Installing Veeam license onto Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0 throws the error: “The provided license is not valid.” or “License is not installed.”

Problem

You’re attempting to install Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0 on a new Windows Server 2012 server but noticed that as you go through the install and enter the license file you received from Veeam (veeam_backup_full_0_4.lic), you are unable to proceed past Provide License step because the following error is thrown:

 The provided license is not valid.

 

Removing the license file and installing Veeam as trial completes without any errors so you attempt to install the license by navigating to Help –> License:

Select the license:

But then receive the following error:

License is not installed.

You need to install a license before you can start using the product.

To install the license, select Menu > Help > License > Install License…

Solution

Searching through the web didn’t provide me with much information on this error so I went ahead and opened a support call with Veeam.  The first response from the engineer was that I may have a Veeam 7 license but I’m installing it into a Veeam 6.5 install but that wasn’t the case so he told me to try opening the license file with notepad to see whether there was actually content in there and to my surprise, there wasn’t.  The .lic file was completely blank.

The engineer proceeded to tell me that he has seen a lot of clients downloading the .lic file from webmail (i.e. Exchange OWA) which ends up corrupting the file. I went back to my Outlook 2013 full client to redownload the file on my laptop and quickly saw the content.  From there, I copied the .lic file to the server which then installed fine.  Strange issue but glad it was a quick fix.  One last point I’d like to try and make is that I asked the engineer whether I could just copy the license file contents to the another notepad then save it as a .lic file and he said no because that wouldn’t work.  Hope this helps anyone who might come across the same issue.

Unable to add new Veeam proxy server with the error: “Failed to install deployment service.”

Problem

You attempt to add a new Veeam proxy server that is located in your DR site that will be used as a target proxy for replication but receive the following error:

[serverName] Failed to install deployment service.

Access is denied.

--tr:Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$ shared folder on host [IP Address].

--tr:Failed to install service [VeeamDeploymentService] was not installed on the host [IP address].

The service account you’re using is a local account on the proxy server that is a part of the local administrators group.

Solution

This error ended up being more Windows related than Veeam as when I tested connectivity to the server, I was able to RDP but could not UNC to the admin$ or c$ administrative shares.  What I realized after troubleshooting the issue was that UAC was turned on for the proxy server with Windows 2008 R2 as the operating system and this was denying access for accounts that try to remotely access these shares.  There are 2 ways to correct this:

1. Turn off UAC
2. Modify a registry key to allow remote access

I ended up opting for turning off UAC since this environment has most servers configured as such.

Veeam 6.5 replication job fails with “Soap fault. No DataDetail: 'get host by name failed in tcp_connect()', endpoint: 'https://DR-vCenterName:443/sdk'”

I recently ran into an issue where my Veeam replication job that replicates VMs from a head office to a DR site would fail with the following error:

[30.06.2013 16:37:40] <  6648> vim| >>  |Cannot get service content.

[30.06.2013 16:37:40] <  6648> vim| >>  |Soap fault. No DataDetail: 'get host by name failed in tcp_connect()', endpoint: 'https://DR-vCenterName:443/sdk'

The infrastructure consists of a Veeam backup and replication server in the head office with a dedicated Veeam proxy target in the DR site along with a vCenter and ESXi host serving as the replication target.  The proxy in the DR environment wasn’t joined to the domain or configured with DNS settings so just as the error apparently suggests, the cause of the failure was because the proxy in the DR could not resolve the vCenter name in the DR.  A simple host record fixed this or if preferred, configuring the DNS settings of the DR proxy with the domain’s DNS servers would achieve the same results.  I opted to use a host record because the DR environment I was working in was a hosted solution that did not allow DNS queries from DR to the head office.

Setting up replication with Veeam 6.5 over a slow WAN link with the option “Map replicas to existing VMs”

I’ve recently had to set up a disaster recovery environment for a client using Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 (6.5.0.109):

… as the replicating application to replicate virtual machines from their office to another datacenter.  The virtual machines were quite large and the link between the office and the datacenter was only 10Mbps so we decide to use the Low connection bandwidth (enable replica seeding) option:

… where we would copy the Veeam backups to the DR site and use the Get seed from the following backup repository:

to perform the initial seeding so we won’t have to pull the terabytes of data through a 10Mbps link.  What I noticed immediately when I kicked off this job was that the operation’s data rate was going as slow as the 10Mbps link so I placed a call into Veeam support and was told that this feature apparently had a bug and that I should workaround this problem by:

1. Install Veeam onto a server in the DR site
2. Copy the backups to DR
3. Use the Veeam server in the DR site to perform an actual restore onto the vCenter/ESXi hosts serving as the replication target
4. Use the Map replicas to existing VMs option to map the replica (the manually restored VM)

I have since gone ahead to do this and was able to get the replication between sites going.