installed

Please note you may need to go through a setup process to fully enable and configure ABfB. I am not going to cover that process in this post.

Now that we have the package installed we can move on to integrating with our VMware vCenter environment. If we open the package we are presented with a home page displaying various information widgets.

Synology Active Backup for Business Home Page

We need to select the Virtual Machine tab and then click the button to ‘Manage VMware vSphere’ –

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Page

A new window will open which we can use to configure out NAS -> vCenter connectivity.

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Manage VMware vSphere Page

We click the ‘Add’ button and then populate the requested fields. In my case I am using the IP address of my vCenter – the reason for this is that my DNS setup at home is being reconfigured and I haven’t setup all my lab records yet. I also chose to use the default root account for my environment – I will probably edit this later to be a dedicated service account but for our purposes this will work OK. If you were setting this up in a business environment I would strongly recommend using a dedicated service account.

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Manage VMware vSphere Add vCenter Connection

Assuming your connection works you should be presented with confirmation that the Synology is able to communicate and that the vCenter is seen as ‘Online’ –

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Page vCenter Configured Online

Excellent – we now have connectivity between the NAS and the VMware platform. We should now see the contents of the vCenter environment displayed. Each host and the virtual machines located on it are listed. Basic information is displayed with further details available if you click on the arrow to the right of the VM object.

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Page vCenter Inventory Populated
Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Page vCenter Inventory Populated Detailed VM Information

Now that we have visibility of our virtual machines we can start to create backup tasks to protect them. To do this we use the ‘Create Task’ button and complete the wizard.

The first step is to select a location to store our backup data. In my example I am using the default location for my ABfB package.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Backup Destination

Next we will create a name for our task, in my example I am backing up the two Active Directory domain controllers. I have selected both domain controller virtual machine objects.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Task Settings

Now we can select how many concurrent backup devices we want along with a number of other settings. I would recommend you leverage VMware Changed Block Tracking or CBT as it is often known. This will ensure that only blocks of data which have changed since the last backup are protected. This can have a considerable improvement on backup transfer times as we are only sending changed data as opposed to every block of the VM.

We can also select the ‘application-aware backup’ box which will leverage VMware tools and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

I have also selected to compress the data transferred over my network. My current Synology NAS is only connected via two 1Gbps Ethernet links in an LACP. In the future I hope to replace this NAS with a 10Gbps version which will allow me to stream data much faster.

For those of you with a Synology powerful enough to run Virtual Machine Manager (another Synology package) you can get ABfB to restore the backup of your virtual machine into Virtual Machine Manager and record a video to provide evidence the VM backup restores and runs correctly. This is a really cool feature and I wish I had a Synology which supports this to blog and demo.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Task Settings Page 2

There are ‘Advanced Settings’ which can also be configured on each VM. This allows you to script against these VMs should you so wish.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Task Settings Page 2 Advanced Settings

The next step is to define a backup schedule – this is determined by your recovery point objective or RPO. In my example I am going to protect these virtual machines on a weekly basic on Saturday at 05:00.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Schedule Backup Task

Now we can determine our backup retention – again it’s up to you to decide how many backups you want to keep.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Retention Policy

The next part of the wizard allows us to decide which of the Synology users will have backup privileges.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Configure Backup Privilege

Finally we are presented with a summary page allowing us to confirm our settings before we complete the wizard. On clicking ‘Apply’ the wizard will prompt asking whether we want to run this backup task now. I’m going to create some additional tasks so I said no.

Synology Active Backup for Business Create a Virtual Machine Backup Task Summary

Once our tasks are created we can test running a backup. We can view performance data for the transfer and also view a log of the task.

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Backup Domain Controllers Task Summary

Here we have a log example from protecting my vCenter virtual machine.

Synology Active Backup for Business Virtual Machine Backup vCenter Task Logs

We can also check on the deduplication rate of our backups on the Overview tab or on the ‘Storage’ tab. The Overview tab only provides the size after deduplication and not the ratio which is shown in the Storage tab. Currently in my example the ratio is 1.68 which isn’t very high however I’ve only protected 3 virtual machines. As I protect more virtual machines, especially those with common data (e.g multiple Microsoft Windows VMs) the ratio should increase allowing me to realise even greater savings.

Synology Active Backup for Business Home Storage Status Deduplication
Synology Active Backup for Business Home Storage Status Deduplication Ratio

If you were viewing vCenter during these tasks you would see a task launch to snapshot the virtual machine and then subsequently remove the snapshot when the task is completed.

Finally the important part of any backup strategy is restoring systems and files. ABfB allows us to do both, restoring virtual machines in a number of ways while also providing an interface for item level restore. As you can see below we have 3 options for restoring a virtual machine. ‘Instant Restore’ mounts the VM and connects it to vCenter while ‘Full VM’ restore does a complete copy back to the actual VMware environment. Both from what I understand leverage NFS to handle the mounting or copying of data.

The third option is unavailable on my Synology NAS but if you have one which supports Virtual Machine Manager you can restore the backup to VMM running on your NAS. This is really cool and I’d love to have a unit which could do this – not only can one confirm backups work as we found out above but we can also restore direct to the NAS should we need to.

Synology Active Backup for Business Restore Wizard Select Restore Type

As you can see, when restoring back we have the option of overwriting the original VM or restoring to a new location with different settings. This can be useful when you want to replicate a VM entirely for testing or some other purpose. Of course you could just clone the VM in vCenter but sometimes you need to replicate a previous version of the virtual machine so this feature is welcome.

Synology Active Backup for Business Restore Wizard Select Restore Mode

Being able to do item level restore, that is where we extract individual items from a virtual machine backup image is great. We can both restore an individual item to the VM or we can choose to download that file to an alternate system such as our own PC.

