But disaster recovery always carries a level of speed. The process of taking your virtual machine backups and restoring them to the public cloud offerings takes some time, maybe outside the required SLAs the business has set. With the most recent version update of Veeam Backup & Replication v10a this process of conversion has been dramatically enhanced, and speed is now a game changer and this Disaster Recovery to the Cloud may now fit within those SLAs that were maybe once impossible using this process.

10,000ft view

Let’s think about your environment or an environment, you have your vSphere / Hyper-V / Nutanix virtualisation environment on premises running your virtual machines. You are using Veeam Backup & Replication to protect these machines on a daily or twice daily or more frequent schedule. You maybe had the requirement to directly restore certain image based backups to Microsoft Azure or AWS for some testing or development, but you likely would not have considered this as a way of recovering those workloads should a failure scenario happen in your environment. What you likely had or have for Disaster Recovery is another site running similar hardware and you are using replication technologies to move your workloads between the sites for that failover.

Maybe you are not familiar with Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure you can find out more here in a previous post. A similar post can be found here for AWS.

Speed Improvements

As previously mentioned the key part of being able to now think of this direct restore option as a Disaster Recovery scenario are the speed improvements that were introduced in the recent Veeam Backup & Replication 10a update. If we go back to v10 that was released early 2020 this will enable me to share how much faster this process is now.

This video demo walks through in detail of some of those restore scenarios generally focused around test and development or data recovery but not full disaster recovery options.

You will see in the 10a update post linked above that there was also a test performed at the time to show you when and where to use the Azure proxy and also depending on your environment variables what speed you would see in regards to direct restore to Microsoft Azure. The below table shows the comparison between 10 and 10a across the board.

This video demo in the section below shows the final two results and how this can be achieved.

The Situation

Let’s think about the situation of, our local site is toast, we may not have any access to our local on premises Veeam Backup & Replication server either, but hopefully and if not you should be sending your data offsite to a different location. Preferably into Object Storage, for the purpose of the post I am going to talk to the fact that we are sending our backups into Microsoft Azure Blob Storage as our offsite copy.

We are using Scale Out Backup Repository on premises as our performance tier and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage for our capacity tier.

But we cannot access that Veeam Backup & Replication server! That is ok, the Veeam Backup & Replication server is just software that can be installed on any Windows OS (supported but can be client versions if really need be)

We have also made it super easy to deploy a Veeam Backup & Replication server from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and this takes 5 minutes! You then add your object storage, import your backup metadata and then you can start the improved direct restore to Microsoft Azure from this machine.

This video shows this process from top to bottom and highlights the speed improvements from the version 10 release.

Other thoughts?

Ok, so we have mentioned Disaster Recovery, this is only applicable if your SLAs allow it, we must get the data converted and up and running in the public cloud and all of this is going to take time. There are ways to streamline this deployment and configuration of the Azure based Veeam Backup & Replication, I am currently working on this process to make things super-fast and streamlined.

I also want to shout out Ian, one of our Senior Systems Engineers here at Veeam. He has been doing some stuff and helping me with some of this process here.

The other angle that could be taken here is around DR testing without affecting or running through a bad outage or failure to the actual live production systems.

You should be able to automate most of the process to make sure that these machines are seen to be up and running and talking to each other in Microsoft Azure or AWS and then auto power off and either sat there waiting for an actual failure scenario or removed from the public cloud.

More of these ideas to come.

10a released today, and this release concentrates on and addresses issues reported by customers, but it wouldn’t be a Veeam release if it did not contain some new features and functionality.

Platform Support

I mentioned earlier that we have been releasing at some pace new products and new versions of products and that included Veeam Backup for AWS. I have done covered this product in this YouTube playlist. Very much released as a standalone product but also allowed for the new Veeam Universal License so you had the flexible way of being able to move workloads around your environments whilst always ensuring Veeam would be able to protect your workloads and data.

The new feature in 10a addresses that standalone management of Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for AWS, this new plug in also released today enables you to unlock some more centralised management for the Veeam Backup for AWS product. The ability to connect to an existing or deploy a new appliance. Then being able to configure your S3 Backup repository for the appliance also known as your external repository which was already there from v10 of the release earlier in the year, but you had to create that manually in the AWS management console and add to both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for AWS.

