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

This was a nice feature that was sneaked into V10 without many people realising.

A common challenge with High IO workloads with VMware snapshots is that it would or could kill performance of likely this mission critical system when a VMware snapshot takes place, which either means you take that risk and manage to get a backup to happen during a relevant window, you leverage crash consistent storage snapshots which also do not require a VMware snapshot or GASP! You just do not do anything and hope that nothing happens to this MISSION CRITICAL system.

Ok so what can we do? – The theory

What if I told you, you could take an application aware and consistent storage snapshot without having to take a VMware snapshot?

If you are running one of the many storage integrations that are supported by Veeam then you are in luck. You can configure a Storage Snapshot only job with your application aware processing configured within the wizard and that is it. Ok there are some caveats. The VM’s virtual disks must be located on the same datastores and they must be unique within the backup job.

Here are some examples:

If you have one Veeam orchestrated snapshot job configured and you have 3 VMs from the same VM Datastore then the traditional method of creating a backup will take place which will involve a VMware snapshot.

Example 1

If you have one VM on a datastore that has high IO and you do not wish this to be affected with VMware snapshots then create one backup job that contains only this VM and you will achieve this application consistent storage snapshot.

Example 2

Finally lets take a Tier 1 application that is made up of 2 virtual machines, these machines reside on their own VM datastores and storage volumes, they are also both added to the same backup job this will also achieve that application consistent storage snapshot.

Example 3

Things to remember

• VM must be the only VM in storage volume / datastore within the backup job.
• If the VM is not the only VM in the storage volume / datastore and backup job, then VMware Snapshot will still take place.
• All VMs that do not qualify will be processed in parallel.
• All VMs that do qualify they will be processed sequentially.

Walkthrough

I am going to pick 3 virtual machines for this test

To match these jobs with the examples above:

• Snapshot-less Orchestrated Snapshot – Same – Example 1 (2 VMs on the same datastore and same storage volume)
• Snapshot-less Orchestrated Snapshot – Single – Example 2 (Single VM on its own unique datastore)
• Snapshot-less Orchestrated Snapshot – Multi – Example 3 (2 VMs on their own unique datastores within the job)

The key to note here is that the datastores mentioned above all contain other VMs in the environment but they are not included in the backup job.

Ok let us walk through creating the orchestrated snapshot job to make this happen. Ok so this is pretty simple but it is important to know where VMs are being stored to take advantage of this functionality, if that VM moves then it will revert back to a VMware snapshot unless it is a VM in it’s own Backup Job. First of all as with all Veeam jobs, give it a relevant name.

Click add and choose your virtual machines, this can be straight via the VM name and remember there is a search function there that will help with choosing out granular machines. You can also use vSphere tags but remember where the VMs are placed in order to use that option.

Next up, because we are running orchestrated snapshots for this role, at this point you will have already had to install or add your storage system within Veeam Backup & Replication, this way depending on the storage system you are using you can select the option for Primary Storage Snapshot Only for your specific storage integration.

The next screen is for application aware processing, this is the whole reason for the enhancement, we could already do crash consistent snapshot orchestration prior to v10 and this does not have the same limitations. For crash consistent you can have multiple VMs residing on the same storage volume. Add in your credentials and hit the test here to confirm all is good.

Most likely you are going to want to schedule this to happen to sort your RPO requirements.

Summary, this is what the job looks like, you can either save this and exit or you can say start the job now.

The Results

Now its worth pointing out that the systems I have chosen for this demo are lab machines, if you didn’t guess they are an Active Directory Domain Controller, Veeam ONE server running SQL Express and Veeam Backup & Replication also running SQL Express. (not the Veeam Backup & Replication server running the jobs) none of these systems are actually running high IO workloads this is to prove the concept so please ignore the durations.

This first one is in line with example 1, we have two VMs stored on the same datastore and storage volume and clearly both within the same backup job, you can see I have highlighted that in this instance we are going to take a VMware snapshot.

The second example is of a single VM in its own backup job. You can see that there is no “creating VM snapshot” or “Removing VM snapshot” you only see “Primary storage snapshot created successfully”

Finally, we have example 3, this shows 2 VMs in one backup job but both VMs are stored on two different storage volumes / datastores. Much the same as example 2 above now you can see that no VMware snapshot is taking place just the storage snapshot.

