We seem to be heading fast toward VeeamON 2019, this year our conference heads to Miami and none other than the famous Fontainebleau Miami Beach luxury hotel and resort. I have never been to Miami, so I am really looking forward to being there but also there is nothing quite like the VeeamON feeling and that of your own conference.

The conference officially runs from May 20^th to May 22^nd all in the same resort. But the fun actually starts on the Saturday for the die-hard techies heading out to Miami they will be starting their VMCE course that runs from Saturday to Monday before the conference kicks off with a welcome reception on the Monday evening.

We then have two full days of conference, breakout sessions and general sessions both of which I am going to get into more detail on later on.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be a Veeam conference if we didn’t have the famous Veeam party to close out the conference, pretty excited to see Flo-Rida perform.

My Breakout picks for the conference

We have I think 60+ breakout sessions this year, lots of technical content, business decision maker content, alliance content it’s a full-blown packed agenda of sessions and I have no doubt that everyone has put an enormous effort in to get the right content for the audience.

The length of the sessions are 45 minutes, I think this is a great move as this means the content needs to be on point and resonating with the audience but also not too long to lose interest. An attendee can hit 7 breakout sessions, so you have to choose carefully and plan your agenda accordingly with that in mind. Below are some of my picks.

There is an App for the event you can grab that will show all the other sessions and what else is happening during the event.

1.    To Download the app, search for CrowdCompass AttendeeHub in the App Store or Google Play.

2.    Once downloaded, search the app for VeeamON 2019 Miami event.

3.    Log in to the VeeamON Event with the same First and Last name you used to register for VeeamON

I am pretty sure I won’t get to attend many of these sessions, unless I am presenting so anyone reading this, I would love an overview of the sessions you attend.

Day 1

10:20 – 11:05

Cumulonimbus – Cloud Tier Deep Dive & Best Practices – intrigued by what Cumulonimbus means but also the level of technical differentiation we have with our Cloud Tier feature that landed in the early part of 2019 is well worth seeing.

11:25 – 12:10

From the Architect’s Desk: Sizing of Veeam Backup & Replication, Proxies and Repositories – Now I have seen the presentation for this, and I know that this is going to get quickly get pretty technically deep, well worth the spot.

13:30 – 14:15

NetApp and Veeam: Deep Dive Into How Snapshots and Secondary Storage Can Help You Get More Out of Backup – This seems to be the Alliance 45 minutes, I am going to highlight the NetApp & Veeam story as one to attend, the end to end capabilities we have with NetApp is truly worth seeing.

Day 2

09:15 – 10:00

Activate Your Data with Veeam DataLabs – of course I am going to kick start day 2 with this one, and I will be making this one. I will be presenting on an end to end overview of Veeam DataLabs, what it is and how you can use it.

11:50 – 12:35

Now at this time there is a top-secret session and I cannot divulge what that is going to be about but that might be worth attending if there is room.

Architecture, Installation and Design for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 – This one will be a full on deep dive into Veeam offering with Office 365 and if this is your world or is going to be soon then it’s worth knowing how the parts fit together and how to architect VBO for your environment.

14:00 – 14:45

Veeam ONE 9.5 U4 Part 1: Monitor, Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics and Business View – Veeam ONE got a lot of love with the most recent release but it’s always been such a great product and really opens up the visibility into your whole environment not just your backup infrastructure.

Also, this slot has a session on Veeam Explorers another capability that is such a powerful differentiator and worth understanding some of the tips and tricks there.

15:05 – 15:50

Veeam ONE 9.5 U4 Part 2: Reporter, Heatmaps and Custom Reports – this is part two of the previous session so if that one got your interest then carry on listening to what can be done with Veeam ONE.

How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Tape Media – There you go I have done it. I have suggested a tape session, and why not it’s still a massive strategy within many IT environments and still many require tape functionality this session will take a look into what Veeam is doing around Tape.

Technology General Session

The thing I want to close on is the Technology General Session where we will be live streaming out beyond the audience that are with us in Miami and we will be showing some technical demos. We then have an exclusive second half of the session where the stream will be turned off and we will share some of the futures that Veeam have coming later on in the year or sooner. This session will be live streamed from 15:30 Miami time.

With that I hope to see some of you there, if you are then don’t be shy and say hi, I will be the guy scrambling around between sessions and other matters probably wearing a funky vZilla t shirt or hopefully something if they arrive in time before I leave.

Hope you have a great VeeamON

Everything You Need to for Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV

I wanted to wrap up this series with some reference to some solid documentation and resources.

Technical Documentation References

If you have questions about Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV you may use the following resources:

For the initial overview of what the product can do the best place to start is with the product page.

Product Web Page – www.veeam.com/availability-nutanix-ahv.html

By far the most in depth documentation will be the user guide, it’s quite granular with how to configure and setup the product it also touches on the supported requirements and some initial best practices.