But that’s not all you also can create, edit, start and stop your AWS backup policies from within Veeam Backup & Replication. Amongst some more pretty cool features. You can download this plugin from here.

• Monitor session statistics.
• View created snapshots and image-level backups.
• Restore entire EC2 instances as Amazon EC2 instances or Microsoft Azure VMs.
• Instantly restore EC2 instances as VMs into VMware vSphere or Hyper-V environment.
• Export EC2 instance volumes as virtual disks.

Ok that was probably the biggest thing for 10a, but there is also support for many new operating system versions, taken from the linked KB article above.

• Microsoft Windows 10 version 2004 and Microsoft Windows Server SAC version 2004 support as guest OS, as Hyper-V servers, for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication components, and for agent-based backup with the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 4.0.1 (included in the update).
• Linux Kernel version 5.7 support for guest VMs, for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication components, and for agent-based backup with the Veeam Agent for Linux 4.0.1 (included in the update).
• RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2, Oracle Linux 8.2 (RHCK) and VMware Photon OS support for guest processing functionality in host-based backup jobs.
• RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2, Oracle Linux 8.2 (RHCK), Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10.4, openSUSE Leap 15.2, Oracle Linux 8 (up to UEK R6) and Fedora 32 (up to kernel 5.7.7) distributions support in the Veeam Backup & Replication agent management functionality.
• VMware vCloud Director 10.1 support and better handling of deployments without network access to vCD cells.
• Recent Azure Stack versions support. Please refer to the documentation for additional registry settings required depending on your version.

There was also some storage enhancement support around primary storage integrations with HPE Primera, secondary storage system support for Dell EMC Data Domain all this detail can be found in the KB article linked above.

NAS Backup

The noticeable new enhancement around NAS backup is the ability to support Azure File Sync, for those not familiar with Azure File Sync it enables the following

• Synchronise file shares between offices
• Fix problems with full file servers by using tiered storage in the cloud
• Use online backup
• Get a DR solution for file servers, e.g. small business or branch office

The issue with Veeam Backup & Replication prior to this 10a release is we were not aware of the cloud tiering but now files not present in the local cache will be backed up directly from Azure. I am going to try and set this up and create a video demo, I think this might be useful for all, let me know if you are interested in the comments below.

Ah yes, another thing added in 10a related to NAS backup is for the first 250GB of NAS data it will be protected for FREE!

Restore

It wouldn’t be a Veeam release if there was not some focus on restore and restore speed and performance, the one I have picked from the notes is the enhancements around Direct Restore to Azure. I have spent a lot of time in testing out restore scenarios from either backup locations or if using a proxy within Azure would make a difference.

I will have to jump back on this testing and confirm how much quicker this same process is with the new enhancements. The below image shows the testing prior to this new 10a release.

Another massive release and we are just calling it an update. I have seen the list of what else we can expect for the rest of the year and it will not disappoint.

The image below shows pre Veeam Backup & Replication v10 when you go to configure your application aware processing.

Configuration

Now in Veeam Backup & Replication v10 and specifically those orchestrated snapshots only jobs we can be more granular on what we protect as per below.

This option enables you to take a periodic log backup to a Veeam Backup repository, whilst using the storage snapshot as the baseline. This is only applicable to orchestrated storage snapshots (this capability is already there for image based backups) to achieve this in your storage snapshot only job you will walk through the wizard until you get to the guest processing option page and then confirm that you require application-aware processing and then you can select Applications.

Next and this will depend on how many machines you have in your job and the placement of those VMs will depend on if you are wanting to achieve the VMware Snapshot-less approach to getting an application aware and consistent storage snapshot. Select your VM and edit to make the relevant application log file decisions.

For this VM which is a machine with SQL present I can now set the appropriate configuration that I need here.

Oracle would be the same here on the next tab over.

When this job is now scheduled to run if you have adhered to the configuration in the previous blog post around VM, datastore placement and backup job configuration then you can now achieve an application aware storage snapshot, without the requirement of a VMware snapshot whilst also being able to create a periodic log backup and use the storage snapshot as the baseline for any restore functionality.

