Several months ago I came across an old Barracuda 290 backup appliance from a former client that was no longer in use. These old appliances don’t generally have a lot of power, but I like to repurpose things for the lab or for experimentation when I can. For instance, I’ve previously repurposed a Datta ALTO 3 appliance as a Windows 11 workstation that works great as a jump-box to straddle my production and lab environments as it has dual NIC’s. In the case of the Barracuda, it has a single hard drive, a simple OS and an installed application to backup data and with any sense, copy to the Barracuda cloud for an offsite backup. I hate seeing decent hardware go to waste, and as any avid homelabber would do, I gave some thought to how this hardware could be repurposed. As you know, I’ve been playing for a some time with the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO, and if the hardware inside would work, with the addition of a small hard drive for the OS, this too could possibly be a repository. Now, I probably wouldn’t put this into production environment, but for a home lab or work lab, it might work well. So let’s get to work and see what it can do.
The Hardware
As previously noted, this is a Barracuda Backup 290. It’s Barracuda’s second smallest backup appliance and back when we used a lot of Barracuda, it was generally about the largest appliance we sold because once you started getting bigger, things started getting expensive quickly, and we would shift to Veeam for not only price, but also power and flexibility. Still, we do have a couple clients out there with the likes of the 390 although I’ve kept no secrets about my desire to migrate any remaining Barracuda (or Datto) appliances to Veeam.
With that said, this Backup 290 uses utilizes a MSI N3150I ECO motherboard. In this case, it is powered by an Intel Celeron N3150 processor which clocks in a 1.6GHz with a burst rate of 2.08 GHz across a total of 4 physical cores. It has an 8GB DDR3-1600 SODIMM which maxes the motherboards RAM capacity. It’s not exactly a powerhouse, but we don’t really need that since we’re planning on running Linux, right? For storage, it utilizes a Western Digital Gold (DataCenter Class) 2TB Hard Drive. Barracuda recommends this size of appliance for backing up environments with up to 1TB of production data.
As you likely know by now, the Veeam Hardened Repository (VHR) ISO requires two hard drives. The smaller will house the operating system while the larger will be utilizes for an XFS drive acting as the backup repository. By using the XFS filesystem, we can take advantage of block cloning and the native immutability functionality. However, there are some other requirements to be met, primarily we need to boot using UEFI as BIOS won’t cut it from a security perspective. TPM is advised as well.
With that said, I needed a second hard drive, in this case, one for the OS. I did have a few old SSD’s laying around both Kingston and Samsung – in this case I chose the Kingston. I also scavenged for a SATA cable and a MOLEX to SATA power adapter. Since there was no good place to mount the drive, I decided to simply use some foam double-sided tape to tape the SSD to the top of the existing hard drive. After routing cables around to see what worked, I ultimately decided to place the SSD perpendicular to the existing drive, mostly due to the cable that I happened to have which plugged in at a 90 degree angle. I booted the appliance and it did recognize the additional hard drive right away – a good sign! After verification, I mounted the drive in place. Onward!
The Software
One thing that you may know is that many times vendors will lock down their hardware with custom firmware. This was a concern because Barracuda is one of those vendors that does this by loading a custom BIOS that typically prevents you from changing settings. They also tend to password protect things to prevent those changes, but a few quick google searches I found a couple links listing the likely passwords. Still, there have been instances reported where you can change settings within the BIOS, but as soon as you reboot, it reverts back to the original settings. For future reference, my password notes from those sites are as follows:
BIOS PW: 322232 32232 BCNDK1 ADMINBN99
DEFAULT PASSWORD (GUI) admin or adminbn99
RAID PASSWORD 0000I had also downloaded stock firmware from MSI just in case. Armed with this info, I booted into the BIOS and spent some time updating settings. However, it is indeed pretty locked down as best I could tell. I also tried to install stock firmware from MSI but never could get it to load from my USB drive despite it seeing the drive – it stated it couldn’t find the firmware. However, at some point I gave up and figured we’d just try to see if I could load the VHR ISO
Now this is where I ran into some actual issues. And this likely has nothing to do with the hardware I was using, but instead was how I was imaging the VHR ISO to my USB drive in Rufus. When I attempted to load the ISO, it was somewhat slow but seemed to work until I was installing and it would error out. Thinking this had something to do with the hardware, I did some troubleshooting but not knowing the inner workings of the VHR ISO very well, I was stumped. Until a couple days later I realized I had overlooked a very important instruction as listed on the Veeam KB for the ISO deployment. "Note that you need to select Write in DD Image mode option." Oops! Rufus recommends ISO Image mode instead of DD Image, and me not thinking about it selected ISO. After reimaging my drive using DD Image mode, I was able to load the VHR ISO with no issues. Fantastic news!
