Containers and Veeam
David Hill introduces us to the topic of containers, and how Veeam can handle that. Containers make it possible to use less different operating systems. Today you’ve got patches and updates to install on your operating system, no matter if it’s Linux or Windows. With containers, it becomes a lot simpler.
It’s all about buzzwords. Being or getting cloud-ready, being cloud-native, and being it now. A few years ago it was the same with the cloud. Cloud did help to solve some problems, but some problems are still the same, just on a bigger scale. The same for containers. They will help to solve some problems, but some problems will still be problems, just on a different scale.
David explained some things about the statefulness of a container. Containers are good when they are used for what they are thought. But having just any kind of application containerized doesn’t work. When an application fails, and the container management spins up a new instance of that application, the application itself doesn’t know what happened. If you click save in WordPress for example, WordPress doesn’t know what you did before when the application crashed in the backend.
Cloud Tier
Andrew Zhelezko and David Hill are talking about the Cloud Tier. In Veeam, you can set up and define multiple types of backup repositories. You can have local disk storage, NAS, deduplication appliances, etc. You can even combine them in a Scale-out Repository. Now with the latest VBR version you’re even able to scale-out to the cloud with the usage of object storage. You’ve got nearly unlimited storage available in the cloud to store your backups. And in Veeam, that’s all policy-driven. Depending on your policy, Veeam does the automatic cloud-tiering to the object storage of your choice. And you can put that object storage also into a Scale-out Repository as a capacity tier.
That means that you might have some backups local, maybe because of compliance reasons or to meet a certain RPO/RTO time. Everything which is older than a specified time will be tiered out to the object storage.
A new feature is the Immutability of your backup files in the object storage. That means that you can lock the backups which are moved out to the cloud. That gives you protection against rogue admins or to have a certain level of compliance. No one can delete your backup files on the cloud storage. You can set the lock for a specific time, and during this time the backup files can’t be deleted. These settings have to be set on a specific S3 bucket.
Top Secret Product Announcement
Veeam Availability Orchestrator 2.0 – Review
Alex King provides us a short review of the Veeam Availability Orchestrator. VAO is a Disaster Recovery tool for your virtual infrastructure where you can prepare for a disaster, ensure the readiness and execute the recovery when a disaster strikes. It also allows you to report all the things. The Orchestrator automates the recovery from backed-up VMs or replica VMs. With the Orchestrator, you can also automatically check your backed-up VMs. Like an Exchange or a SQL server, if the databases are coming up and are accessible, as well as against the Active Directory and DNS things.
And yes, that’s mean, but from here the segment is red, so under NDA. I’m allowed to share the bits by the end of October, so keep an eye on my blog.
NAS Backup
Michael Cade and Dima P. are on the stage now talking about NAS Backup.
Veeam will come with the support of NAS backup. That doesn’t mean that you can back up your VMs to a NAS, that’s already possible. But you can now take backups from your NAS file shares! No matter if it is SMB, NFS or another share. Just provide the path to Veeam and they will read it and store it in the backup repository.
Instead of comparing the files on the NAS share and the backup, to find out which files are new or changed and have to be backed up, Veeam creates CRC checks in the very first backup run and stores them in the cache. During the next backup, Veeam compares the CRC hashes and can then decide what’s changed or new. In the current release, only Windows proxy is supported for NAS backup, and the file share proxy is a new role which can be deployed on any existing Windows proxy.
Just from a backup perspective you only need read rights on the NAS file share. But surely, in case of a restore, you have to provide credentials with write permissions. Veeam is able to create a backup of a NAS file share from a storage snapshot, so it doesn’t have any performance impact or so to the production datastore. A proxy can handle one share per job, but can concurrently handle multiple folders per share during a backup job.
For a NAS file share backup, you can have a Scale-out Repository as the backup target. The placement policy of a SOBR repository will be ignored, the data will be stored evenly. The integrated metadata redundancy protects against two extents being completely lost. Metadata is protected, not data. When doing a restore, Veeam doesn’t mount just a restore point, but only the metadata. In the known Veeam Explorer you can browse through the various restore points, search for files, and you have various options to do the restore, instead of mounting one restore point after the other because you didn’t find the file you were searching for.