Recovery

From a recovery point of view obviously this means we can have a much better RPO for our database recoveries, we have the speed from the storage snapshot baseline and we have the transaction log backups stored on a Veeam repository as a .VLB file or files.

A common question I have been asked about this feature is will this work with secondary snapshots, for example with NetApp ONTAP, HPE Nimble and HPE 3PAR we have the capability of being able to leverage their storage replication to create and send their snapshots to secondary systems. This feature will work in those scenarios also.

Another thing to note here is that with HPE Nimble those VM Disks for snapshot-less processing must reside on the same volume collection.

Ok, so how do we recover this data using our Veeam Explorers for SQL or Oracle.

Firstly, you should select the ribbon at the top and choose Restore, choose Restore from backup as our option.

Next, we want to choose the Application items restore option.

You will then see the list of Veeam Explorer options that we have, for this example we will choose SQL but this is also applicable to Oracle recovery options.

At this point we are then faced with the Veeam Explorer for SQL and you should choose the machine that is relevant for your restore operation, specifically here you will see a list of backup jobs and storage snapshots. We will choose our storage snapshot and our SQL server.

You will then be faced with the available restore points, or you can choose the latest available snapshot with the option at the top of the wizard.

Then choose a location for a temporary VM will be registered but remained powered off, this will be automatically removed after the restore operation is closed.

To finish the wizard, give a reason for the restore for audit purposes and then select finish on the summary screen this will then open the Veeam Explorer for SQL with the mounted databases from the restore point you chose.

Up until this point this is not different you could always do this before but you would have created the snapshot whilst also taking a VMware snapshot and you only have point in time copies of your databases on your storage snapshot. What this new feature in Veeam Backup & Replication v10 enables is the ability to restore to a specific point in time using those transaction log backups that we put on our Veeam repository as the .VLB files on a schedule.

Getting down to the specific transaction can also be achieved by selecting the “perform restore to the specific transaction” at the bottom of the wizard above. You then have the ability to fine tune which transaction you wish to restore back to, this is a lab environment so not much happening, but I created a transaction to show you an example.

The transaction log backup job runs permanently in the background, shipping transaction logs to the backup repository at a specific time interval (by default, every 15 minutes). This process was once only available for backup jobs but now you can achieve this with your storage snapshots also.

The transaction log snapshot /backup session starts and stops in the following way:

• The initial session starts when the parent backup job schedule is enabled. After that, the session starts with every new session of the parent backup job.
• The session ends before the next session of the parent backup job, and/or when this parent backup job is disabled.
• When the session ends, Veeam Backup & Replication stops the runtime process and uninstalls it from the VM guest OS. When a new session starts, the runtime process is deployed again.

Hope that was useful any questions let me know here below or get in touch on twitter @MichaelCade1

Announcements

The opening keynote was really exciting to hear, the aquisition of CloudHealth was great. I have been following these guys for a while and the tech they bring or will bring to the VMware portfolio is really exciting. With CloudHealth, you gain visibility into cost, usage and performance across your physical infrastructure and virtual machines.

The second exciting announcement was around Amazon RDS and the ability to set up, operate, and scale databases on-premises and in hybrid environments as it is in AWS. That’s a huge thing for those customers that have gone already into the AWS realms and migrated their databases in, this to me though completes the gap around making that database function more available. Prior to this how would you have ever got that RDS instance out of AWS and functioning elsewhere if there was an outage or a reason that AWS was not available?

Veeam also made a couple of announcements during the week, the major one was Veeam Intelligent Data Management Combines with Cisco HyperFlex to Deliver New High Availability Solution

Veeam also announced the release of some deployment automation for customers wanting the easy button for deploying Veeam when using VMware on AWS.

Veeam Session – Automation & Orchestration

For me personally there was also lots of great things to list at the event. Myself and @AnthonySpiteri had the responsibility of the first Veeam session of the week. You can find the QR code to get going with the Terraform scripts we created for the Veeam end to end deployment.

You can also pick up the session here.

vBrownBag / VMTN Session

Following the Veeam session I had the chance to go a little deeper into the CHEF element of how we are using Desired State and Configuration Management to deploy a dynamic Veeam deployment within any vSphere environment.