And just to confirm that we are application consistent here we have the logs being truncated in the summary below. There were some also enhancement in this area when it comes to SQL and Oracle that I will have to get to in another post.

So, you could do this kind of prior to Veeam Backup & Replication v10 but they would be crash consistent and that’s a huge risk to take on such important systems. Veeam also has this capability already with the storage integration with Cisco HyperFlex as this uses the native VM snapshot engine and API available on the HyperFlex system to achieve this.

And what if I told you, this has been around for years with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam have had this capability for a while now since 2016 in fact.

Primary use cases that we have seen have been,

Test and development

When you have the public cloud at your fingertips why not take advantage of it? Instead of having to purchase specific test and development environments. Also, perfect idea if you are looking to just see how certain apps and workloads are going to run in Microsoft Azure.

Data Migration

Let’s say you know where you are going and that is Microsoft Azure, how are you going to get those workloads there in a fast and efficient manner, Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure enables a fast way to restore those backups to the public cloud without compromising on keeping the restore points and more to the point the rollback is back to those production systems you also still have on premises.

Data recovery

We tend to talk about the bad failure scenarios, or we think nothing will happen to us and not really touch on the in between. What if you lost half your production virtualisation servers due to an outage of some description? What would you do? This feature within Veeam Backup & Replication enables you to restore some of your workloads from backups into Microsoft Azure you can then use an existing VPN or some other connectivity to join the environments and continue working or you could use VeeamPN to achieve this.

Walkthrough

In this YouTube video I walk through how easy and simple it is to get those image-based backups restored into Microsoft Azure as native Azure VMs for some of those use cases mentioned above. This also ties into the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure that was released this week.

Where should I run the conversion process?

I ran some tests for this one to determine for my lab where and what would be the best practice when it comes to restoring workloads into Microsoft Azure. Veeam offers a lot of choice when it comes to restore and how to assist when environmental challenges are in the way. Things like link speed to the public cloud due to location or other reasons for that. Also since the release of this feature back in 2016 there have also been many other enhancements and features added to Veeam Backup & Replication including the new Veeam Cloud Tier which gives us the ability to store our backups in Object storage, well we can also recover from those as well. This video linked below goes into more detail around where and what considerations you should take when looking to restore workloads to the public cloud.

Cloud Tier

It is only right that we have spoken about protecting native Azure VMs using the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, we have spoken about getting your image based backups from either virtual or physical platforms that you have on premises or even in other public clouds to Microsoft Azure so I had to mention Cloud Tier or Capacity tier on how we can tier our backups or copy our backups into Microsoft Azure Blob Storage for either a long term retention or an offsite copy of your data.

Couple all these features together and we have a pretty dynamic and flexible way of being able to move data to from and within the public clouds.

If you have any questions or comments, feedback at all on the videos then please let me know either here in the comments, on the YouTube channel or on Twitter, a side note here is that I will be creating more video content over the next few weeks whilst we are stuck at home, I for one have been consuming a lot more of my news and education through YouTube and judging by the uptake in subscriptions I think you are too so let me know anything you want to see or for me to walk through.

What is Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure?

This new product focuses in on the Azure IaaS workloads you have running in the public cloud, much like the Veeam Backup for AWS edition that was released early this year, this product provides you the ability to protect those Azure VMs without having to install and agent on each one. It is a policy driven approach allowing for both snapshots and backups to be part of your data management plan when it comes to Microsoft Azure.

The product is a standalone solution that is deployable from the Microsoft Azure marketplace. A very easy to use wizard driven approach to configuration and management. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure Free Edition and subsequent versions are available within the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

The FREE edition allows you to protect 10 Azure VMs using native snapshots and then tier those snapshots to an Azure Blob Storage repository.

Within the Azure Blob Storage Repository these backups are stored in the portable data format that sets Veeam apart from the other vendors in this space. This allows for the Veeam Backup & Replication External Repository feature to be leveraged and enables the ability to further additional data protection or allow for other tasks such as migrations or on premises data recovery.