User guides – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/van/userguide/overview.html?ver=10

As this is a v1 product today, it is very important that we gain feedback on what features we would like to see from the field the best place to announce these to our product management team is via our forums.

Community Forums – www.veeam.com/forums

Technical Support

The final thing to mention here is obviously technical support, this is a paid for product and there are options for technical support contracts along with this, all we can ask is that you check resources available for a possible solution to a problem, the forums again would be a great way to understand if you are hitting a bug or if you have a solution to fix.

Email and phone technical support is offered for customers on maintenance and during the official evaluation period. For the best support experience, please provide the following when contacting technical support.

• Version information for the product and all infrastructure components.
• At the summary tab of the appliance settings section, click support bundle.
• Select a relevant set of log files and click download.

To submit a support ticket or obtain additional information, please visit www.veeam.com/support.html

Before contacting technical support, consider searching and engaging for a resolution on the Veeam community forums at www.veeam.com/forums

That’s a wrap for the Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV series, hopefully it has been useful as a resource. V2 is being worked on in the background so expect some great features and functionality to land when that is released.

Everything You Need to for Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV

Now that we have the Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV all up and running and protecting our workloads, it’s now time to look at how we can accomplish the recovery scenarios. Today in the product and between Veeam Backup & Replication we can perform the following recovery scenarios:

• Entire VM restore (Proxy Appliance)
• VM disks restore (Proxy Appliance)
• File-level restore
• Application item restore
• Restore to Microsoft Azure
• VM disk export
• Instant recovery to Hyper-V VM

Entire VM Restore (Proxy Appliance)

A list of all Protected Virtual Machines will be shown here. You can either hit the restore or disk restore option here and then go through and choose your virtual machine or if you select your virtual machine below you will then see all the restore points you have associated to that virtual machine and can start the next wizard from there.

Select the restore button to begin the Full VM Restore Wizard.

Select Add, all jobs will be shown here.

Expand the job and you will see all associated virtual machines and the restore points available.

Click add, now you can define which restore point you want to restore back to by clicking the point button.

The next window will display the restore points available to that virtual machine.

Click next, you then should decide where you wish to restore the virtual machine, to the original location or a new location.

If you were to choose new location, then you will notice the steps for the wizard will increase to define the configuration settings and location for the newly restored virtual machine.

With new location selected let’s walk through these options, if you chose to push to original location you wouldn’t have to input all these additional items. It might be that you want to restore the machine to the original location, but you want to make a name change so that it is not conflicting with the live system.

You then need to choose what storage location you wish to restore this machine to, this will be the datastore to which is presented to the AHV cluster.

A reason should be given to ensure that you are keeping an audit log for restore operations.

The final screen of the wizard is the summary, this will outline the restore process, what name, restore point and the original name.

VM disks restore (Proxy Appliance)

There may be other circumstances where you wish to just recover a certain disk for a certain machine within the environment. This can also be achieved within the Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance.

Select Disk Restore

Select the restore point you wish to restore from.

The next step allows you to map the virtual disk to a specific target VM, this doesn’t need to be the original.

We then continue through the wizard with a reason for auditing and then a summary. The next steps are going to cover the recoverability options now within Veeam Backup & Replication.

Veeam Backup & Replication – Recovery Scenarios

Nutanix AHV backups are landing in the proprietary VBK format, within a Veeam repository we have the visibility of those files within Veeam Backup & Replication, also notice below the restore wizard options now includes Nutanix Policy.

File-level restore

If we want to perform granular recovery of files and folders, then we need to head over to the Veeam Backup & Replication server. From the restore wizard select the Operating system choice.

Windows

For this walkthrough we are going to use that same Windows 2016 instance we have been using to capture our backups. When you run through the restore wizard this way it allows you to see all available Nutanix Policies you can also navigate to the specific backup job and restore point under Backups and Disk on the Home page.

Above you have selected the backup job and virtual machine you wish to perform a file level recovery from. Now you need to choose your restore point.

Give a reason to why you are doing this and then review the summary, this will then start the process of mounting the backup file to your Veeam Backup & Replication server and you will see the explorer as per below.

From here we can navigate to the files or folders we wish to recover, we can copy the file to a location or use windows explorer to pick up the folder and move back to its original location. We do not have the ability to do a restore in place.

Once that restore function is complete you can close the window, and this will dismount the backup file from the Veeam backup and replication server.

Linux FLR

I need to add that if you require a guest file recovery of a Linux virtual machine then you will require a VMware or Hyper-V host to run the Linux FLR appliance.

Application item restore

Using the same process as above within the guest file recovery explorer we can use the Veeam Explorers to recover application items.

Active Directory

Exchange Server

SQL

VM disk export

Closing out on the recovery part of the series, I didn’t touch on but should mention and possibly point links out to them. But we have some extending available ways that we can perform against these Nutanix AHV backups.