Cooking up some Veeam Deployment with CHEF automation

Community

It was another great week for engagement within the IT Community, the events aside from the main conference that continue to be a major success. The people get more helpful I think, I have such a good time chatting to everyone at this conference and sharing views and ideas.

Another shout out I have to give around the community is to the Virtually Speaking podcast guys, they are constantly busy over there capturing content. We managed to get some time on there to talk about the week.

Wrap Up

Now it’s time to head home and then before we know it we will be over in Barcelona for the European show. We will be enhancing the script and code that we used to potentially add even more detail and functionality but with the same premise of deploying a portable set of code for all to use in any vSphere environment which gives you a dynamic and scalable way of delivering your Veeam infrastructure.

I have lots of ideas that have come out of this week around content but also about other areas that we can transition the Veeam platform to continue to be the number one choice for availability for your data. Expect to see some of this in whitepaper or blog format.

Safe Travels everyone.

This screen has been taken from beta testing.

To summarise what this means is, for the Veeam customers that have taken the steps to leverage VMware on AWS by giving those customers the same simple, easy to use and seamlessly easy to get thing protected from a backup and replication point of view, using the same toolset that we know from our on-premises vSphere environment.

Yesterday I spoke about automation and we also shared this information in our session about this feature also coming available, both this and the chef and terraform we spoke about yesterday are both types of automation but for possibly different end users and prospects.

The beauty of what we discussed of the CHEF deployment is it allows for us to be more distributed and dynamic, this offering is going to get things up and running as fast as possible and start protecting workloads. There will also be some customers that don’t want to explore the open source community of our CHEF cookbook.

It’s as simple as deploying to your SDDC and then choosing the CloudFormation template. The template will use the VPC that is linked to your VMware on AWS instance. The CloudFormation template will be executed on the VMware on AWS instance.

This template from CloudFormation will then run through the creation of the stack required.

When that CloudFormation template has been ran it’s then time to start the environment configuration, resource pools, network configuration etc.

Then is the summary screen to show you all the configuration you are about to commit.

This will then continue the deployment with your configuration and you will be able to see the Veeam server deployed within your SDDC.

When you first login to the newly created Veeam server you will see that the repository server has been added down to the stack configuration of the CloudFormation template. It has also added your vSphere vCenter server. You can now see the VMs within your SDDC and can begin protecting those instances.

The final thing I wanted to share was the capabilities, it’s not just backup, you also have the ability to replicate these virtual machines from this vSphere environment to any other environment including an on-premises environment, a Cloud Connect Service Provider offering replication as a service or to another vSphere environment anywhere.

Our session this year is focusing on the automation and orchestration around Veeam and VMware. But what does that mean? The point of our session to highlight the flexibility of the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform, some people just want the simple, easy to use wizard driven approach to install their Veeam components within their environments but some will want that little bit more and this is where APIs come in and allow us to drive a more streamlined and automated approach to delivering Veeam components.

We also highlighted this by running through everything live, I will get to the nuts and bolts of that shortly.

With there being a strong focus this year’s event, we wanted to highlight the capabilities by using VMware on AWS. Veeam were one of the first vendors highlighted as a supported data protection platform that could protect workloads within VMware on AWS that was 1 year ago and we wanted to highlight those features and capabilities within Veeam.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator – “Replication on Steroids”

The first thing we will touch on is Veeam Availability Orchestrator released this year, this provides a “Replication on Steroids” option for your vSphere environment, this environment can be on premises or leveraging any other vSphere environment, maybe say VMware on AWS where maybe you would still like to keep your DR location on premises and send those replicas down in case of any service disruption within the AWS cloud. The replication concentrates on the application over just sending a VM from site to site, what this also enables is the ability to run automated testing against these replicas to simulate disaster recovery scenarios. Oh and the other large part of this is the automated documentation. Ever had to create your own DR Run Book? I have this does the majority for you whilst being dynamic to any changes in configuration.

Veeam DataLabs

The we wanted to highlight some more automation goodness around Veeam DataLabs, what this gives alongside that Backup and Replication capability is the ability to have an automated way of testing that your backups, replicas or storage snapshots are in a good recoverable state. It also provides the ability to get more leverage from those sources to provide isolated environments for other ways of gaining insight or improving better business outcomes.

