Managed and Public Cloud Workloads Bare-Metal Recovery

Veeam Software introduced a Windows Agent product several months ago, and Veeam Marketing flooded us with messages about Cloud Backup and Cloud VM Protection. But reading and listening to the marketing messages, it appears that many Service Providers are sill lacking the full visibility

of the cloud Recoverability offered by Veeam Windows Agent.

In this week’s issue of our blog, we will discuss how you, as a Service Provider, or a customer using Public or Managed Cloud, can recover a partial, or full loss, of your Cloud workload.

As you are already aware, to perform a restore, you must start your restoration from a backup. The backup process using Veeam software is a very simple process, and with their recently released product “Agent for Windows”, this process is made simple for any type of workload, whether is running on Private, Public or Managed cloud.

The Veeam Agent for Windows product is made special by the diversity of options available to backup to a Target or Destination. You can target your backup to local storage, a shared folder, a Veeam backup repository, or a Veeam Cloud Connect repository. See the figure below.

On a Managed and Public Cloud, the Service Provider, or the customer, can target a Veeam Repository, or a Veeam Cloud Connect repository, which we will discuss below.

Veeam Agent Cloud Restore Process

So how can you restore your Virtual Machine after a data loss, or a complete disaster?

There are two options you can use to restore; File Restore, and Bare-Metal Restore (BMR).

File Level Restore

The File Restore option is the most simple, as your VM is still accessible, and up and running. All you need to recover a file(s) is to run the Veeam Agent GUI, and then select the recovery point you will recover to:

<Recovery Points>

Next, select the files to be Restored

<File Restore>

Bare-Metal Restore

This type of restore sounds more serious, and it is.  The reason it is more serious is that you have already been hit by the disaster and you now don’t have access to your workload.

However, all is not lost; Veeam Agent will help you to recover your VMs;  all you have to do is to follow these steps:

• Boot the VMs using the “Veeam Recovery Media”. This media will be created during the installation of the Veeam Agent; or, you can create one from any Veeam Agent by selecting “Create Recovery Media” from the Veeam application folder.

• Booting from the Media will present you with three options; Bare Metal Recovery, Windows Recovery Environment, and Tools.

• Select the first option to start the Bare Metal Recovery. As it is a network recovery, the Recovery OS must obtain an IP address to connect to, and communicate with, the Veeam Backup, or Cloud Connect server. If you do not have a DHCP server available, or for any other reason the Recovery OS has never obtained an IP address (it happened during our testing), you will be able to select Tools, and then run the following command to configure a fixed IP from the command line:

 <netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”Ethernet0″ static IPAddress NetMask>

• On selecting the Bare Metal Recovery option, you must select the Network storage option to start the cloud recovery:

• As we pointed out before, we will demonstrate the Cloud Recovery from the Veeam Backup Repository.

• Next, you provide the Veeam backup server IP address and its credentials:

• After authenticating and connecting to the Veeam backup server, you can now select the Windows Agent computer, or computers you want to recover; then press next. On the screenshot below, we have only one computer, AGENT01STN, and we will use three restore points.

• As mentioned above, we have three restore points. On the screen below, we can choose to which point we will restore our failed VM:

• After selecting the restore point, you must select the restore mode. You can start the restore by keeping the default “Entire Computer” option, or select Manual in the event that you wish to alter the disk mapping. You can select which volume you wish to restore, if your VM had several volumes; etc…

• Finally, press restore to start the recovery process.

Summary

Many Service Providers asked us about the process we just described. We hope this blog shows you how to start, and complete, the Veeam Agent Cloud Recovery process. Many products provide backup and recovery; but what keeps us excited about the Veeam products, is the simplicity and the diversity the products offer. On complex and restricted environments like Managed and Public clouds, Veeam never compromise on the quality and capability of their products when it comes to reliable recovery.