Touring Acropolis with Veeam Backup

Veeam Software announced Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Support on Friday, the 30th of June 2017. It’s a great and important announcement for both organizations. In this early blog announcement review, we put all the marketing info we have gathered and built a technical overview of how the integration might look.

As always with these early reviews, all the information we provide is not guaranteed to find its way into the final release; so, reader discretion advised. In saying that, let’s begin our review.

What is Nutanix Acropolis

Nutanix Acropolis is an open platform for virtualization and application mobility; or, in short, it’s the Nutanix Operating System, which also includes the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). What makes the AHV virtualization powerful and unique, is that this Hypervisor is an integral part of the Nutanix infrastructure stack, rather than a standalone product that needs to be purchased, deployed and managed separately.

Nutanix Acropolis offers advanced features for space efficiency, scalability, automated data tiering, and, of course, security.

Veeam Nutanix Integration

As you are already aware, Veeam software supports VMware Hypervisor, Microsoft HyperV, and later this year will also add another hypervisor support, Nutanix AHV. This integration will also come agentless, in the same manner as the support for VMware and HyperV.

This is what we know about the integration so far:

• Agentless support;
• Utilizing Nutanix Acropolis APIs; and
• AHV CBT (Change Block Tracking) and VM tools utilization and Support.

The figure below illustrates what we expect to see from the integration when it is released.

What you will get

Veeam R&D is working hard to deliver state of the art Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) integration, and no doubt the result will be a fantastic feature-rich integration.

The integration starts with backing up the AHV using one of the Veeam backup methods, such as an Incremental-Forever Backup applying Veeam inline deduplication, data compression, and data encryption (optional), before storing the backup in a Veeam Backup Repository.

The data from the AHV datastores will be read through a proxy appliance, which will be deployed automatically from the Veeam backup console when integrating with AHV.  The Veeam backup proxy for AHV will communicate with the AHV using APIs, and the data processing will use Network File System (NFS) and hotadd transfer methods.

The integration will provide the normal VM recovery options to recover the backup data; this will be in addition to the application explorer recovery.

We understand though, that Veeam VM Instant Recovery, Acropolis Object Storage Support, and Acropolis Container Service (ACS) support will not be available on the first version of the release, but we are sure that this feature will find its way into the General Availability (GA) release on one of the future versions.

Finally, Acropolis File Services (AFS) support will be released with the upcoming Veeam version 10.

Conclusion

It is too early to tell yet what shape the integration will take; but, we have tried to build for you a brief outline of the functionality we expect to see from the integration. We have based this on the recent announcement and the marketing presentations. Of course, we promise to re-visit this feature closer to the release date to provide more information, and hopefully, meet your expectations. Until then, keep reading our blog.