This post will provide a high level overview of the capabilities that Veeam can offer with the NetApp portfolio, providing Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, from utilising storage snapshots to create application consistent backups to fast SAN/NAS based repositories.

Orchestration

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

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots

This feature allows Veeam the ability to see within existing historical NetApp snapshots but still perform granular item level recovery even though the snapshots are in a crash consistent state.

Backup from Storage Snapshots

Following on from the Orchestration we are able to achieve the 3-2-1 methodology by taking a backup from those storage snapshots, reducing impact from the VMware vSphere environment but allowing us to take a backup to a different media type away from the data being reliant on the original data source.

Backup from SnapMirror / SnapVault Location

Utilising a secondary FAS system for backup reduces the impact on not only the vSphere environment but also on the primary FAS system. Using the orchestration method of performing snapshots locally and then replicating to a secondary FAS system, Veeam are able to then take a backup to a secondary media type. This feature requires the Snapmirror or Snapvault license to be in place.

OnDemand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots

This features requires the NetApp FlexClone license to be in place. FlexClone is a great technology from NetApp giving the IT staff a fully functional snapshot version of their production data with production storage performance. Veeam enables the automation of this task, including the creation of the FlexClone snapshot, presentation, provisioning and most importantly the clean-up operations when testing and development is complete. This feature can provide a full performance virtual lab without using any further production storage, this feature can be leveraged on both primary and secondary tier FAS systems.
I have a number of posts around “FlexClone On Steroids” as well as a walk through video on YouTube.

Direct SAN for SolidFire / E-Series Workloads

SolidFire recently enrolled within the NetApp portfolio, we do not have the same level of integration with the SolidFire arrays today, however our Direct SAN technology will still enable us to reduce the impact of backup from the virtual environment.

Converged Infrastructure – FlexPod

As Veeam integrates so closely with the NetApp FAS range, the FAS range is an integral part of the FlexPod offering between Cisco & NetApp, this allows Veeam to provide Availability to these converged Infrastructure solutions, with reference architectures on how this can be configured and implemented between all vendors.

AltaVault – Cloud Integrated Storage

From a secondary tier backup storage option NetApp have the AltaVault system, AltaVault will allow Veeam customers to leverage backup copy jobs to a cloud integrated storage platform where this will allow for longer term retention backups to be streamed into many Public and Hyperscale cloud providers.

E-Series as a Backup Repository

The E-Series offers a high performance backup repository for us as Veeam to store out backup files.  This coupled with the high density of storage and the performance of recovery from an enterprise level storage array provides a great story as to why the E-Series is a great fit for a SAN based Veeam repository.

ONTAP Support

The most recent Generally Available ONTAP release from NetApp was 8.3.2, This was supported from version 9 update 2, I strongly believe that ONTAP 9 will be supported by the time this is GA and possibly when Veeam 9.5 is released.

Recovery Workflow from Storage Snapshot

You saw earlier in this post how the Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots can be used to view historic snapshots or snapshots that have not been orchestrated by Veeam but still enable file level recovery options.

Below you will see the view from a snapshot that is created and orchestrated by Veeam.

You will also the see the options available for this virtual machine that has a snapshot in an application consistent state. The ability to provide application item level recovery from a storage snapshot with no agents required and in a simple to use interface.

The steps below show the process to run an Instant VM recovery from a storage snapshot from the Veeam management console, the final step as you can see from the bottom right shot is for the backup admin to use vSphere tools such as Storage vMotion to migrate from the mounted snapshot to its original datastore.

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