Now make it pretty!
I don’t want to advertise falsely that this device is a Barracuda appliance. After-all, while I love the thought of calling it either the Veeam290 or VHR290, I opted for the former, but I wanted to decorate things a bit. This is apparently what slowed me down. The fun stuff was done with loading the shiny hardware, and the powers of ADHD struck causing me to delay FOR MONTHS rebranding the device. I have a Silhouette vinyl cutter so it only made sense to change the logo. Removing the Barracuda label from the front panel was quite easy. And in this case, the logo is backlit using the Barracuda trademark fins and verbiage, so thought was to backlight the Veeam logo. Drawing up the logo with some additional nomenclature designating that this was a Hardened Repository Powered by Veeam was no problem, but I knew that the tiny lettering would be tough for adhesive vinyl and was really going to be best for screen printing. Still, I gave it a try.
The blue LED’s used to light the fin’s were covered a layer of Veeam green and then black vinyl with the green carrying over to the white LED’s. Then a new black label to cover it all and leave the appropriate green lettering block was left visible. Finally, an additional layer of white letters. Indeed, the “Powered by” was incredibly tiny and after a single attempt, my past experience reminded me that this just probably wasn’t worth the battle as the larger “Hardened Repository” wasn’t perfect. I fully expect to lose the dot on the “i” at some point, possibly before the device even get’s racked. However, the larger “veeam” lettering on the green block presented no issues give me a “good enough for the lab” result. Then, plug it in and see of the lighting glows through. And indeed, it doesn’t glow where I don’t want it to, and does where I do. It’s not perfect with some distortion behind the vinyl giving me a weird dark spot, but again, good enough.
How will it Perform?
I don’t know yet, but I’m not expecting a lot of performance out of this little box give the meager 1.6 GHz Celeron processor and a paltry 8GB of RAM. While I’ve deployed the VHR ISO to Dell PowerEdge R550’s and R760xs rackmount-servers and the PowerEdge T160 tower server, these all have Intel Xeon processors and 32GB of RAM or more. In production, I found that I actually quite love the T160 as a small form-factor server with a PERC hardware RAID1 repository and BOSS RAID1 card with M.2 SSD’s for the OS — and I love that it can be used as a tower or desktop form-factor with the latter taking up 3RU and having indents in the corner feet so you can stack them if desired). But for a lab environment, the Barracuda appliance will probably be fine, at least for now. I’m sure it won’t be fast, but it’ll likely be good enough for my purposes.
That said, after attending VeeamON and learning more about the VBR v13 VHR (in addition to the new linux-based VHR server using the JeOS (Just-enough OS) architecture and how that new appliance will function as well as the hardware requirements (which mind you are still being ironed out because they were pretty stout requirements at the time of announcement), I’m not sure that the v13 appliance will run on this hardware, let alone even install. Although you can be certain that I’m going give it a try.
But it’s not the first repurposed appliance from a competitor used as a VHR…
As previously noted, there was a lot of discussion about the VBR v13 and VeeamON 2025 in San Diego. While much of it focused on the new Linux deployment that you can optionally use with version 13, but one of my favorite events at the end of every recent VeeamON is the discussion around the VHR ISO which was introduced at VeeamON 2023 in Miami. Rick Vanover and Hannes Kasparick always run this final presentation as Hannes is seemingly the godfather of the VHR ISO. During the presentation Hannes noted that they had statistics gathered from support tickets that were created and one of those stats was what hardware that was used to back the VHR. It was interesting to see what percentage was HPE vs Dell vs Lenovo, etc and their associated models. With that said, they noted that they even had one ticket that had been opened where they were using a repurposed backup appliance from a competitor After the presentation, I asked Hannes what is was to see if someone beat me to the punch (it wasn’t a Barracuda, it might have been Commvault but I can’t remember for sure…). I did of course inform them that I had a working VHR on a Barracuda appliance and Rick was very much looking forward to seeing this!