As you would expect the offering also allows you to recover those Azure Virtual Machines not only back where they initially resided but also across accounts and even across regions. As well as being able to provide file level recovery for a more granular option.

Another cool feature is the ability to see a level of cloud cost, when you create your policies through the wizard driven approach you have the ability to start seeing some cost forecasting so you can make better decisions about your cloud cost consumption.

Policies, Workers & Protected Data

Those familiar with Veeam will notice a different approach to some of the key functions and naming, and maybe you can liken these new terms with those found in Veeam Backup & Replication they have some differences.

Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication will recognise Policies as something more commonly known as Backup Jobs, however even within Veeam Backup & Replication world we are seeing policies now entering the fold with the CDP policy coming in later releases.

Policies give you the ability to define several requirements when it comes to your cloud data management. But again, it is that same very easy to use wizard driven approach that all Veeam customers will be familiar with.

You can choose to protect everything in a region, or we can be granular on what to protect. An awesome feature here is that you can select either by Instance or by Tag. Tags really lend well to the fast-moving pace of Cloud Instances being spun up and spun down all the time. The ability to use tags means we can protect in a more dynamic fashion. We will demonstrate the ease of use and how dynamic these tags within Azure can be created and used for your data management needs.

I mentioned above about Snapshots and Backups and how they are used together in this product to provide the best of both worlds when it comes to fast recovery points but also an out of band copy of your data not linked to the original VM.

You may wish on some workloads to only provide Snapshots and some only backups, or both. Snapshot settings allows you to define when these will be taken and how many snapshots you intend to keep. Backup Settings is where we can define that Microsoft Azure Blob Storage repository in which we wish to store those backups to, this will also play the part of making that data visible if you wish to see that within Veeam Backup & Replication. You also have the same retention setting to define here.

The workers are configured during the configuration stage and setup of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure. Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication could maybe liken these worker nodes to the Veeam Backup Proxy component within VBR.

The worker is a Linux based instance that is deployed and used when data needs to be transferred, the worker is used for both backup and recovery. When the policy is complete then the workers are shut down but remain in place for the next scheduled policy to take place.

Cost Estimations

A unique feature that is built into the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure free edition and will obviously include other versions is the ability to estimate cost when it comes to backups and storing the retention you have defined. This is something else we go into further detail within the video walk-through below.

As I have mentioned this post gives a very high-level overview of what you can find with the new product but if you would like to see more then I have created a walk-through below. Any comments please comment here, on the YouTube video or find me on twitter.

Let me know what you think to the YouTube walk-through’s it is something I am intending to really increase given that we are house bound and I have more time to create this content.

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.

What is the integration? The integration gives visibility into your environment of both the virtual infrastructure and backup environment. This post will run through the steps to get the HyTrust Cloud Advisor up and running in your environment. The deployment comes in the form of an OVA to be downloaded from HyTrust, they have trial versions to take advantage of as well.

Download the OVA and files required from the site and then begin the deploy from OVA wizard within vSphere. Once you have deployed it’s time to get this configured and looking at our environment, the easiest way to configure this is via the vSphere remote console. Connect here and then run through the initial steps of configuration.

When you first see this screen if you are like me you probably read this and then you go off looking for that default username and password. Look closer at the screen and you will see that default username and password is actually in the opening welcome message.

Once you have logged in the first time, an automated setup wizard will begin this will start with the name of the appliance.

The following setup wizard takes you through configuring network address details, domain and DNS. There are two network interfaces in the appliance and I only chose to configure one.

When you have been through the wizard and if you are happy with the summary of changes you can then commit those. It will then give you some detail about where you can go next to further deploy this appliance. Take note of the web address in the summary screen below.

Having taken that web interface address we can now go ahead and connect to that address in our web browser. Be aware if of the https and secure connection you may have to accept some rules on your browser to proceed to this point.

The first time you login HyTrust Cloud Advisor you will see this option to “Setup Now” This rolling screen covers some of the areas that HyTrust can assist with their portfolio of products. Worth a flick through there.

Obviously I read through the End-User license agreement, I expect you guys will do to.

