Veeam and Alibaba Cloud – OSS Integration

What options will Veeam offer to protect Alibaba Cloud workloads? How do you backup Alibaba ECS (Elastic Compute Service) instances? And is possible to use Alibaba OSS (Object Storage Services) to archive your Veeam backup?

Veeam Update 4, released on 22 January, not only introduced a new product feature; but also introduced a new Cloud Services integration. In this blog, I will discuss the integration of Veeam Update 4 with Alibaba Cloud.

There are several levels of integration that Veeam offers to protect or/and utilize the Alibaba Cloud resources. The following options are available to you when you use Veeam and Alibaba Cloud:

• Deploy Veeam as an Elastic Compute (ECS) instance from the Alibaba MarketPlace,
• Protect Alibaba ECS instances using a Veeam Agent,
• Integrate Veeam with Alibaba Object Storage Service (OSS),
• Integrate Veeam with Alibaba VTL.

In this blog post, I will focus on Veeam and Alibaba OSS integration to keep the blog short and focused. On future blog posts, I will discuss Veeam Agent protection and VTL.

Veeam and Alibaba Object Storage Service (OSS) Integration

Veeam Archive/Capacity Tier is a newcomer to the Veeam suite and is included in Update 4. The good news for those customers using Alibaba Cloud is that Alibaba OSS is supported out of the box. As an Alibaba customer, you can add your OSS bucket as part of the Veeam Scale-out-backup-repository to archive your aging backup to your OSS for longer retention.

To Add your Alibaba OSS to Veeam, you must first complete these tasks:

• Create the Alibaba OSS bucket,
• Acquire the Bucket URL and the Access key,
• Add Alibaba OSS as a repository.

Let’s demonstrate the process to add the OSS to the Veeam infrastructure:

The process to add Alibaba OSS to the Veeam infrastructure is very simple. The process starts by adding a new repository, as shown in the following screenshot.

After you choose the Object storage, you must select the S3 Compatible option:

Next, name the new OSS repository, then press Next to enter the Service Point URL (OSS URL) and the credentials on a form of Access Key and Secret key. See the screenshot below.

The final step in this process is to create a folder where you will save your Veeam backups. See the screenshot below.

Before you finalize the process, you take the opportunity to limit the OSS consumption. See the settings in the screenshot below.

Now press Finish to complete the process.

Summary

In this blog post, I discussed the integration of Veeam and Alibaba OSS, walking you through the steps to add Alibaba OSS to Veeam infrastructure as a repository. To use the OSS as an Archive/Capacity target, you must configure a Veeam Scale-out-Repository (SOBOR), then include the OSS part of the Capacity Tier configuration. See the screenshot below for the setup.

On a future blog post, I will keep the discussion around Veeam and Alibaba Cloud, and the topics I will discuss will be Veeam and Alibaba VTL and Alibaba ECS Agent protection. Until then, I hope this blog post helps you get started. Please don’t forget to share.