Synology Active Backup for Business Restore Item Level Restoration

I’m really excited to have a backup solution running directly on my NAS which protects my VMware lab. I didn’t have to create a virtual appliance in vCenter or consume any host compute/storage resource on vSAN. I also benefit from inline deduplication to help save on NAS storage space. Perhaps in the future if I’m lucky enough to get a bigger NAS I can also test the restoration into Virtual Machine Manager to prove that the backups are good. Always remember that an untested backup provides no guarantees. You should regularly test restoring systems/files/databases etc to confirm not only that the data is good but that the restoration process works and you understand it.

20 thoughts on “Synology Active Backup For Business – VMware Lab Protection”

  1. Nice article, thanks for writing it. I also have a Synology NAS, and have some virtual machines on ESXi that I wanted to backup. When I follow your guide, all works as you describe, but only if the datastore is a local VMFS5 datastore on a hard disk local to the ESXI server. I have most of my VMs on a NFS share (also served by my sinology), but Active Backup for Business can’t seem to access the NFS shared folder. When I create the backup task and try to run the backup, it fails almost immediately with the following message “Error message from the hypervisor: [File not found [NFS DS918+] TESTVM/TEST.VM.vmx]”. If I look on the NFS share, I can see the folder, so it exists. I guess some permissions need to be changed on the NFS share, but I don’t know what to change. Appreciate any advice if you or anyone else can make suggestions.

    Reply
    • Hi John,

      That’s an interesting problem – I assume the account you used to connect ABfB to vCenter has sufficient permissions? If it isn’t, perhaps make it an admin in vCenter and see if that helps. I will try and setup something similar when I am next back home to see if I can replicate your issue.

      Alex

      Reply
  2. Yes I’ve used the [email protected] account when I configured ABfB so it should have the required rights. Since the vSphere server is also able to authenticate to my Active Directory domain (via an LDAP connector), and the NAS is also linked to the AD domain using LDAP, I created a user account on the windows DC, gave it administrator privileges to vSphere, and also gave it full permissions to the NFS share on the NAS. Using that domain account as the configuration account in ABfB still gave the same “file not found” result when I tried a backup from the NFS share. However, a VM located on a VMFS5 local hard disk in the ESXi host, it backs up perfectly. I want to use NFS because I can then use vMotion in vSphere, and I prefer NFS to iSCSI because NFS multipathing with NFS41 works really good across multiple NICs and it is much simpler to configure than to be creating iSCSI LUNs. Not sure where to go with it. I’ve logged a support ticket with Synology, so we will see what they come back with.

    Reply
    • Completely understand your reasoning there – let’s see what Synology come back with, I’d be really interested to hear what they say. Hopefully you are up and running soon!

      Reply
  3. So Synology have solved the issue. They asked for log files, then they asked if they could remote into my NAS to see the problem. Apparently it was because the name I had given the NFS share contained a “+” character [NFS DS918+] and it was the + that was causing the file path issue. No doubt they will soon have a software update for ABfB available for other users. The official response from Synology is below:

    Dear Customer,
    Thank you for waiting. The reason for backup failure is because the vmx path contains the + character that we didn’t handle well. Our developer have changed the code on Active Backup for Business on your NAS. You should be able to back up VMs now.
    Hope the information helps. Feel free to contact me should you have any further questions.
    Best Regards,
    Danny C.
    Synology Technical Support

    Reply
    • Hi John,

      Thank you so much for updating with the results – greatly appreciated! Sounds like they didn’t test with special characters to make sure they were escaped properly, great find on your part and now everyone will benefit from your patch.

      Reply
  4. Hi guys, thank you for this!! my question is, do we need to have Vcenter or Vsphere for this? or just an ESXi host will work? thanks!

    Reply
  5. hi,
    Please note that using free esxi licence will not let you to have cbt (change block tracking)
    This mean that vmware will always do entire scan of the vm to read the datas. (longer backup time)
    synology will still be able to dedupe.

    Regards
    Max

    Reply
    • Hi Max,

      Thanks for posting, that’s a good point to remind people of. As I have a VMUG subscription I’m always running an Enterprise+ licensed environment but others may not be.

      Reply
  6. Anyone else having issues with instant restore to “new location with different settings” with distributed switches?
    Thank you!

    Reply
  7. Nice article, Alex. Unfortunately, the performance of the restore has been crippled by Active Backup not allowing the option of selecting which specific interfaces it should use for the backup/restore traffic. Specifically, when performing an Instant Restore of VMWare backups, I wish we had the option of which IP address Active Backup should use when creating the NFS-based datastore on the ESXi host. We have 10G cards in the Rockstation specifically for this purpose; however Active Backup always uses the IP address of the onboard 1G LAN interface. Migrating the VM from the Active Backup created NFS datastore to the ESXi host’s faster production storage subsystem takes forever to complete. Throughputs of 15-25MBs. As of today, 2/20/23 this feature has still not been implemented. How could they have missed something as trivial and performance-impeding as this? I’ve opened a feature request which I doubt Synology will consider; otherwise they would have already fixed this glaring problem. The only way around it at the moment is to either disable the 1G ports or manually create the NFS datastore on the ESXi host using the Rackstation’s 10G port(s) IP address(es).

    Alos along the same line it would have been nice to select NFS 4.1 when creating the datastore with the option of which IP addresses on the Rackstation to use as the NFS server for the purpose of multipathing. Again, something that has to be performed manually which eats into your restore time and is prone to user error when you are trying to recover from a disaster.

    Reply

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