Backup and DR — Partner Solutions — Google Cloud Platform — Part 3— Veeam
Backup and disaster recovery are vital components in your business continuity plan & Google Cloud is committed to providing suitable solutions that meet your business needs through partner and first-party solutions.
A broad ecosystem of ISV and system integration (SI) partners provide backup and disaster recovery offerings on, and/or integrated with, Google Cloud. This provides Google Cloud customers with freedom of choice and facilitates frictionless use of preferred third-party products and services.
In this blog series, I along with Jasbirs would cover third party products and services(Zerto, Veeam, VMware SRM) that could be leveraged for backup and disaster recovery use cases on Google cloud platform. In this blog me and Umesh Kumhar would cover Veeam, One Solution for Cloud Data Management and Protection.
Previous blog on Zerto Part I- https://medium.com/google-cloud/backup-and-dr-partner-solutions-google-cloud-platform-part-1-e5334b87f4e6
Previous blog on VMware SRM Part II- https://medium.com/google-cloud/backup-and-dr-partner-solutions-google-cloud-platform-part-2-vmware-srm-57a5deff850f
What is Veeam?
Veeam Backup & Replication is a comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution. With Veeam Backup & Replication, you can create image-level backups of virtual, physical and cloud machines and restore from them. Technology used in the product optimizes data transfer and resource consumption, which helps to minimize storage costs and the recovery time in case of a disaster.
Veeam Backup & Replication provides a centralized console for administering backup, restore and replication operations in all supported platforms (virtual, physical, cloud).
Primary Components Of The Veeam
1. Backup server
A Microsoft Windows-based machine on which Veeam Backup & Replication is installed. The backup server performs main management operations: coordinates backup, replication and restore tasks, controls job scheduling and resource allocation.
2. Backup repository
A server where Veeam Backup & Replication keeps backup files, backup copies and metadata of replicated VMs.
3. Backup proxy
A component that retrieves data from the source host, processes it and transfers to the backup repository.
4. Mount Server
The mount server used for restores that work with guest OS files and application items. It help to perform file level restore
Veeam Solution Overview & Highlights
1. Disaster Recovery
The architecture of the Veeam supports onsite and offsite data protection, operations across remote sites and geographically dispersed locations.
Veeam Backup & Replication supports several deployment scenarios, and each one includes the core infrastructure components: backup server, backup proxy and backup repository. As per the requirements and storage where backup contents needs to be secured, the architecture diagram can vary.
The recommended deployment architecture is that the roles of components required for data protection tasks are assigned to dedicated machines.
The overall reference architecture on GCVE with Veeam based Disaster Recovery would be as shown below. All backups will be saved into cloud storage and Veeam Replication would use cloud storage as a source for disaster recovery.
2. Continuous Replication
Veeam Backup & Replication performs vsphere to vsphere VM replication in the following way:
- Create a replication job
- Veeam Backup & Replication reads job settings from the configuration database and creates a list of VMs to process. For every disk of a VM added to the job, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a new task.
- Veeam Backup & Replication checks what backup infrastructure resources are available, and assigns backup proxies and backup repositories to process the tasks.
- Then Veeam Backup & Replication establishes a connection with source and target backup proxies and the backup repository, and sets a number of rules for data transfer, such as network traffic throttling rules and so on.
- The source proxy establishes a connection with the target proxy and backup repository.
- Veeam Backup & Replication queries information about VMs and virtualization hosts from the vCenter Server.
- Veeam Backup & Replication requests vCenter Server or ESXi host to create a VM snapshot. VM disks are put to the read-only state, and every virtual disk receives a delta file. All changes that the user makes to the VM during replication are written to delta files.
- The source backup proxy reads the VM data from the read-only VM disk and copies it. During incremental job sessions, the source proxy uses changed block tracking (CBT) to retrieve only those data blocks that have changed since the previous job session.
- The source proxy compresses VM data and transports it to the target proxy.
- The target proxy decompresses VM data and writes the result to the destination datastore.
- After the backup proxy finishes reading VM data, Veeam Backup & Replication requests the vCenter Server or ESXi host to commit the VM snapshot.
3. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in Veeam for vSphere
Veeam Backup & Replication also supports continuous data replication in a way to reduce the RPO to almost zero in situations of disaster.
First, CDP creates VM replicas and, then, keeps these replicas up to date.
CDP constantly replicates I/O operations performed on VMs. To read and process I/O operations in transit between the protected VMs and their underlying datastore, CDP uses vSphere APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO) that gives an option not to create snapshots.
Because CDP is always on and does not create snapshots, it allows reaching a lower recovery point objective (RPO) compared to the snapshot-based replication — near-zero RPO which means almost no data loss.
Learn here more about how CDP works in detail.
4. Long-Term Retention
Veeam makes it dead simple to meet your regulatory or legal requirements: send data to the cloud or the purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for retention spanning months or years. These long-term copies can be taken from local backups or DR replicas, are done on a schedule of your choice, and can be stored wherever makes most sense for your business. Powerful indexing & search makes finding and restoring files as easy as 1–2–3 no matter what your 3–2–1 strategy looks like. In it for the long haul? Use cost-effective cloud tiering to move LTR copies from hot to cold to deep freeze storage for data you want to keep but only infrequently access.
5. Data Mobility and Migrations
Whether for datacenter consolidations, mergers & acquisitions, or an on-ramp to the cloud, Veeam helps our customers move their data and applications with none of the pain typically associated with migrations. Dramatically speed up your migration project with SRM’s fully orchestrated platform, even if migrating to/from the public cloud.
6. Test and Development
Veeam’s continuous replication means you can always get a copy of production systems that’s only seconds behind. Customers use Veeam to quickly deploy test/dev servers that are nearly identical to production, then let Veeam efficiently clean up once the servers are no longer needed. Easily validate patches or test new code in isolated environments that won’t interfere with production. It’s a win-win for everyone when continuous data protection meets continuous integration and deployment.
7. Security and Compliance
The unmatched granularity Veeam provides means ransomware or other malware doesn’t have to stop your business — let alone force you into paying a ransom. Use Veeam to quickly rewind to a point in time just prior to the infection and restore your unencrypted files and VMs. That granularity of seconds also enables on-demand sandboxes that are ideal for post-incident forensics, analysis, or proactive scanning. Even pen-testing is made simpler when production replicas can be hammered with no impact to the live systems.
Combine the Protection of Veeam with the Power of Google Cloud
Veeam lets you seamlessly migrate workloads and perform disaster recovery on Google Cloud VMware Engine without refactoring your applications.
In this section, you will focus on two different set of scenarios that can be covered with Veeam Backup and Replication below:
Use Physical Bare Metal as Source
To back up physical machines, Veeam Backup & Replication uses Veeam Agents according to the operating systems such as Veeam Agent for Linux and Window Machines.
You do not need to install, set up and operate Veeam Agent on every source machine whose data you want to protect. Instead, the Veeam Backup & Replication console can perform the whole set of deployment, administration, data protection and disaster recovery tasks on computers remotely.
Now Veeam can backup the data to the backup storage/repository and use that for restore/recovery.
Learn more about Veeam agent working on Linux and Windows host.
Use ESXi Virtualization Hosts as Source
Veeam Backup & Replication does not install agent software inside the VM guest OS to retrieve VM data. To back up VMs, it leverages VMware vSphere snapshot capabilities.
When you back up a VM, Veeam Backup & Replication requests VMware vSphere to create a VM snapshot. Veeam Backup & Replication uses this point-in-time copy as a source of data for backup.
Veeam Backup & Replication copies VM data from the source datastore at a block level. It retrieves VM data, compresses and deduplicates it, and stores in backup files in the backup repository in Veeam proprietary format.
Learn more here.
Use Hyper-V Virtualization Hosts as Source
Veeam Backup & Replication requests Microsoft Hyper-V VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to create a cohesive point-in-time copy of a VM. Microsoft Hyper-V VSS creates a volume snapshot or VM checkpoint, depending on the hypervisor version. Later Veeam move this to backup repository
Learn more here.
