Veeam Availability Console – The Artist formerly known as… VMBP

The official Veeam line is “Cloud-Enabled platform for Service Providers and distributed Enterprise environments”

Basically offers management and encompasses all other virtualised, physical and public cloud management and provides the following to the enterprise or service providers.

• Easily and efficiently manage protection of hybrid cloud, remote offices and mobile users.
• Service Providers are able deliver Veeam-powered backup and replication services to their customers.
• Enables partners and resellers to launch a new service provider business and capture new revenue streams.

The way I see it though is that if you have a fully virtual environment and you are using the Veeam Availability Suite then there is no reason to add another console interface to your administration, the VAC really will help those customers and service providers managing multiple VAS instances as well as a physical or cloud instance environment.

From an Enterprise point of view though if you have multiple departments or areas of businesses that are segregated then this console may help from that administration point of view also, along with this it could allow your enterprise business to manage that migration or transition to a hybrid cloud model.

Large Enterprises and Service Providers work in a very similar way wanting to achieve many of the same features from Monitoring and Alerting to a charge-back and billing approach to either tenants or those departments previously mentioned.

Veeam Availability Console is capable of performing centralized, remote management and monitoring of the clients where Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents are deployed. Collected data is stored in the Veeam Availability Console database which is deployed on a Microsoft SQL Server.

You can find more information here on the official Veeam site – Veeam Availability Console

The biggest feature of this product is this, not only a simple platform to deploy with step by step configuration steps and in a true Veeam way is very easy to use. VAC will also provide a central management tool to deploy backup agents, have the ability to manage multiple sites and locations centrally and allow for user creation and role delegation to perform certain tasks.

As well as that configuration and central management, VAC is also going to bring Monitoring of all these entities through a single UI. Virtual Workloads, Physical Servers and Workstations and Cloud Based workloads.

All sounds great so far right, but the biggest issue today with the Veeam Endpoint FREE product from a scale point of view is that you have to manage each agent locally in terms of setup and schedule including deployment, that’s no good when it comes to anything above 20 physical / cloud instances that’s a lot of man hours wasted on simple process. The Availability Console will provide not only discovery across an IP address range, Active Directory integration and also just a CSV file containing server names or IP addresses, but it will also allow for a central deployment method for all agents, saving so much time from an administration and setup point of view.

I have to add here that this deployment model is only available for the agents and not for Veeam Backup & Replication.

In the same vein that Veeam ONE will provide powerful and easy reporting capabilities, Veeam Availability Console will now also provide reporting for Billing and Charge-back. Something that has been asked a lot by our Service Provider partners and now delivered as part of this new product announcement.

The same billing reports will be great for enterprise customers being able to give actual usage information across a department type business and appropriately showing the costs incurred within the environment.

Really quite customisable, in that fixed fees can be set, reports to show per computer or per cloud resource. The ability to also set and review quotas for departments or customers. On the customisable piece also being able to edit the format and have a custom branded portal and invoices.

The final piece of the pie is the RESTful API for integration with other billing systems. I am yet to find out exactly what other API calls are available from the console but in due course that sounds like a good post on its own.

In summary this new or re-branded and enhanced product is going to give Enterprise and Service Providers.

• Easily and efficiently manage protection of hybrid cloud, remote offices and mobile users.
• Streamline delivery of Veeam powered backup and replication services.
• Central Management, Discovery, Deployment, Monitoring, Reporting including Billing and Charge-back capabilities.

As always please feel free to leave me any feedback. I have other posts that have been released during this announcement week.