Veeam Enterprise Manager can be used by your VMware vCloud Director tenants to perform their own workload backup and restore. They can do this using the Veeam Self-Service Portal, and in this blog, I will show you how to give your tenants access to the Self-Service Portal without leaving the vCD portal?
Many Service Providers are impressed with the services offered by the Veeam Enterprise Manager Self-Service Portal; but also, many of them ask if there is a way to easily give the tenant access to the Enterprise Manager Self-Service Backup Portal without leaving the vCD.
Out of the box, Veeam doesn’t provide such a capability; but with several hours of coding, you can make this option possible. Don’t worry, I am not going to ask you to do any coding here, as I have already done that for you.
So let’s have a look at what was done to get this solution to work.
A month or so ago, I received a call from one of our Australian Vanguard members, (http://stevenonofaro.com/) wanting to discuss this requirement. He wanted to collaborate to build such a vCD plug-in. Working with his local development team, he was able to demonstrate a workable solution based on the code at this link: GitHub sample code.
The workable solution developed demonstrated was limited to one Web application portal. We agreed to release a version of the code that can be used by any Service Provider, and that can point to any Web Application. I will share here what I came out with after three weeks of research, coding, errors, and more.
Solution
To provide a community release version, it was necessary to rebuild the code from scratch. This was done in two stages; the first stage runs a simple application where the Service Provider needs to provide the Web Application URL; i.e., Veeam Enterprise Manager in this case. Then the plugin is generated as a .zip file, which the Service Provider uploads to the vCD Provider portal.
Let’s take a look at the steps:
- Download the Plugin Generator tool:
To get started, you must download this file. The next step is to extract the .zip, and then change the extension to .exe to run it.
- After renaming the file to .exe file and running it, you are greeted with the tool shown below, where you must provide the Web Application URL
- After entering the URL and pressing the Generate vCD Plugin Package button, a Zip file is generated. You upload this file to the vCD provider portal.
vCD Provider Portal
To upload the vCD plugin, you browse your vCD admin portal using as the following: https://vCDURL.domain/provider and then:
- Browse to the customize portal:
- Chose to upload, then select the .zip file. By default, the zip file is generated with Cloudoasis.zip as a file name.
Tenant Side
The tenant will access the link by selecting Backup Portal from the tenant menu:
When selecting Backup Portal, the tenant is directed to the Web Application URL specified by the vCD plugin generator. In this example, the portal points to the Veeam Enterprise Manager Self-Service Backup Portal:
Veeam Enterprise Manager Preparation
You must complete the following steps to allow the Veeam Enterprise Manager Self-Service Portal to integrate into the vCD:
On the Enterprise Manager Server, open IIS. Then select the VeeamBackup site. The last step, click on the HTTP Response Headers icon.
At this point, you must update the X-Frame-Options and enter your Enterprise Manager URL. It will look like this:
“allow-from https://<Enterprisemanagerurl>:9443/”
Finally, restart IIS.
Summary
With this small community tool, I hope to help the Service Provider community make it easy for their tenants to open the Veeam Enterprise Manager Self-Service Portal into the vCD portal without the requirement to open another browser, or browser tab, just to conduct backup and restore operations. Also, as you may have noticed, the plugin generator allows you to point to any Web application, not just the Veeam Enterprise Manager, so long as you provide the correct URL and port.
What do you think?
It’s an iframe
Whoah, nice!, this should have been part of the VCD release from the start!
One comment, although it works great for Veeam using this for multiple solutions (for ex zerto) doesn’t seem to work ootb. I’ve tried adjusting the 3 generated files (manifest, etc) but somehow the after uploading it replaces the naming of both the veeam and 2nd plugin too.
It would be nice to be able to enter the manifest details through the exe tool
Thanks!
Hi Peter, thanks for your feedback, add to the list for v2.
Is there a way to pass credentials so the customer doesn’t have to manually log in to the Veeam portal? Since the portal uses vCD for authentication anyway, it’s literally the same credentials.
Hi David, agree , but this code not include this feature as yet. Will try to release a new code with SSO when the time allows.
Have you had the opportunity to update the code for SSO?
Hi David, no not yet as I dont want to double up with the office plug-in of Veeam Software – check the github to download the new official plug-in
You said that this can be used to reference any Web Application, but they all show up as “Backup Portal” and only the most recent one uploaded seems to work.
One more thing (I’m sorry!): While this works fine in Firefox/Chrome, trying to access it from IE gives a frame error: “This content cannot be displayed in a frame. To help protect the security of information you enter into this website, the publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame.”. Other than that, though, it works great!
Hi Team,
I asked this question with Veeam & VMware support Engineer but no answer yet.
Let me explain my environment:
Our ESXi/VM management subnet is 10.128.1.0.
All the VMs(vcenter server.NSX,vCloud director,vCloud director database,Veeam backup VM etc..) are in the same subnet “10.128.1.0”.
vSphere version is 6.7 U1
Veeam version is v10
We have configured the self service portal plugin in vCloud director provider portal as well as configured this self service portal to my vCloud director tenants.No issue at all while access the Veeam self service from vCloud director tenant URL via private VPN.
NAT comes in to picture here:-
When we try to access the “Veeam self service portal” from vCloud director tenant portal from public internet,its not loading(self service portal).I dont know why? When we inspect the page from chrome browser,its coming,
a39ad7f4-fd8b-4163-961f-c9e5dbcfb302 (Veeam Self-Service Portal)] Registering route: plugins/VmVlYW0=/veeam
register-external-extension-routes.step.ts:28 [a39ad7f4-fd8b-4163-961f-c9e5dbcfb302 (Veeam Self-Service Portal)] Registerd route
bootstrap-extension-points.step.ts:27 [a39ad7f4-fd8b-4163-961f-c9e5dbcfb302 (Veeam Self-Service Portal)] Bootstrapping 0 extension point(s)
external-extension.loader.ts:68 [a39ad7f4-fd8b-4163-961f-c9e5dbcfb302] Successfully activated
bundle.js:1 Tenant: routing to Veeam Portal
bundle.js:1 Organization Administrator: true
bundle.js:1 Logged in to VSSP: false
After configuring the NAT( Pointed to Veeam VM) with port 9443 from Network end,It started working from public internet(self service portal from vCloud director tenant) and able to see the backup jobs from “Veeam self service portal”
Im not sure,Why NAT is required for Veeam server with port 9443 when we access from public internet ?It should work without NAT because the VCD,VCD DB VM & Veeam backup VM are in the same subnet.
Note:- If we access the Veeam self service portal from vCloud director tenant either from public internet or private intranet,it should talk locally(without NAT) because all the VMs are in the same subnet.
Any one has any ideas?
Thanks,
Manivel RR
Hi Manivel, Does Veeam EM installed on your VBR server? Also is this plugin you are using, downloaded from my Blog or Veeam one?
[…] post vCD Tenant Backup Portal appeared first […]