Restore to Microsoft Azure

Instant recovery to Hyper-V VM

To complete the series, I will touch on some useful resources that will help you get started and some useful pointers.

Everything You Need to for Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV

Now that we have our Veeam Proxy Appliance deployed, installed and configured, the next step is to start protecting some of the workloads we have sitting in our Nutanix AHV Cluster.

Navigate to the backup jobs tab on the top ribbon.

Here we can add a new backup job, a simple wizard driven approach to start protecting those workloads.

Next, we need to add in our virtual machines,

In my scenario I have simple virtual machines, if you are leveraging Nutanix Protection Domains then you can also leverage this grouping here to select your virtual machines, we can also leverage dynamic mode this is to allow the adding and removing of new workloads under that protection domain.

Add the virtual machine or machines that you wish to protect.

Next, the next option is selecting the destination of the backup job. To be able to see the backup repository the access on the VBR server needs to have the correct permissions to allow for access. This is done from the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

There are some advanced settings that can also be set to remove deleted VMs from the backup that are no longer included in the backup job.

The final step is to configure through the schedule. This will allow, you to choose the interim of backups and how many restore points that you must retain.

The final screen is the summary of the backup job you are about to complete.

You will also notice the ability to run the backup job when finish is selected, this will then start the backup job process. This will trigger the backup job to perform a full backup of the virtual machines you have selected.

Over in VBR you can see the job also running. In a very similar fashion to what we saw with the original Veeam Endpoint backup, we see enough that something is happening, but nothing can be configured from this job within Veeam Backup & Replication.

Back in the Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV we now have a completed backup job.

Veeam Backup & Replication also shows the completed job and the steps that have occurred during the job.

We will also now see the specific job in our Veeam Backup & Replication console under the backups giving us the ability to perform certain recovery tasks against those backup files.

And we also see the completed job now under the backup jobs in the proxy appliance interface. Here we can perform an Active Full in an ad hoc scenario but also, we can start and stop the job and edit that job.

Over on the Protected VMs tab you will also notice that we now have visibility into the virtual machines that are protected with how many snapshots and backups are present.

To finish, if you head back to the dashboard you will now see the job status showing that we have one created backup job and it is currently idle.

That’s all for the availability section of this series, this is really giving us the ability to create those backup jobs for the virtual machines that sit within the Nutanix AHV cluster, this is an agentless approach for any application consistency you will require the Nutanix Guest Tools.

One thing to note is if you have a transactional workload we would recommend using the Veeam Agent to provide not only the application consistent but also the log truncation within the application. Not required if you have an application that can manage that truncation task.

Next up we will look at the recovery steps and options we have.

Everything You Need to Deploy Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV

Download the latest version of Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV from: www.veeam.com/availability-nutanix-ahv-download.html

These steps assume you have already had a Veeam Backup & Replication server configured. Navigate through the site to get the latest version available.

Accept the EULA.

You will then be prompted for login using your Veeam login credentials.

All the above is pretty standard for any downloads from Veeam.com, now we will get into the actual deployment into your Nutanix AHV cluster.

Once downloaded you need to extract the .vmdk file to a location accessible by the Nutanix AHV cluster.

Log in to your Nutanix AHV cluster, for the purposes of this walkthrough I am using the Community Edition but the process is the same in general for any hardware AHV cluster.

We need to take the VMDK disk and send this to AHV as an image, to do this we need to navigate to the settings button on the top right of the Prism interface and locate “Image Configuration”

A new window will appear, and you can then select Upload Image.

At this stage we can name the image something that allows you to recognize its purpose along with all other fields such as disk type and where you wish to upload the image to.

Upload from the file location you downloaded the vmdk to and save.

Now that we have the image we can create the Veeam proxy appliance from the image. Select create VM.

Create a VM with recommended parameters in the Nutanix AHV cluster that you wish to protect. As per the user guide you will find the system requirements for your proxy appliance. Also take note at those platform support versions.

Creating the VM is very easy and straight forward, we need a name and we need to determine what specifications we wish our VM to have.

In the VM settings add a new disk from the image previously uploaded, the operation job down allows you to clone from the image service. Then under image you can select your recently uploaded Nutanix AHV VMDK

Once added you will also need to ensure that the disk is seen as a boot device, I have removed the CDROM drive from my VM configuration.

You should also add your network interface that has access to your Veeam Backup & Replication server for that communication between the Proxy Appliance and the Veeam Repository.

Once you have added the disk and configured the network then you select save.

Complete the setup by selecting save and then wait for the VM to be created and power on.

NOTE – Must have DHCP available on this network so that the system will pick up an available IP for management this can later be changed to fixed if required.

Once the VM is powered on within the VM console you will see the web console address, copy that full address and paste into a web browser.

There you have it. You have successfully deployed and configured Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV.

The following post will touch on the next steps and navigating the web interface that is exposed from this proxy appliance, the post will also touch on the installation phase.