This release gives Veeam the ability to protect workloads natively across the trifecta of the public clouds, Microsoft Azure, AWS and now Google Cloud Platform or GCP. This version 1 of the product gives you the ability to protect your GCP compute instances leveraging cloud-native snapshots and backups to Google Cloud Storage which in turn gives you the ability to restore those virtual machines back into GCP. With the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication v11 and the addition of a third external repository option which is the object storage where Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform writes its backups to this enables for further protection of your data or even more recoverability across different environments and cloud platforms.

A full hybrid cloud of options when it comes to backup

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Getting started

In true Veeam style this is super simple and easy, head over to the GCP marketplace and simply type in Veeam and you will see the below offering.

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When you click into this option, you will see an overview of what the products capabilities are and versions available, you will also see along the top links to Pricing, Documentation and Support.

Pricing

There is a free edition as with all Veeam backup for cloud products there is a free “community” edition which is enabled for you to protect 10 instances for free with basic email support. A great way if like me you have been learning the ropes in GCP and you just need to start protecting those instances either by native cloud snapshots or get a copy of them instances to Google Cloud Storage which then allows you to move them to different regions or locations. The image below has been taken from the Google Cloud Marketplace and you should run through the cost estimator when you walk through the appliance and create your policies this will give you a solid understanding of what the pricing would look like for your environment.

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The cost estimation will be visible when you start creating your policy and as you start adapting retention periods and amount of restore points you will see this change.

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Architecture

Again much the same as the other Veeam backup for cloud products all available in the marketplaces for the clouds is that you have your backup appliance, this appliance is a Linux based VM and is where the management takes place for all infrastructure components, it is the coordinator for all your snapshot and backups requirements as well as recovery scenarios and tasks. It also of course handles the scheduling of these policies.

Then as I have mentioned already, we need a location to store backups, this comes in the form of Google Cloud Storage and it is a storage bucket where we store those backups. Finally, we have the worker instances, those familiar with Veeam from an on-premises point of view will know these as similar components to the proxies we have within Veeam Backup & Replication, the data movers. A Linux machine that is responsible based on the schedule and tasks from the management appliance will go out and copy data from A to B. These are automatically deployed by Veeam and they are only running for the duration of the job. You can find more about the worker instances and the roles here.

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Backup

As a version 1 of a product, this is focused on IaaS and is focused on the Backup and Recovery of those IaaS compute instances. There is no agent installed inside the compute instances that require protection. As well as backups the product is also able to perform or leverage persistent disk snapshots as a restore point. You can choose to just enable snapshot-based protection or also within the policy configure the backup operation to send a copy of that data to the Google Cloud Storage bucket. This backup operation is when the worker instances are deployed into the GCP region applicable to the VM to be protected. The process then leverages the persistent disk snapshots and mounts them to the worker instance which reads the data and transfers to the Google Cloud Storage bucket. When the backup operation is complete the snapshot is not removed and is still there for another restore option. This data is encrypted and compressed. The worker is then removed, and the schedule continues.

Restore

Restore is obviously the first and foremost reason we backup in the first place, the v1 product gives you the ability to recover the full instance, individual disks as well as file level recovery options. The instance and disk restore can restore to different regions and availability zones. Obviously, you can restore back to the original location but also to a new location. This is done simply by selecting that option and then choosing the region and zone you wish to restore the instance into.

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Updates

Just like the other options for both Microsoft Azure and AWS there the appliance for Google Cloud Platform also has the updater, this updater allows you to check for new product versions and available package updates for the Veeam software but also the Linux operating system in use. A simple thing but a must have feature when we talk about how appliances and workflows are in the public cloud.

Where can I find out more?

I have been walking through each release of the cloud focused products for both Veeam Backup for AWS and Microsoft Azure and I will be recording something for the GCP product shortly. Please go and subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you see when this video is released. I have been also venturing into the world of streaming every Friday at 12:30 GMT each week covering various Veeam technologies.

I say this quite a lot and it is no different here, I have condensed a lot of the high level when it comes to the appliance but if you would like to know more about the architecture or steps taken during backup and recovery then the Veeam user guides are second to none full of great information.

User Guide – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbgcp/guide/welcome.html?ver=10

To get started here is the link to the marketplace – https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/veeam-marketplace-public/veeam-backup-for-google-cloud?project=windy-marker-278420&folder=&organizationId=

I have also just uploaded a short walkthrough of the product on YouTube.

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