I plan to follow up on this as this is one of my passions within our technology stack the ability to leverage Veeam DataLabs from many of the products in the platform to drive different outcomes is really where I see us differentiating in the market.

The Bulk of the session

As you can see we are already cramming quite a bit into the session. But this is the main focus point of the day for us, it’s about delivering a fully configured Veeam environment from the ground up, all live whilst we are on stage. Oh and because we can we are doing this on VMware on AWS.

The driving use case for this was around the Veeam proof of concept process, I mean it was fast, deploy one windows server and 7 clicks later you have Veeam configured, perfect. But the issue wasn’t the Veeam installation, what if we could take an automated approach and be able to understand the customer pain points and needs and then in the background automate out the process of building the Veeam components and automatically start protecting a sub set of data all in the first hour of that meeting?

The beauty of this is, is you do not need to be a DevOps engineer skilled in configuration management or a developer in Ruby. The hard work has been done already and is available for free on GitHub and in the CHEF Supermarket.

I have listed the tools below that we used to get things up and running and to be honest if you were to pull this down when we make this available you will only really need PowerShell, PowerCLI and Terraform installed on your workstation.

The steps we went through live was deploying that Veeam Backup & Replication server along with multiple proxy servers to deal with the load appropriately. Because of the location of the Veeam components and our production environment we chose to also leverage the native AWS services and we deployed an EC2 instance for our backup repository but this could be any storage in any location as per our repository best practices, we also added a Veeam cloud connect service provider to show a different media type and location for your backup or replication requirements. Finally we automated the provisioning of vSphere tags and then created backup jobs based on those.

By the end of the session we had the following built out, over on the right you can see we have a Veeam Backup & Replication server and some additional proxies. On the left at the top we have our Veeam cloud connect backup as a service offering and at the bottom left we also have our on-premises vSphere environment where we could send further backup files or even as a target for those replication jobs. Underneath the VMware on AWS you can see the Amazon EC2 instance where we will store our initial backup files for fast recovery.

As I know some of you will be catching this whilst at the show I want to give a shameless plug out for the next session which goes into more detail around the Chef element of this dynamic deployment so you can find those details below.

I also want to give a huge shoutout to @VirtPirate aka Jeremy Goodrum of Exosphere who helped make the terraform and chef peice happen he also has an article over here diving into the latest version of the cookbook and some other code releases he has made that are related.

Veeam Cookbook 2.1.1 released and Sample vSphere Terraform Templates

Expect to see much more content about this in the form of a whitepaper and more blogs to consume.

I wanted to put a short post together just highlighting some of the things that Veeam and I will be doing at this year’s event.

For the official Veeam at VMworld page you can get that here.

Veeam Official Sponsored Sessions

Every year Veeam has at least two sponsored sessions, it is our team’s responsibility to create and deliver at least one of these sessions, this year it is our team delivering the sessions. It is very important that we make these sessions as informative as possible and engaging, we don’t want them to be the run of the mill sponsored sessions and you will see that mine and Anthony’s session is very much showing the art of the possible.

Personally, and this was the case before I even joined Veeam. The what’s new session that is always on the agenda and normally delivered by Anton Gostev but for the last year it has been delivered by Danny and Rick. This is my favourite session, it really sets out the lay of the land and where Veeam are and where they are going. Highlighting the new features and functionality that is coming over the next few months.

For our session we will be diving into VMware on AWS and how Veeam just works there. But we will be taking things to the next level and showing how as we move into the world of automation, how we can easily spin up our Veeam environment in any location to help drive the availability regardless of where that data resides. We will also be touching on how Veeam Availability Orchestrator can be used between VMware on AWS to provide disaster recovery and business continuity. We also just got a room upgrade because the amount of registrations was shooting up so expect a large room. Oh, and the last thing to mention is the live demos… much of this session will be backed by many live demos.

Sponsored Community Sessions

I also have the pleasure of returning to the vBrownBag for a VMTN TechTalk, this year I have taken both slots and combined them up for a 30-minute session on how CHEF can be used to dynamically build out your Veeam environment from a single all in one system to a complete scaled out distributed architecture in a large enterprise. That bit is not the hard bit, the best thing about this is the ability to dynamically provision or tear down these resources so they are only up and running as and when you need them. I will try and squeeze that into the 30-minute window.

