In addition to cost and complexity of managing the distributed IT infrastructure puts pressure on the IT departments of any organisations when come to manage and protect these distributed workloads. Is there a better way to reduce the complexity and cost of protecting these workloads?
To reduce complexity and costs, it is essential that an organization partners with a true cloud data management vendor who can help achieve these objectives.
The recent Veeam software update, version10a, introduced more than 1200 fixes and enhancements to ensure Veeam customers benefited from the improvements of a true data management platform.
On this blog post, I will discuss the new Integrated AWS-Native backup feature.
Before we get Started
It is important to mention that Veeam offers a Native workload backup for AWS workloads. To protect the AWS EC2 workloads, you must deploy the Veeam AWS backup solution from the AWS market place. When that is done, create and configure the backup policies necessary to protect the EC2 instances.
Veeam Software is fully aware that organizations IT departments are always under constant pressure to manage and protect the organizations distributed workloads; whether these workloads are running on-premises, or dispersed out to the cloud. To simplify the IT department’s work and protection process, Veeam introduces an integrated AWS Native backup. This new add-on feature will assist the organization with the following tasks:
- Provision the AWS-Native backup appliance from the on-premises Veeam backup and replication product
- Manage the already provisioned AWS-Native backup appliance from the on-premises Veeam backup and replication product
- Simplify the S3 backup bucket management; provision a new or use an existing backup bucket instance, remotely if required
- Allow a simple cloud workload mobility to assist the organization restore or migrate their workload to the on-premises environment, or to a different cloud, such as Azure Cloud.
Now, after we went through the introduction or the new add-on feature, let’s consider the following scenario to put a context around this great new feature.
Scenario
The ABC organization is running several EC2 workloads on AWS. They wish to protect these workloads natively and store the backup on S3. The IT department is also interested in achieving the following requirements, in addition to the AWS E2 workload backup:
- Centralizing management of all the organization backups
- Restore the backups to on-premises VMware infrastructure
- Migrate the EC2 workload to Azure cloud
The organization is already using the Veeam backup and replication product on-premises; therefore, to achieve these requirements, the organization must run through the following easy and straightforward steps after upgrading to the newly released update, v10a.
Provision the AWS-Native Backup Appliance
From Veeam Backup and Replication product, browse to the Backup Infrastructure -> Manage Servers. Right-click to chose Add Server…
At the pop-up window titled Add Server, select Veeam Backup for AWS to begin provisioning a new appliance, or to connect to an existing appliance.
For the demonstration on this blog post, at the New Veeam Backup for AWS Appliance screen, I will select the radio button marked Deploy a new appliance.
To get started with the deployment, at the Account popup, you must provide an AWS account ID, and a key. Select your AWS region and Data center.
At the EC2 Instance popup, you must provide the appliance Instance name and a Description. Continue down the popup to complete the requirements for Networking, IP Assignment and Guest OS.
At the Networking selection, you can use an existing Amazon VPC, or create a new one directly from the deployment interface:
At the IP Assignment selection, you require a public IP address to access the appliance externally. Use the radio buttons to assign a public Dynamic IP address, or set a Static IP address (elastic IP).
The last step, at Guest OS, is to assign credentials to for the appliance to be used for logging in.
When completed press Apply to start the deployment. The Summary selection will show the complete setup. Click Finish.
Optional
At the Summary step, you could check the “Open the S3 backup repository creation wizard when I click finish” check box to create an S3 bucket to store your backup. To set it up, run through very simple following steps. Begin at Veeam Backup for AWS:
At Account, Assign the AWS account:
Then create the bucket and select Apply:
At the end of the process, you will see that the deployment process created the S3 bucket. The bucket has also connected to the bucket to the on-premises Veeam Backup and Replication product as an external repository. You are able to leverage the AWS backup to restore locally to the VMware environment, or migrate to Azure as required in our scenario.
Managing your AWS Backups
You will notice a new option has appeared on your Veeam Backup and Replication interface at the completion of the deployment process. It is called Amazon EC2, located under Backup Infrastructure -> Managed Servers:
From the VBR console, you will be able to Manage Appliance by selecting Edit Appliance or Remove Appliance to Manage the AWS Native-Backup appliance:
Selecting the Open Console option under Tools will open your default web browser and connect directly to the AWS Native-Backup appliance. From there, you can log in using the credentials you entered during the deployment process. After logging in, you can start creating your AWS backup policies and protecting your EC2 workloads.
Workload Mobility
After running your EC2 backup, you can browse to the backup directly from the Veeam Backup and Replication console, under the External Repository option under Backups.
The tied integration between the two Veeam products allows you to perform the following recovery operations directly from the Veeam console:
- Instant Recover the EC2 backup to VMware
- Restore guest file form the EC2 backups
- Export Disk to VMDK or VHD(x) files
- Restore – Migrate the EC2 workload to Azure
- Restore back to EC2
Conclusion
By implementing Veeam Integrated AWS-Native backup, the ABC organization was able to achieve all the required objectives easily and flexibly. The integrated solution provides the cornerstone to solving the challenges of backing up distributed workload that faces organizations these days. Solving these distributed workload challenges with the centralized and integrated solution described on this blog will allow an organization to achieve easy workload protection and mobility.
