Cisco dCloud is a huge catalog of demos, trainings and sandboxes for every Cisco architecture that are fully scripted. The customizable environments are available almost instantly in the cloud. It’s very easy to work with and to get started all you need is a Cisco account.

That’s why I’m more than happy to let you know that as of mid-November we
provide you a with full hands-on experience of our Veeam Availability Platform and the integration in Cisco HyperFlex as part of Cisco dCloud. There are two different labs available to you:

Veeam Demo Lab

This demo is used to demonstrate our integration into Cisco HyperFlex and different backup/recovery scenarios:

1. Introduction to Veeam
2. HyperFlex Integration
3. Backup HyperFlex VMs
4. Restore VMs in a HyperFlex Cluster

Veeam installation and configuration lab

This lab can be used to perform a full installation, configuration and integration of Veeam into the HyperFlex environment. Furthermore, it guides you through the backup, recovery and replication scenarios:

1. Install Veeam Backup & Replication
2. Add Cisco HyperFlex Storage to Veeam
3. Perform a Backup
4. Perform a Restore
5. VM Replication

The labs are globally available and can be accessed with your Cisco login. Here are some of the components available for you:

• Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform 2.5 (Simulator)
• Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 2 (Windows Server 2016)
• UCS Director 6.0 (Emulator)
• Microsoft Active Directory 2012 (Windows Server 2012 R2)
• SQL Server 2016 (Windows Server 2016)

Let us know about your experience using Veeam and its integration with HyperFlex in Cisco’s dCloud in the comment section down below.

Read more:

Read the “Cisco HyperFlex with Veeam Availability Suite” validated design guide

This post will continue from part 1 and will cover protecting the VBO Server in AWS with Veeam Backup for AWS and bringing it back to vSphere on premises.

We now have our VBO server running as an Amazon EC2 instance and continued protection of our Microsoft Office 365 environment.

What if we wanted to move that back on premises?

The last thing we did was confirmed that we had a successful backup of our Microsoft Office 365 environment, this was covered in part 1.

Veeam Backup for AWS (FREE)

I actually wrote about this a few weeks back, introducing the latest product release into the Veeam Availability Platform, more can be covered off here on that overview.

It is very simple to get up and running with the free version of the product, and the paid for products are the same. I am using the free version for this task as it gives us the ability to protect up to 10 Amazon EC2 instances.

My first task was to create a new policy that would enable me to get a backup of the Veeam Veeam Backup for Office 365 instance.

This policy will then start at the scheduled times and start protecting your AWS EC2 Instance of Veeam Backup for Office 365.

The important part to note is in the same way that we described when taking the machine from vSphere to AWS we had to take our final backup and then I shut down the machine to avoid any misconfigurations or consistency. We should perform the same task here. When we are ready to migrate our workload back to vSphere, we perform those same steps.

Veeam Backup & Replication – External Repository

How do we get that data from the AWS S3 bucket now that is stored in our portable data format the .VBK. That S3 bucket can also be added to our on premises or any installation of Veeam Backup & Replication.

The External Repository feature was added with 9.5 update 4 and it gives that ability to bring backups from AWS into Veeam Backup & Replication for recovery tasks or additional backup capabilities such as sending backups into tape media. You can find a little more of that description here.

You will also find below a silent video on how to easily add your external repository to Veeam Backup & Replication.

Once you have added that S3 bucket in Veeam Backup & Replication you will see your backups that you have taken with Veeam Backup for AWS.

Recovery / Migration – Portability Full Circle

From here as I said you can do many things, create backup copy jobs and send that data elsewhere, you can send to tape or to one of our service providers using cloud connect. Or you may wish to use it for recovery. By recovery this can be individual files or folders, application items or full instance recovery.

Now we could use Instant VM recovery, this is the ability to mount this backup to our vSphere environment and boot that machine then once up you can confirm and then commit the storage vMotion back to production storage. Depending on link speed will depend on performance, I did perform this step but there was some lag from what I was trying to achieve.

The alternative is to backup copy that instance backup to a more local repository and then perform that task. The above task would likely perform better in an actual non lab environment.

A quick recap, we began with a virtual machine on premises running in our vSphere environment, we had a business decision to move that to AWS. We performed a consistent backup and migrated our workload using Direct Restore to EC2 and our Veeam Backup for Office 365 instance was now running in Amazon as an EC2 instance. We then decided that for other business benefits that it needs to be back on premises in our vSphere environment. We then used Veeam Backup for AWS (Free) to perform a backup of that EC2 instance and bring that back to our vSphere environment.

We powered on that machine and our Veeam Backup for Office 365 was able to take a backup and store that data on the connected AWS S3 Object Storage the same as it was in each of the other stages of the process.

The closing point I will make is that if you are bringing machines back from the external repository be sure that if you need a required amount of resources on the recovered machine then make sure you set that appropriately by default it will not take the same specifications it maybe once was, this will also possibly work the other way if you are recovering a smaller workload be sure that the recovery process is not giving away resources.

I really wanted to show off that portability message that not only comes from the vbk file format but all of Veeam’s products have this functionality in mind.

How do we backup the backup? Veeam have a solution to that as well, although today the Veeam Backup for Office 365 product is separate to the flagship product Veeam Backup & Replication, they still have the same simple and easy to approach to boring backup.

Our customers running Veeam Backup for Office 365 they are most likely today to be running the software within their datacentre running as a virtual machine most likely on VMware vSphere.

Because of that scenario we can leverage Veeam Backup & Replication to perform a backup of that machine and that opens the doors to lots of possibilities.

Veeam Backup & Replication backing up the backup

It is extremely easy to get a backup job up and running on Veeam Backup & Replication even if you are not using Veeam Backup & Replication what I am showing you below can all be achieved using the Community Edition this is the free edition and allows for protecting up to 10 instances.

Portability

Ok very good, we have a backup of our Veeam Backup for Office 365 server, this would be also easy to achieve wherever it resides if physical we have our agents also we have some offerings in the public cloud that would also achieve a similar protected machine, I am going to touch on that aspect later.

What I really want to talk about now is because of the major feature released in Veeam Backup for Office 365 v4 in the fact that backups can now be sent directly to Object Storage.

What this means though is that our Veeam Backup for Office 365 server is now quite minimal, it’s a Windows machine that now does not require the space to act as a repository. My example is a 50GB typical Windows Server of which with Operating System and Applications we are using just over 20GB. We still have to be mindful of the metadata and cache files that are required to be stored on the Veeam Backup for Office 365 server.

This opens the door to many flexible options to where this machine can now reside. Especially when we are using one of the Public Cloud Object Storage for our backup target.

Because we are protecting this machine now with Veeam Backup & Replication we open the door to the portability and mobility features built into the software even with Community Edition. (FREE)

Prepping for Migration

Before we get on with the moving of our server, we need to make sure we follow the correct steps, if we do not follow this, we could waste a lot of time to find that something is not quite right.

1. To ensure consistency you should if you wish, perform a final backup on your Veeam Backup for Office 365 server.
   

1. Once the job is complete, you can now safely power down that server.
   

1. Perform a Veeam Backup & Replication incremental backup of your Veeam Backup for Office 365 server whilst the server is powered down.
   

Direct Restore to AWS EC2

We now have the ability should the business require or there are performance or migration reasons to migrate our Veeam Backup for Office 365 server to somewhere else, I am using AWS EC2 as my option, but this could also be to Microsoft Azure. As well as other on premises options in vSphere, Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV.

We run through this wizard to get our machine into its AWS EC2 state. Depending on the options you selected this may or may not have powered on once complete.

When you are ready you can now power this server on, again depending on the configuration you will either have a public IP to connect or a private way of connecting to the private IP for the machine.

Portability Level: Complete

We have now moved our Veeam Backup for Office 365 server to an AWS EC2 instance. Now to complete the level we need to get in and we need confirm all is well and if we performed the clean shutdown then when we open the console you can confirm all components are in a good state.

You can then wait for the schedule to start or you can run a manual backup job.

Ok so we managed to get our Veeam Backup for Office 365 machine from our vSphere environment into AWS, but how do we get it back? That would show true portability. Well we have an answer to that too.

The next part of the series will show how we protect the machine in AWS and get that back to our vSphere environment.

Taking a backup is just the start, it’s always been the insurance policy for your data or infrastructure, that doesn’t change when it comes to SaaS based workloads. Why do we need to protect Microsoft Office 365? Well because it’s your data, Microsoft are not backing that up.

I will argue with anyone that thinks a litigation hold is a backup, the same as I would argue with anyone that thinks a snapshot is a backup..

If you right click on your organisation or you select the Explore button from the top ribbon then you can then start looking into the restore options around Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Exchange Online Restore

Recovering from a backup directly back into your Office 365 Exchange Online inbox is one of the cool recovery options with the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, which is the same tool used to perform this within Veeam Backup & Replication for on premises exchange systems.

The ability to restore a whole mailbox, multiple mailboxes, individual folders and items back into Exchange Online in a very seamless and fast manner is probably the most important but the ability to export those same items out into pst files gives another angle to the recovery engine here.

Sharepoint Online Restore

In a similar way to Exchange Online people are moving their document sharing and document libraries away from on premises SharePoint systems they want to offload that infrastructure, operating system and application configuration and maintenance to someone else i.e Microsoft. But they should also be considering their backup of that data and read up on what Microsoft has covered for them.

From a restore point of view the Veeam Explorer for SharePoint allows for the granular recovery of Document Libraries, Lists, documents and list items but also your whole SharePoint site.

OneDrive for Business Restore

Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication may have come across the two explorers that I have just mentioned but OneDrive for Business is not something you roll out on premises or there has not been that non SaaS based approach here for us to have to worry about from a backup point of view.

The explorer for OneDrive for Business gives you the ability to recover complete OneDrive or particular folders and documents. It also has the ability to copy those items as well to a different user.

This link to the Veeam User Guide covers off the Veeam Explorers in much more detail – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/explorers/explorers_introduction.html?ver=95u4

Ok so we made it this far, it’s time to create a backup. Being 3 posts in and only now talking about backup makes it sound like this is really long winded this is not the case at all, all of this process was completed in less than an hour.

Head back to the “organizations” section of your console and select Backup.

Very simply add a name and description for your backup job.

Our first choice is do you want to backup the entire organisation or a subset of users. I have one user in my organisation so that makes my selection easy.

The next screen is choosing anything you wish to exclude, you may have selected entire organisation but there may be some accounts you do not need to protect.

The next screen is where we configure our Proxy and Backup Repository.

The above is the correct setting but if we want to go directly off to Object Storage you must make sure that the Backup Repository has some additional configuration steps completed before starting the job. This was covered in the previous post.

Next up is the schedule.

That’s the job created and will run against the schedule you have configured. Pretty simple stuff.

If you wanted to perform a job, then you can do by navigating back to the window below and here you can start the backup job. You will see it connecting and processing all available data.

Once the job is completed then you will see the recovery options when you right click against the organisation.

The next post is going to cover those recovery options that you can see above as well as later in the series go into a few use cases where recovery will be required.

In the previous post we went through the super simple process of getting Veeam Backup for Office 365 installed. This post will touch on more of the components and how to get things configured in the v4 product where we have the option now to send our backups directly to Object Storage.

This post will walk through the configuration steps. The screen below is what you will see when you open the console and connect to a brand-new installation.

The first task we have to perform is adding an organisation. Here we can add an Office 365 organisation but this product will also allow for protecting Microsoft Exchange on premises.

For the walkthrough I am going to add my Office 365 organisation, I mean who has Microsoft Exchange in their lab anymore. We can also choose here if we have Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for business.

In the previous release of the product Modern Authentication was added as well as the existing basic authentication. It is always advised here to use Modern Authentication. Falko Banaszak did an awesome post for how to configure modern authentication within Microsoft Azure Active Directory for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you can find that here.

That’s it, supply credentials and connect.

Now we have our organisation but no backup jobs configured we will come back to that in the next post.

