Veeam Cloud Backup Edition

I have had a little bit of free time the last couple of nights….. that I enjoyed every minute in the Lab looking at the new product release from Veeam. Veeam Cloud Backup Edition is a new product from Veeam that gives you the ability to move your Veeam Backup’s off to 15 Cloud Storage providers, any that support OpenStack, and even Local/Remote File Shares. What does this give us? An Affordable solution for off-site backup of our Virtual Environment with no re-design of our local backup processes. Make sure to head over to the Veeam website and get more great products to help manage and protect your Virtual Infrastructure.

Key Features

Cloud-Agnostic – Support for 15 different public storage clouds

Encryption – Up to AES-256-bit encryption this is done on the server before transmission.

Compression – Saves time and Money! Data is compressed before sending to the cloud.

Cost Estimation – You can set limit by GB or Dollar, Makes sure you don’t go over your Storage Budget.

Job Notifications –  email to keep you informed on your backups copied to the cloud

Bandwidth scheduling – Control bandwidth in real time, and based off of Local or WAN locations.

Licensing

All components of Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition use the same license file. The license file should contain a Cloud backup option. If you use a license without the Cloud backup option that you previously obtained for Veeam Backup & Replication, you will not be able to use Veeam Cloud Backup. When you go to launch the application you will get the following error.

System Requirements

Veeam Cloud Backup Console

Specification	Requirement
Hardware	CPU: any modern x86/x64 processor (minimum 2 cores recommended) RAM: 4 GB HDD: 25 MB Network: 1 Gbps
OS	Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the following operating systems are supported: · Microsoft Windows XP SP3 · Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 · Microsoft Windows Vista SP2 · Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 · Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 · Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 · Microsoft Windows 8 · Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Note that Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 are not supported for the file-level restore from the cloud scenario.
Software	.NET Framework 4.0 (included in the setup)
Cloud Storage	A registered cloud service account.

 

Installation

The installation of the this product is very fast, and painless. That is one of the reasons I enjoy working with Veeam products.  You need to keep in mind when installing Cloud Edition, it has to have all of its components installed on the same local machine as the Veeam B&R SQL Database. The reason is to get all the integration working correctly, with the integration you will see the History of the Cloud Jobs from within the Veeam B&R Console.

Prerequisites

– Of course make sure it meets the System Requirements

– Make sure you have the proper license file

– From above highly recommended to install Cloud edition on the same machine as the SQL Database.

Screenshot of Install

For this installation I already have a version of Veeam B&R already running, I am only showing the Veeam Cloud Backup Install.

You can now choose your User Mode. To sum it up all users can have the same settings and plans, or they can have different plans and settings for their own account. I am going with the Common Setup. But you could see the use case for this.

You can change your install location, I’m moving mine to my D Volume. I just find it easier to manage. You can go ahead with the defaults.

Time to watch the progress, but you won’t be waiting long.

Took all of 3 Minutes from the point I launched the installer.

First Launch

The Welcome Tab is your first landing spot where you can go ahead and setup your backup plan. All the other tabs are practically empty right now until you create a Backup Plan and start running them.

Under the File Menu you will get to see all your Cloud Storage Vendors. I don’t think anyone will be displeased with the choices. If you do not have a Cloud Storage Vendor at the moment you can start your shopping now. You can even select Amazon Glacier, and start to use that for very low cost storage for archive data.

From the Screen Shot above you will also see Export configuration and Import Configuration. This gives you the ability to export your Backup Plans and restore them on another server.

From the tools menu you can select “Change Service Account” this will allow you to run the Cloud Console under a different service account, if you need to change authentication for a Backup/Restore. Network Credentials gives you the ability to use different credentials for different network paths, very handy option.

Now we get into the options. You can set Application preferences, connection attempts, bandwidth schedule, Global Purging settings, proxy, logging and advanced settings.

Create a Backup Plan

I do not have a Cloud Storage Vendor Account. For my testing I am going to be using a Shared folder that is not part of my Lab Domain.

The first thing I am going to do is setup network credentials for that path.

Time to complete the Backup Plan Wizard.

Next setup is select your Cloud Storage “In my case I will select File System” and create a new account. From the Advanced link, you can choose a Backup Prefix that will allow you to have more than one Job go to the same bucket but be able to identify it easily.

With our Storage defined we now need to give the Plan a name, and decide if we want to store the plan configuration in the Storage. The default is yes. I agree that it is a good choice, this way if the server you are running the Cloud Backup’s from is no longer with you, you have the configuration for the job saved offsite.

Backup Mode

You have two main choices

Advanced Mode –  You can use Encryption and supports Versioning of Files. But you can only access your files with Veeam Cloud Edition manager.

Simple Mode – You can use any file manager to access your files, however encryption and versioning is not supported.

Really the choice is yours, but I like the Advanced mode where I can use Encryption to protect my data, and also the ability to keep versions of files. Custom Mode basically does a vanilla replication. You may be very interested in the last option to force using VSS, this will be quite useful if another process is accessing your files.

Now it is time to go ahead and select your Backup Source. I am going to select a Veeam Backup folder called Critical VM_s.

The Advanced Filter is just that, it lets you choose exactly what you want to replicate or what you don’t want to replicate. Along with the ability to skip folders, and choose files that were modified within a certain date/time.

Now we get into Compress and Encryption. I am going to select compress all files, and do AES 128 Bit Encryption *** Please do not forget your Encryption Key, that could turn into one bad day when you need it to restore *** You can also select to encrypt your file names.

Purge Options can be pulled from the Global settings in the options, or you can set different ones per Job.

Schedule gives you a few options. You can do it manually, specific date, recurring, or real-time. With real-time it will monitor the folder and check it every 60 Sec for any changes. It will store the Changes locally, and every 10 Minutes move it to your cloud storage.

Pre / Post Commands will allow you to execute a command before or after the Job. Depending on the result of the command the job will continue or fail.

Notifications can send off Email alerts, and can also generate a Windows Event log entry.

look over your summary and make sure all looks as you had planned.

Now with a Backup Plan in place the Welcome Screen has changed. It now shows our new Storage, and Backup plan. The Backup Plan tab is the place to go if you want to run a Job, view it’s progress, or make changes.

The Backup Storage Tab gives us a view into our Storage, and gives us the ability to restore files from the location, or delete them.

Backup Plan Execute

Now that I have my plan configure, and just finished doing a full backup of two VM’s. I am going to move that to my backup storage.

This is going to be a fairly small transfer of about 14.3 GB’s. To start the Backup Plan launch the Cloud console and go to the Backup Plans Tab, and click the link “Run”

click the down arrow on the right to get more details

The Backup has completed

The Email Notification

From the Backup Storage Tab you can view your files

From within the File Share this is what you will see. D$ are where the files reside in an encrypted format, meaning from this location I can look at the files, but can’t do anything with them. CBB_Configuration is where the configuration for the Backup Plan is stored.

 

Command Line Trigger Backup Plan

You may be asking yourself, well….. I want to run a backup job from Veeam B&R, then have it automatically run a Cloud Backup to my Off-Site Storage? That you can! Veeam Cloud Backup has a little tool called cbb.exe it is located at the install location for Veeam Cloud (C:\program files\Veeam\Cloud Backup\cbb.exe) To learn more about it just go ahead and run the command with no arguments or the ?. Also Veeam Cloud Backup Help from within the console has a full section related to the CLI.

But all we want to do is trigger a Cloud Backup after the Veeam Backup is complete. To get a list of Backup plans run cbb.exe plan –l the plan I want to trigger is VM Different-Storage.

The command that trigger this pan would be as follows

We now know the command we will need. Go ahead and open up notepad, paste the command, and save it as a bat file. Lets go edit our Veeam Backup Job. As you can see we can enter in a post command from the Advanced options from the Storage settings. I’m going to go ahead and save the changes.

Going to start the Job again with the new post command.

Once the Job is completed the post command runs and then we run the cloud backup.

Restore Time

Time to test the restore, no point replicating this data if we can’t restore it.

First thing I am going to do is delete two files.

Let’s restore them. Go to the Cloud Backup Console and go to the Backup Storage Tab. Expand your location where the files should exist.

You will see the two files I deleted from my Backup Folder. I have selected them, right clicked and now going to restore them to their original location.

Just going to do this once, no need to save

I’m going to restore the latest version. This is where Versioning comes into play if you did the advance mode.

In this case I want to restore to the original location.

These files were encrypted and still are, we need to have the password to complete the restore.

Make sure all is as it should be.

The progress of the Job

It took all of 30 secs, but again this is local storage and no compression needs to take place.

You can check now under the History Tab to see the two files that were restored.

My files are back where they should belong.

Take Away

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed something amazing about the new Cloud Backup……. It can replicate any file, I didn’t go into detail on it, but I have done other Job’s of just random files, without an issue. Veeam could have built this product to block any other type of replication that wasn’t a Veeam Backup, but they didn’t. Which I thank them for that, it makes my business case that much easier. I think when I put this in my environment I am going to find many more uses for it. For what this product is going to cost in the overall picture of data protection and security, I am getting… What about you?

To find out all the details, have a look here