Free ticket giveaway

Now this has always been a thing with Veeam, but I don’t recall the number of free passes being so high! 10 passes are up for grabs and if you are one of the lucky winners then you can choose which event you would like to attend.

The few things I ask though if you are one of the lucky winners, obviously attend our sessions but also make the most of it, you probably entered because you didn’t get the chance from your employee and if you are that winner then make the most of it. Yes, I said that twice. I never got the chance in my previous roles to attend but already last year I can see the power of community at this event, the out of hours is where that networking happens. Yes, the technical side of things is interesting for us but it’s the conversations the ideas within the community that make it what it is.

My second ask is write about it, write about your experiences during VMworld and carry that on after.

Veeam Party

The next important matter to mention is the legendary Veeam party, I got to experience both the US and the European parties, and they are different, but the event is special. Not only that the locations are special as well, Hakkasan was great last year but it is so last year. This year we have Omnia and from what I have heard it’s a cool place for a party. You will find the details below, you can also click the image below if you would like to register.

A VMworld 2018 Badge is required for entrance and will be scanned at the door. Must be 21+ years of age with proper ID. Passport required for International guests. Each Attendee Must Register Separately.

Finally, please come and speak to us at the Veeam booth #1412, there will be great prizes up for grabs every day and the failsafe Veeam t-shirts being given out.

Veeam backup and replication 9.5 update 3 was released just before Christmas, this updated included a major feature in the Universal Storage API, this would allow Veeam to support a much wider range of storage vendors for integration into the product.

A closed process led by Veeam and storage vendor the private SDK is provided to the storage vendor to develop against, at completion the storage vendor will then provide the Veeam QC team with the new plug-in where it can be tested in the system for any bugs or configuration issues. At this point it can then be released to the public.

This post will run through the simple process of installing the universal Storage API plug-in for Infinidat storage arrays.

Firstly, login to your Veeam account here.

If you then scroll down this page you will see an area named “Download additional storage plug-ins” in here today you will see the Infinidat plug-in for Veeam Backup & Replication, expect to see a few more land in here as we move through the year.

Hit the download button for the plug-in you require within your environment. Once downloaded navigate to the download location.

Next up you should extract that zip file, for ease I chose the same location.

Next step is to install the plug in, if you receive the following User Access Control message then select Yes to proceed.

If you have not closed all Veeam Backup & Replication console then you will receive the following message.

Once you have been through and closed all related windows we can then proceed with this update.

Click Next. Do you agree to the terms?

As you expected this plug-in enables Veeam Backup & Replication to perform backup and restore of VMware vSphere VMs directly from storage snapshots of Infinidat storage arrays. I would add that it also allows us to do some pretty cool things around virtual lab environments and the ability to explore into historic snapshots that were not even created by Veeam. Click Install to begin.

This process is going to stop the Veeam services.

And then once it has installed the components it’s going to start those services up again, depending on the environment this should be a fast process.

Now that we have the plug-in installed and the services are now back and running we can open a new console to our Veeam Backup & Replication and start adding our storage array.

Once logged into the console navigate down to the storage infrastructure tab in the bottom left corner. Select Add Storage.

You will then see the nice new Infinidat logo and option to add the array to the Veeam Backup & Replication management console.

If you are running the standalone console on your laptops and desktops then the same installation of the plug is required on those devices to see the storage options.

This will be the same for all new storage plug-ins stay tuned for more that are coming soon.

So far in this series I have shown you hopefully how powerful the Replication side of the house is within Veeam Backup & Replication. It is by no means the whole topic covered, we will have CDP as mentioned as a feature, Veeam also have the Veeam Availability Orchestrator which I consider the next level Veeam Replication on Steroids and that alone deserves its own series.

There is another form of replication though that in some environments can be driven by Veeam to allow for data to reside in that secondary location. This comes in the form of the storage snapshot integration. This was also mentioned in regard to transport modes used for your replication jobs but when I see storage snapshot orchestration I mean that Veeam is capable of using the storage replication technology and drive that through the Veeam user interface.

