The Veeam vCloud Self-Service portal (from here on, just portal) is a great solution for offereing self-service capabilities to vCloud Director tenants that want to manage by themselves backups and restores of their VMs and vApps. Service providers can already configure the service to allow tenants for different degrees of freedom, but there are some additional options that are not available in the configuration options.
I already blogged a few months ago about how to “Disable Items Restore options in Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal”, so that the ITEM tab can be completely removed from the interface. And looking at the number of visit this page has had so far, seems like several providers are alreday leveraging this “trick”.
Today however, we want to go a little bit further.
WARNING: As in the previous post, this is a totally unsupported procedure, do it at your own risk!
The request we received from some service providers was this: “How can we disable direct file restore and offer only the download option to our tenants?”. The scenario can be explained with this screenshot of the portal:
The ITEM tab is already removed, and a tenant can only restore virtual machines and files. In the FILES section, tenants can select any file and request for a direct restore, that is from the Veeam infrastructure directly into the virtual machine, either overwriting the original file or by keeping both versions.
Depending on the network configuration, especially for Linux virtual machines this type of restore can be a problem, since it requires many configurations to the network topology to make it work. For Windows machines this could still be possible, since VIX libraries would help to restore the file in a “networkless” way, but VIX cannot be used in Linux for restores, and the portal cannot dynamically disable the Restore options depending on the involved Guest OS.
So, we found a way to completely disable this option.
To do so, service providers need to replace the original file %Program Files%\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Enterprise Manager\WebApp\js\release\app.min.js with a modified one, that can be downloaded at the end of this post. After renaming the original file (always better to keep it if you need to revert the modification), the downloaded file can now be named app.min.js. After reloading the interface, this is the new behavior:
As you can see, the RESTORE button in the upper part is greyed out, and even when you right click on a file, there’s only the Download option.
NOTE: we originally created this modified file at the time of Veeam Backup & Replication Update 2. During the upgrade to Update 3 (9.5.0.1536) the modified file stopped working. Chances are that during the next Update this problem may surface again, in that case we’ll create a new version of the file: