Applications
vPlus can protect Applications and others likes:
Main concepts
There are 2 main concepts that vPlus uses to execute backups:
Command Execution Configuration
Application Definition
Command Execution Configuration
This describes how to perform a backup operation. That is how to execute a command that produces a backup artefact which vPlus later stores in a backup provider. Multiple Application definitions share Command Execution Configuration but with different parameter values.
Command Execution Configuration properties come in several sections:
General:
Name - Name of your configuration
Execution type:
Node - execute this command directly on the node
Remote SSH - execute this command over SSH using credentials provided in the Application definition
Timeout - fail execution if a command doesn't complete within the time given
if you think that your backup should take longer, increase this value
this timeout is for whole command execution - if you have several steps in your script and you need additional timeouts for these steps - add them to your script
Command arguments:
add arguments that contain spaces as separate arguments
the first argument is the path to your executable
make sure this command is accessible on the remote host, and vPlus credentials will suffice to execute it
remote commands (over SSH) will invoke shell so you can use bash-style expressions (built-in commands such as
echo, environmental variables or redirections) within the command argumentcommands executed on the node are executed natively by OS, so if you want to use bash-style expressions (built-in commands such as
echo, environmental variables or redirections) you need to split your command at least into 3 arguments:/bin/bash,-candyour command > with some redirections
Data export:
Export data - when enabled, vPlus will expect artefacts to be collected as a result of a command
Source type:
FILE - result will be a file, directory or path with
*wildcardSTREAM - output of your command
Source path:
path to your artefacts that need to be collected
file, directory or path with
*wildcard - more than 1 file on the source will result in files being stored as a single tar archive
Remove files after export:
if artefacts (files or source directory) need to be removed once exported
be careful when providing a path in the source directory, the whole directory will be removed when this setting is enabled
Applications:
select which applications will use this command execution config
Parameters:
this section allows you to define the parameters that will be expected to be entered in each application definition
each parameter will eventually become an environment variable in the application definition
each parameter has several properties
Name - Name of the resulting environmental variable
User-friendly hint - a hint what this parameter is to be shown later in the application definition
Default value - the default value, entered during initialization in the application definition form
Show in UI - if the value should be shown as dotted or not - useful for passwords
Obligatory - if we expect that its value should always be provided in the application definition form
Error handling
Standard error output stream handling (when non-empty):
Don't ignore it - will fail if anything is in the standard error output
Ignore without warning - will ignore it silently
Ignore with a warning - will ignore it but a warning indicator in the backup history will contain this output
Ignored Exit Codes:
error codes that should be ignored and not treated by vPlus as errors
by default, only 0 is assumed as a success
Application Definition
Once you have your command execution configuration defined (or you choose to use the predefined ones provided with vPlus), you should define the instances of your application.
There are a few parameters for application definition that come in several sections:
General:
Name - Name of your application instance
Choose node - which node is going to execute this command
Backup policy - optionally set policy for scheduled backups
Command execution configuration
configuration of your command used for this application
Note: when you create a definition for the first time, you select a configuration and click Save - you will be redirected to the Settings tab for additional details
Environment variables
shown only when the definition has been saved on the Settings tab
defines a list of environment variables that will be passed to your command/script during its invocation
parameters from the command execution config will be populated automatically
each parameter has several properties:
Key - name of the environmental variable
Value - Value of the environment variable
Show - if the value should be shown as dotted or not - useful for passwords
SSH access:
shown when Remote SSH is chosen as the execution type in command execution configuration
parameters:
SSH host - host where the command will be executed
SSH port - port on which the SSH service is running (by default 22)
SSH user - user used to connect via SSH
SSH key path:
path to your key - needs to be a file only accessible by vPlus with
400permissionsalternatively, you can use the password access method
Password:
shown when Remote SSH is chosen as the execution type in command execution configuration
set your SSH password here if you're not using the public-key authentication method
Enabling WinRM on Windows machines
The Windows Remote Management (a.k.a. WinRM) interface is a network service that allows remote management access to computers via the network. It's used to allow remote management of computers via PowerShell. As a result, WinRM is not enabled by default on Windows Server.
There is an enable_winrm.ps1 script in the /opt/vprotect/scripts/winrm directory
A Power Shell script performs the following steps:
Automatically starts the WinRM service
Adds all addresses to trusted hosts. This can be changed in line 7, replacing the aseterix symbol with the appropriate address, e.g.
Add all computers to the TrustedHosts list
Add all domain computers to the TrustedHosts list
Add specific computers to the TrustedHosts list
Add computers to the TrustedHosts list using the IP address
Adds an exception in Windows Firewall, which is used by WinRm over HTTPS (port 5986).
Creates a self-signed certificate and creates Create HTTPS listener.
The enable_winrm.ps1 script must be run on the Hyper-V server in the PowerShell console.
PowerShell for Linux must be installed on the machine where Node is installed. You can download it from GitHub
More about installation and versions for different Linux distributions here
After the correct installation, we can test the connection. On Linux, run PowerShell with the pwsh command.
Then we connect to the Hyper-V server:
After providing the correct credentials, the PowerShell console will start on the remote machine. We end the session with the "exit" command. We can also try a test PowerShell script on a remote machine:
or
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