Overview

Veeam’s Integration allows Veeam Backup & Replication to sit on top of the storage systems from NetApp & HPE Nimble and control application consistent Snapshots for local fast Recovery Point Objectives. Veeam also enables the ability to orchestrate and schedule those app aware snapshots to be sent to a secondary storage array from the same vendor.

We also have similar capabilities with HPE 3PAR with their Peer Persistence replication technology. The screen below one step further also in that we are able to then take a backup of the data from the secondary location.

Configuration

Let’s run through some of the options for all of these firstly how does this look from a HPE Nimble and NetApp point of view.

For this orchestration, it’s a backup job first, we need to create a new backup job and this is also after the storage arrays have been configured and added to the console. Notice how from the drop down this allows me to choose a Primary Storage Snapshot.

Next, we can select the configure secondary destination for this job.

Next, we have the options to choose where the secondary destination should be. It is worth noting that this feature will only talk to the same vendor and model specific i.e HPE Nimble to HPE Nimble and NetApp ONTAP to NetApp ONTAP.

All software versions should be checked within the system requirements before attempting this.

The retention set here is how many snapshots on the secondary array should we be keeping.

When this job runs providing licensing and network replication has been configured on the storage arrays this will orchestrate the storage snapshots and replication to the target location.

HPE 3PAR

Is a similar process to the one above, I need to clarify some of the next points though as these were put together during a beta phase. Thanks to Pierre and Niels for their work on the diagrams and screen grabs.

Much the same if we want to leverage the storage replication for that secondary target then we can select the following configuration with the required remote copies of snapshots to keep.

from a recovery point of view, the Veeam explorers can be used for recovery tasks however the failover and failback from Veeam replication will not work.

In this day and age, we want to be able to do more with less, seems to be everywhere, or we want to be able to do something additional with what we have already got. Get more ROI out of an asset. Leveraging data is no difference, for years as technical customers we have been backing up our data to some form of media, this could be classed as dumb storage. We send our backups there then we update again at the next iteration. We only come back to that backup or replicated data if we need something in the form of a recovery.

Why not leverage it, that’s your production assets in the form of a backup or replication state. In the last post, I discussed SureReplica which is the Veeam way in which those replicated virtual machines can be verified for recovery. To do that we power on those machines in an isolated network away from production and in this instance in our secondary site for disaster recovery. Fully automated to make sure that those files are good for if we need to failover our workloads.

Verification is one thing leverage is another, by leveraging that data we are getting more use from that target storage array that traditionally may have just been sat there holding those replicated VMs.

SandBox Labs via SureBackup Job

By clicking a simple step within the SureBackup job wizard you can keep that same application group up and running for as long as you need. A good use for this is patching, if you are responsible for patching your key application servers or all servers then this could help that process.

Options

One thing to note here is that this is going to start that same application groups it’s going to adhere to the configuration of that application group about memory assigned and boot time delay etc. be sure to configure those tests and settings to ensure you have the optimal configuration when running a Sandbox environment.

You also have the ability to run your own scripts here this is part of the verification also, this could be a script that you may run that runs a windows update via script to test updates faster.

Scheduling & Stopping

When you have that in line you are able to start your job or schedule that job. What I mean by scheduling is that this will run a scheduled time and spin up these replica VMs in your secondary location the difference here is that they will keep running. Whilst they are running no further replication jobs can be completed. I want to show you how you can stop the session so that you don’t face this issue, when you are finished with your sandbox testing then be sure to stop that session.

By stopping the session, you are going to shut down them virtual machines and you are going to lose anything you placed on that we are not going to write anything to those replica files or backups.

Tips – Data Sources

A useful tip here is that you may have these VMs in your application group that are being replicated over to the secondary location however you may have a Domain Controller or something alike already running in that location, with that you may or I should say should be taking a local backup of that Domain Controller. Within your application group configuration, you can mix your workloads, we could use some of the replicated virtual machines and we can use some of the local backup files.

There is also one more option of sources and that’s the ability to leverage storage snapshots. I will touch on more later on in the series on this one.

Other Resources

I also did a vBrownBag session at VMworld in 2017 that allowed me to demonstrate the power of this cool unsung feature within Veeam.

<Link to VMworld YouTube Session>