It then breaks into this CloudAdvisor setup wizard, each of these tabs needs to be completed so I would advise before starting the setup wizard to have this information to hand. The first thing to add is the license key.

Now during the console setup we had already added DNS configurations but this is just confirming that this is the correct settings, you also have the option to test the settings you have put in here.

As always, this Data and Time screen needs to be configured correctly. Pick the correct region and pick the appropriate NTP time server. In my case I chose an external one and chose London as my timezone.

The next stage is where we will add the appliance to the active directory domain. Provide the domain name and netbios these are required and then you have the option to test with credentials to authenticate with the domain controller and make sure the configuration is correct.

You can choose if you wish to setup email notifications, I didn’t for this quick configuration.

The 6^th stage is adding your virtualisation manager this in our case is our VMware virtual centre. Very simply add your DNS name or IP of your Virtual Centre and your allowed credentials.

The final stage and the most important one for me is the backup provider, we are able to add our Veeam Backup & Replication server here, the first thing to note is that when you add the server you get the chance to choose an “Analysis Blackout Window” this is when you do not want your backups to be mounted and analysed, very important to consider as this could affect retention periods and performance. This can be adjusted or even configured later on.

Adding VMs to Inventory

Now that we have the initial deployment and configuration out of the way, it’s now time to start populating the tool to understand more of what is happening in the environment and making some actionable events against those findings. This is where we add our virtual machines and backup files to the fold.

On the first selection it is your provider again that we added in the first configuration wizard, depending on where will determine the provider chosen. In my first scenario I want to add a live VM.

The search function here allows you to search the VM name or by guest OS. My VM naming convention uses TPM04, I have searched based on this. You can also tweak the number of entries you see in this page, I put this straight to 100 as I know I don’t have that many machines.

The next step is to choose which VMs we would like to assign Insight profiles to, this is a set of rules or specifications that will be gathered. For the purposes of this I am going to run through on just the default profile.

The default policy is going to look for these specific tags within the VM. This can be updated during this configuration using the “Update Insight Profile” button on the previous page.

Next is the concept of discovery points, this is defined as snapshots, this will be the schedule on how frequently the data will be checked.

Again, you can change the schedule here and configure new ones. The default that I will set is manual schedule.

Discovery Tools is the final step to adding virtual machines, this allows for an agent to be deployed to the machines you maybe want to get more data from.

I am going to deploy on only one machine for lab purposes to begin with. But by clicking on the install now hyperlink you are faced with some configuration on how to deploy the agent.

Once the agent has completed its deployment you now see the following in that window.

The following then takes place and adds those VMs into your inventory.

My NFR license only allows for 2 active VMs. One is from the Virtual centre and one is from the Veeam backup and replication server and the backup file.

Next up we will have a closer look at the Veeam and HyTrust integration and some use cases and overview of how and where you might use these two products together.

That’s some of the things from a security perspective that should be in place but what if something does get breached and data could have got out of the business. Then you must report any data and security breaches to the information commissioner. This is new as this was a choice from the company if they felt it required by themselves to report. It is not mandatory.

Now we have the overview, I think you will agree it’s going to mean for a huge review for a lot of businesses to understand the way their systems work as well as their employees.

Data Minimisation

Another area that I feel this is going to highlight is the security of systems. Often overlooked or its been the cutting corners for getting things done quicker. GDPR will mean a much stronger focus on technical security, this is going to introduce the use of encryption and having to make sure those security patches are installed on those workloads.

As well as Encryption, pseudonymisation will also be another technique where businesses will have to explore. Pseudonymisation is a technique that allows to replace some of the identifiers with fictitious entries to protect people’s data privacy.

Quote from WikiPedia:

“Pseudonymisation enhances privacy by replacing most identifying fields within a data record by one or more artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms. There can be a single pseudonym for a collection of replaced fields or a pseudonym per replaced field.”

Road Warriors

Many of us carry laptops and other mobile devices around with us on a daily basis, the majority of these devices actually contain some work content. How is this affected? Well it comes down to that review of process and directive from the data protection officer. There will be a requirement as there is today but with more of a highlight on making sure staff members are reliable when taking personal data and business data offsite on these devices. Device encryption is one of the areas I can quickly see being the easy tick here but I am sure there are more options around this like remote workers with thin clients on the road. Because this could also put data at risk of exposure and failure to ensure these points could expose businesses to a fine.

