With the recent unprecedented events, changes to workplace staff deployment to working remotely has forced many organisations to migrate their workloads to the public cloud, or at least provision their workloads from the public cloud.
When this crisis passes, the question will be “how easy is it to recover, or migrate, and keep protected, these public cloud workloads back on-premises afterwards?”
In recent months, many organizations were forced to provision their workloads from the public cloud, brought on by the need to have their personnel work from remote locations. Speed to market and remote working performance metrics were able to be met from the public cloud while the company was operating under trying circumstances. Moving to the public cloud made it easy to bypass internal application hardening processes and speed up application release cycles. However, for the advantage of maintaining speed, a price has to be paid in new challenges when having to protect the new public cloud workloads.
If your organisation is using Microsoft Azure to deliver its workload to remote workforces or customers, then you should be looking at Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure (VBA). To learn more about VBA, you can check out my previous blog post on this link.
In addition to the core functionality of backup and recovery, the VBA product also offers a quick, easy and cheap way to migrate workloads between sites. The following list is some examples:
- Public Cloud to on-Premises migration,
- Public Cloud to Public Cloud migration,
- Migration between accounts in the same Public Cloud Repository,
- On-Premises to Public Cloud, and
- Recover instantly from the Public Cloud to a local Datacenter.
These diverse workload mobility options help organisations to focus on delivering the most important services needed quickly by using the public cloud; but at the same time, provide the flexibility to migrate the workload from, and to, the public cloud using a two-click process. I will show you how on this blog post.
On-Premises Integration
First, establish a connection between Veeam Backup for MS Azure and Veeam on-premises by configuring an External Repository in the Veeam Backup and Replication server. See the screenshot below:
Next, choose the public cloud external repository option, as shown on the following screenshot. In this example, I will choose Azure (blue hexagon):
Next, provide the Azure blob storage account and container information to connect the external VBA Repository to the local VBA Repository:
After you have completed the “Add External Repository” process, you will have connected to the same Blob repository used by VBA on Azure. You can also see the backup point stored on the external repository by browsing to the External Repository menu item on the backup tab, illustrated in the figure below. Look closely at the figure below and you can see that I have three restore points set.
Workload Mobility
Let’s examine the recovery options available after we have made the connection. The recovery of the workload to on-premises is a straightforward process. It includes a right-click, then selecting the recovery option you want to use. See the figure below:
An interesting and unique option in this list illustrated in the figure above is the Instant VM recovery option. Selecting this option will mount the Azure VM backup point instantly to the local VMware environment and run the destination backup point as a local VM:
If you choose to Migrate your workload to a different public cloud, such as AWS, you can select the Restore to Amazon EC2 option to convert and Migrate the VM to AWS. Or, you can simply migrate to a different Azure account using Restore to Microsoft Azure:
Summary
Organisations are expecting more from their Backup and Recovery products. In the era of public clouds, simply backing up and restoring workloads no longer satisfies many organisation’s data protection strategies. These days, organisations want to have the flexibility to protect and recover their workloads from all their cloud implementations, whether they be private clouds, public clouds, or cross-public clouds. It’s important for the organisation that they partner with a vendor offering a diverse range backup and recovery products, and options within the products; but it is also important to choose a vendor who can offer flexible workload portability products too.
