Indexing

Indexing and Search Overview

Veeam Backup & Replication performs backups at the image-level using APIs available from the underlying hypervisor. It has no direct visibility of the file structure after backup is finished. It is possible to Use File Level Recovery (FLR) wizard or Enterprise Manager to mount VMs from within a backup file and access/restore VM guest files. If a user wants to perform file restore from the central Enterprise Manager it is not possible within an acceptable timeframe to mount all backup files and VMs in it to find a file that the Enterprise Manager user wants to restore. To support advanced file-level restore scenarios Veeam offers the capability to index files on VMs being backed up. Indexing is available for both Windows & Linux VMs allowing users of Enterprise Manager to browse and search for the necessary files and to perform one-click file restores.

The sections below will outline some specific use cases for indexing and describe best practices and guidelines for sizing.

When to Use Indexing?

File-level indexing should be enabled only if you plan to utilize advanced file search and one-click file level restore capabilities of Enterprise Manager (including delegated restore). While indexing is a job-level setting you can use filters to index only a subset of files. It is possible to exclude specific VMs from indexing as described for example in This section of the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager User Guide

How Veeam Indexing Works

Veeam indexing creates a separate index file in the catalog for each restore point. These index files are used by Veeam Enterprise Manager to support file browsing or searching without a need to mount the restore point to the mount server. Users can quickly search for files across multiple restore points viewing the required file history when looking for a specific version of a document. They can also select a specific VM and browse the file system to restore guest files.

Enterprise Manager allows for file-level restore functions to be delegated to a subset of users by leveraging the role-based access control.

During the VM backup job run the following operations are performed If configured:

  1. Veeam accesses the guest OS (using credentials specified in the job settings) and injects a small run-time process to collect the list of files.

    • For Microsoft Windows-based VMs the process gathers file metadata by reading the MFT data of the supported file system (NTFS and ReFS).

    • For Linux-based VMs the process leverages the existing “locate” database that is commonly installed on most Linux distributions. Veeam uses the following software packages for it: mlocate, gzip and tar

These operations take place in parallel with the backup and do not increase the duration of the process. For more details on the indexing process refer to the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager User Guide.

  1. Veeam Backup & Replication creates a catalog (index) of the VM guest OS files and stores index files on the Veeam backup server in the C:\VBRCatalog\Index\Machines\{vm_name} folder. Creation of the index is extremely fast and has minimal impact on network and VMware environment.

  2. Once the index is created and stored on Veeam backup servers, the indexing service on Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager performs index copy — it aggregates index data for all VM image backups from multiple backup servers to the Enterprise Manager database while the original index files in the backup servers are deleted to conserve space. The consolidated indexes are stored on the Enterprise Manager server in the C:\VBRCatalog\Index\Catalog and are used for search queries .

Important To Note!

  • To search within the index catalog it is necessary to deploy Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager, this component is in charge of catalog data replication and retention (see this section of the User Guide for more details).
  • If you enable indexing without configuring Enterprise Manager the indexes in the VBRCatalog folder of the backup server will never be collected or deleted and will eventually fill up the disk drive.

Temporary VM Disk Usage

During the indexing process indexing information is temporarily stored on the local VM guest requiring additional free space on the system drive.

Windows VM

Temporary space required on the first drive in the VM (С:\ drive):

100 MB per one million files

This was tested with one million files with 20 characters long filenames in one directory. Depending on the saved metadata and folder structure of the files, the value can be lower or higher.

Linux VM

Temporary space required in /tmp:

50 MB per one million files

Linux indexes require around 50% less space because mlocate does not index metadata such as timestamps and ownership.

Sizing Enterprise Manager Catalog

The Veeam Catalog Service is responsible for maintaining index data. When running on the backup server this catalog service will maintain index data for all jobs that run on that specific server as long as the backup data remains on disk. When running on the Enterprise Manager server the service will move index data from all managed backup servers into the Enterprise Manager local catalog deleting the files from the originating backup server catalog. So it should be sized appropriately to hold all data from the remote Veeam servers.

  • When using a Standard license, Enterprise Manager will only keep index data for restore points still in repositories.

  • For Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licenses, you can configure Enterprise Manager to keep indexes even longer, with the default being 3 months. This can significantly increase the amount of space required for the catalog.

Estimated used space of the final index file after compression is approximately 2 MB per 1,000,000 files for a single VM restore point on the Enterprise Manager server. The indexes are also stored in the backup files and temporary folders on the backup server.

Example

Below is an example that summarizes the information above. The example is given per indexed VM containing 10,000,000 files.

2 MB * 10 million files * 60 restore points per month * 3 months index retention = 3.5 GB

Follow these recommendations when setting up Veeam indexing:

  • Place the catalog on a dedicated volume of high performance disk. To change the default Veeam Catalog folder location refer to this Veeam Knowledge Base article: http://www.veeam.com/kb1453.

  • You can enable NTFS compression on the catalog folder. This can reduce the space requirements by well over 50%. For very large catalogs (with 100s of VMs and 10's of millions of files) it can be more beneficial to use a Windows 2012 R2 volume with Data Deduplication enabled. This volume should be dedicated to index files and configured to run deduplication functions outside of the normal backup window.

  • It is recommended to enable indexing only on VMs where the advanced search capabilities are necessary. Use filters to exclude unnecessary files from indexing (Windows system folder, Program Files and other system directories are excluded by default). For the Linux systems to be indexed, make sure they have mlocate or another compatible locate package installed.

  • It is possible to lower the retention of indexes for offline media (e.g. tape archives) in order to reduce space requirements. The retention is configurable in Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager, and it is recommended to configure it for the minimum necessary to meet the IT policy requirements. Index retention setting is available in the Enterprise Manager web console under Configuration > Settings > Guest File System Catalog.

  • To enhance search performance, SSDs can be used. If you plan to index a very large number of VMs it is recommended to limit the search scope at restore to a single VM before you click the search button, this will bring faster results.

    Notes:

    To take advantage of indexing on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) you must be running version 12 or above. In lower versions that do not contain by default the mlocate package you may try this OpenSUSE package http://software.opensuse.org/package/mlocate

    Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager SQL database (VeeamBackupReporting) will not grow much while using indexing functions, as this database will only store the corresponding metadata.

Using Veeam Backup Search (Optional Component)

In its early versions Veeam did not have its own indexing engine, instead it used the Veeam Backup Search component to connect to the Microsoft Search Server 2010 that provided search capabilities. Now Veeam has its own built in indexing engine developed specifically for this purpose.

It is no longer a requirement to have a Veeam Backup Search configured as Veeam Integrated indexing engine can be more performant.

If you need to use that Veeam Backup Search component (and Microsoft Search Server) for indexing consider the following notes:

  • Microsoft Search Server Express Edition can be used as it has no limitations for the number of indexed files.

  • Other editions of Microsoft Search Server deliver higher scalability because Search Server components can be separately installed on multiple servers. If you are using Enterprise Manager consider that it can spread the load between multiple Microsoft Search Servers Express automatically.

  • Microsoft Search Server functionality is used to scan content in the shared VBRCatalog folder on the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager server and to create a content index on the Search Server; this content index is used to process search queries. For more details, refer to the Veeam Backup Search section of the User Guide.

Note: Though using content index streamlines the search process the index itself can require significant space on disk in C:\VBRCatalog\Journal\[YYYY_MM]\[search-server].

  • Search Server requires an SQL database for its operation. Consider that Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition leverages only one CPU which limits the Search Server performance. The database size supported by this edition is also limited (in particular, 10 GB for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition or later).

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