Next we need configure our backup infrastructure, the backup infrastructure consists of Proxies to perform the lifting of the data between Microsoft Office 365 and the Backup environment. The backup repositories and Object Storage Repositories.

There is always a default backup repository created, we are not going to use this and we are going to create a new one because we cannot add the Object Storage Repository to the default repository.

Before we create that new Backup Repository, we need to connect to our Object Storage Repository.

A very simple wizard driven approach again, give your new repository a name.

The biggest feature added in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v4 is the fact you can now backup directly to Object Storage. On the next screen you can choose your Object Storage type.

For the series I am using AWS S3, all should become clearer later on in the series. We need to provide our cloud credentials here. This will be your access key and secret key for AWS accounts. Be careful here as you don’t want to be letting them get into the wrong hands.

Next, we need to choose our location, bucket and folder.

We also have the ability to configure some advanced settings on if you want to limit the storage consumption or to use AWS S3 Infrequent Access.

Click finish and you have your Object Storage Repository listed.

Before we can get going with creating a backup job, we need to create that repository that I mentioned. If you right click in that white space, you can create a new Backup Repository

Next you elect your backup proxy and the path to your local backup repository; this will be where metadata and cache will be stored. If you choose not to use Object Storage then this is where you would determine the location for all of your backup files.

If you are intending to use the direct to Object Storage, then you will need to select this and choose your previously added Object Storage Repository.

We also have another new feature here in the fact that you can encrypt the data being uploaded to object storage. Specifically calling out security when sending data into the public cloud.

Finally, we can choose our retention policy,

Item-Level Retention

Select this type if you want to keep an item until its creation time or last modification time is within the retention coverage.

Snapshot-Based Retention

Select this type if you want to keep an item until its latest restore point is within the retention coverage.

User guide shout out for an awesome description to the two options – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/retention_policy.html?ver=40

Below you will now see the new object storage enabled backup repository.

Click finish and we have everything configured. Next up is getting our data backed up from Microsoft Office 365.

Before we get going, I have a confession to make, this is my second time of installing Veeam Backup for Office 365, the first time was v1.5 and now we fast forward to v4. The gap in releases is really fast though so I am not too far behind.

In true Veeam fashion the installation is super simple. Download the bits you need from veeam.com in the download you will find the Veeam Backup for Office 365 installer along with the Exchange and SharePoint explorers.

I should mention the system requirements here also but I would also refer you to the user guide which I have linked at the bottom of the post.

Although I will mention that if you are looking to install this in a lab then the above requirements can be lowered as there is a warning, but it does let you continue to backup should you have a resource constraint.

For those that have installed Veeam products before the simple installation wizard is very similar to what you have seen before.

Obviously, we all must read through the EULA at least 3 times so you are aware and then proceed to accept.

There are three components available to install and these can be installed on separate systems but for this installation I am installing everything on this one machine.

That’s it, hit install

Click finish and now on your desktop you are going to see a few new icons.

You will see two new Veeam icons on the desktop one is the console and one is labelled PowerShell. Double click the console and you will receive the following window.

When you first login to the console, the console can be installed on any machine you wish to connect to the Veeam Backup for Office 365 server. The first information alert is regarding licensing. There is a Community Edition that allows you to protect up to 10 users. You can continue without adding a license or you can add one at this stage.

When you download the trial from veeam.com you also receive a 30-day trial so I installed that here.

The trial license gives you the ability to protect against 50,000 users. If you do require more then you will have to speak to someone from Veeam. Or contact me and I can you get you a 30 day trial for the number of users you require.

That’s going to be it for a very simple installation process. There are also some resources I mentioned above that I wanted to add here for reference.

Michele has put a huge effort into getting this content out – https://www.veeam.com/wp-guide-veeam-backup-microsoft-office365-v3.html

As with all Veeam documentation you will generally find the answer to your question here – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/vbo_introduction.html?ver=40

If the above two do not help then, there is also our Veeam Community Forums where you can get firsthand interactions with our Product Management team.

This is a series covering different areas and use cases surrounding Veeam Backup for Office 365.