First up is the backup repositories location the ability to set your location of the target backup repository.

Before we move forward we need to create our locations. You can do this by right clicking on the object and then selecting manage locations.

A very simple wizard approach, add your locations by text and that’s it.

Once you have added your list of locations you will see them all listed as below. The import wizard allows you to import from a csv.

It’s as simple as that, but it’s not how complicated the feature is, it’s how and what it does for your business. You can also define locations on your other physical components.

This will then allow us to populate location down to the assets within these virtual centres or these physical entities. See below for some other areas where you can define location.

Agent Management – Location Tagging

Also within the update 3 feature list was the inclusion of agent management but of course the location tagging continues here to show where those physical or cloud instances reside.

Now that we can define where our physical constructs are this will help us understand where the data has come from if you are moving from certain countries or sites. Next up we will look at how this can be seen and presented on within Veeam ONE.

What if I told you that the same tool that you purchased for Backup & Replication could also perform a level of verification against your replication jobs. Oh and did I mention that this test would automatically test the verification of Virtual Machine, Operating System and Application.

SureReplica gives you the ability to spin up an isolated network in your secondary location to confirm that the restore point is in a good state should you require to actually recover from it, rather than waiting for a failure scenario to occur and then you are sat there with crossed fingers hoping the backup or replica is in a good state to recover from.

This same feature allows for some further lab environment, a sandbox that can be accessed whereas this is fully automated. This will be coming up next in the series.

Components required for SureReplica

There are some one-time configuration components that we need to consider before we get going. These really don’t take long to configure.

Virtual Lab

Most of the time we would not want our verification tests to interfere with the production network, this is why we create a Virtual Lab, a virtual lab consists of a virtual network switch on your remote site ESXi host.

This can be on a single host or a multi-site environment, depending on the size of the testing group of Virtual Machines.

The most basic requirement here requires:

• A resource pool
• VM Folder
• A standard vSwitch

The VMs are started in this virtual lab and this is the only use case for the vSwitch, there is a proxy appliance also deployed at this stage on the same host, resource pool and VM folder. This is used to bridge connectivity between the production network and this isolated network.

Some more detail on this configuration can be found here – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/surereplica_vlab_config.html?ver=95

Application Group

An Application Group is a group of Applications, kidding, this is where we can define our virtual machines that we would like to verify in our secondary location. Remember here that it might be one mission critical system that you want to test, but you need to make sure within that application group you have all dependencies so we can truly test if that application is in a good state or not.

I will also add that you can mix where your VMs come from this could be from Storage Snapshots, Replication Jobs and Backup Jobs all mixed accordingly to achieve the requirements that you have.

SureBackup Job

In the Veeam Backup & Replication console this type of job is called SureBackup, this offers that same level of verification to the Veeam backup files.

To piece the Application Group and Virtual Lab together comes the SureBackup Job. Let’s run through this configuration with our SQL example we used in the last post.

Firstly, find the SureBackup job wizard in the console.

Set the name and description for the job, this wizard is assuming you have been through and created your virtual lab and application group.

Select the required virtual lab that you have created. If you need pointers on this then there is a demo video at the end of the post.

Select the Application Group that you have also just created.

Additional notification settings can be added at this next screen to determine SNMP traps or emails as well as some integrity checks. This is going to give you the audit trail for that DR testing plan though that normally takes weeks and weeks to perform.

If you are wanting to run an automated Disaster Recovery test, which Is completely possible then you may want to make sure this runs on a scheduled basis. Remember this will consume resource, within the application group creation you can determine the associated ram in terms of a percentage to the live production system, just be cautious in choosing when this should take place.

Finally, a summary page to show you the configuration, also the option to run that job.

Now that you have this created and scheduled you can now wait for the scheduled time to come by and then once this job has completed you will either receive an email notification if this has been configured or you can see from within the console.

https://youtu.be/LHoTua_fxNg