“Nutanix Mine provides a single platform for organizations experiencing the

benefits of Nutanix Enterprise OS, as these organizations can simply extend

their existing integrated data protection to include secondary data backup

and archiving all in a turnkey backup solution powered by our platform

partners.”

One of the benefits here from a Veeam point of view is the benefit to choose where and what you use for your Veeam Availability, choice is very important, the ability to roll your own hardware and storage targets for your backups is great and that works for some but some will also will want to follow the HCI methodology and have an easy and simplified approach to where their data will reside.

One of the main benefits I see with Nutanix Mine is the scalability, Veeam is able to scale up and down according to the environment that it is protecting but by leveraging an HCI approach this makes life much much simpler. Also, it’s a single SKU including hypervisor, hardware, platform OS management storage and support including your Veeam licensing.

Hit the easy button

The ability to choose a validated configuration that scales out with your Veeam Backup & Replication licenses already bundled in already along with the flexibility of those licenses using the new Veeam Instance based licensing meaning the production workloads can move between different hosts, hypervisors and clouds makes for an interesting option.

Independence

The key differentiator here is the independent cluster for the Veeam components, regardless of the production workload this could be Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Windows or Linux physical workloads or any other virtualisation platform where we do not yet have access to the underlining hypervisor. This solution provides the ability to roll out a simple independent secondary approach to protecting all those workloads.

Simplicity

Veeam is not difficult to deploy in any case but what Nutanix Mine also offers in the ability for the customer to receive a pre staged Nutanix hardware solution, it is then to be racked and cabled before running a really simple automated Veeam deployment wizard.

Cloud Tier / Nutanix Buckets

The final thing I wanted to add was the ability to leverage the new Cloud Tier capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update 4 with Nutanix Buckets. The premise of the cloud tier is to relocate backups as they exceed their operational restore window.

Veeam Differentiators

• (virtually) Unlimited capacity / restore points
• Seamless integration (restore point transparency)
• Dehydrated backup files are still files, and can be easily rehydrated
• Cross-tier indexing
• Source deduplication (forever incremental)
  • Intelligent restore
  • DR recovery from cloud tier
• No per-TB pricing

More information in general about Nutanix Mine can be found here.

I have covered lots of deep dive on the capabilities that the product brings even in a v1 state, but I wanted to highlight the ability to automate the deployment of the Veeam Availability for Nutanix Proxy appliance. The idea was also validated when I spoke to a large customer that had heavily invested in Nutanix AHV across 200 of their sites in the US.

Having been a Veeam customer they were very interested in exploring the new product and its capabilities matched up with their requirements. But they then had a challenge in deploying the proxy appliance to all 200 clusters they have across the US. There were some angles around PowerShell and from a configuration this may be added later to what I have done here. I took the deployment process and I created a terraform script that would deploy the image disk and new virtual machine for the proxy with the correct system requirements.

This was the first challenge that validated what and why we needed to make a better option for an automated deployment. The second was that the deployment process of the v1 is a little off putting I think is a fair thing to say, so by being able to automate this it would really help that initial deployment process.

Here is the terraform script, if you are not used to or aware of terraform then I suggest you look this up, the possibilities with terraform really change the way you think about infrastructure and software deployment.

# Configure the Nutanix Provider
provider "nutanix" {
  username       = "Admin"
  password       = "Passw0rd99!"
  endpoint       = "10.0.60.11"
  insecure       = "true"
  port           = "9440"
}

resource "nutanix_image" "VAN_Proxy" {
    name        = "VAN_Proxy"
    source_uri  = "http://10.0.30.20/VeeamAvailabilityforNutanixAHV_1.0.457.vmdk"
    description = "Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV"
}

resource "nutanix_virtual_machine" "Veeam_VAN_01" {
  # General Information
    name                 = "Veeam_VAN_01"
        description      = "Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV"
        
            num_vcpus_per_socket = 2
            num_sockets          = 2
            memory_size_mib      = 4096
            #power_state = "ON"
            nic_list = [
                {
    # subnet_reference is saying, which VLAN/network do you want to attach here?
                    subnet_reference = {
                        kind = "subnet"
                        uuid = "f7f0ce84-8097-45f8-b713-9ac1a2dd2ba7"
                    }
                }  
            ]
            disk_list = [{
    # data_source_reference in the Nutanix API refers to where the source for
    # the disk device will come from. Could be a clone of a different VM or a
    # image like we're doing here
    data_source_reference = [{
      kind = "image"
      uuid = "${nutanix_image.VAN_Proxy.id}"
    }]
    # data_source_reference in the Nutanix API refers to where the source for
    # the disk device will come from. Could be a clone of a different VM or a
    # image like we're doing here
                    data_source_reference = {
                        kind = "image"
                        uuid = "${nutanix_image.VAN_Proxy.id}"
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    
        
    

One caveat you will need to consider is as part of this deployment I placed the image file that I downloaded from veeam.com on my web server this allows for that central location and part of the script to deploy that image from this shared published resource. Again the thought process to this was that 200 site customer and providing a central location to pull the image disk from, without downloading it 200 times in each location.

Once the script has run you will see the created machine in the Nutanix AHV management console.

There is a requirement for DHCP in the environment so that the appliance gets an IP and you can connect to it.

Now you have your Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV proxy appliance deployed and you can run through the configuration steps. Next up I will be looking at how we can also automate that configuration step. However for now the configuration steps can be found here.

Thanks to Jon Kohler he is the main contributor to the Nutanix Terraform Provider and also has some great demo YouTube videos worth watch, You will see that the base line for the script I have created is based on examples that Jon uses in his demonstrations.

I have been preaching the powers of NetApp & Veeam for a few years now, but if you have not seen the power of the integration between the two vendors then I am going to summarise everything in this post here today.

Explorer

Let’s start with the free stuff you can do with Veeam in a NetApp ONTAP environment. Veeam Community Edition (Free version of Veeam) has the ability to add an ONTAP controller to your Veeam environment and regardless of if Veeam has created those native ONTAP snapshots or not, Veeam has the ability to go inside those ONTAP snapshots and perform recoveries against any VMware virtual machine you have within that snapshot. This could be full virtual machine recovery, also Instant VM recovery see here. It could also be file level recovery or if you want to get down to the application items, maybe a mail item or share point object then you can also do this from the FREE version!

Orchestrate

Now natively you can create a NetApp Snapshot pretty stress free, however this is going to be crash consistent and where some application servers would withstand that crash consistency on recovery there are some most likely business critical applications that require application consistency. Why not use Veeam to orchestrate your application aware and application consistent snapshots. This provides a much tighter Recovery Point Objective. This also makes leveraging ONTAP snapshots for these reasons more appealing given that in ONTAP 9.4 the limit of snapshots per volume was increased from 255 to 100. With it being a snapshot your Recovery Time Objective is going to be seconds!

Veeam can also orchestrate the SnapMirror or SnapVault snapshot data transfer.

Backup

Ok sounds good so far. Now the icing on the cake or maybe the buttercream in the middle of the cake. Snapshots are great and I am not getting into the snapshot vs backup its 2019 and if you don’t get it or agree then you probably voted BREXIT and I am fine with that, but this is my time to shine not yours.

The integration with Veeam and NetApp gives us the ability to leverage those snapshots and gain all the benefits mentioned in the above section but also the ability to get those blocks of data into another media type.

OnDemand

We have you covered for granular recovery, fast RTO, tighter RPO and a copy of your data on a separate media type that could protect you from internal malicious threats or corruption. Now the cherry on top.

We can take those ONTAP Snapshots and those backups and we can spin them up in an isolated environment. Veeam DataLabs gives us the ability to leverage the FlexClone technology on the ONTAP system and automate the creation, provisioning and removal of small isolated sandbox environments. This YouTube video clip of a session I did is a little old now, but the capability is a huge feature within Veeam Backup & Replication.

Oh, I should also mention that we have the same integration with Element Software and NetApp HCI I wrote about that here.

I think that’s all for now in the world of NetApp & Veeam. If you have any questions, then you can find me on the twitters @MichaelCade1