Adding Archive tier (Azure) to SOBR does not work

[kbr]

Hi we have an existing environment at a customer running Veeam B&R version 11. They do offload to Azure Blob capacity tier.

We added the archive tier to it yesterday. Unfortunately we keep getting errors that the proxy appliances can not be deployed. We do see multiple appliances being deployed but also getting deleted again. Now i see aan error 19-10-2021 14:26:02 :: Failed to provision a proxy appliance: Unable to connect by SSH to appliance.

I'm not the Azure guy, but what i understand customer does not currently have an expressroute or VPN to Azure. Not sure if this is the issue.

Have a call running with support but hasn't helped yet. Anyone have any input if this can even work with an expressroute or VPN or what else the issue can be?

[wishr]

Hi Karl,

Technical issues should be investigated directly with our tech support engineers. They will be happy to help. Any chance you could share your case ID, as requested when you click "New topic"?

Thanks

[kbr]

Not sure where to mention the Support ID, but it's : 05084582

[veremin]

Thanks for providing the support ticket number.

Out of curiosity - isn't there a security group that is associated with the selected subnet? If so, doesn't it have an SSH port blocked?

Thanks!

[kbr]

Hi,

Not sure, i'm the Veeam guy not the Azure guy . We also tried to let Veeam create the security groups and subnets but that didn't work. There isn't a lot of documentation we could find about how to setup the archive tier unfortunately.

[veremin]

Got it, then continue working with the support team, they should be able to figure out what is blocking SSH access. Thanks!

[kbr]

Hi,

Well things got interesting. We made the offload work now, so we have a capacity and an archive tier. But what we were hoping for isn't happening, we think.

We moved all FULL backups older then 66 days (that's keeping 2 FULL's on the capacity tier) to archive storage. Hoping to gain a lot on the capacity tier and using the cheaper archive tier for that. In practice we now have about 20TB on the archive tier already. But our capacity tier has not shrinked. That's partly to blame to adding new VM's to the backup but if we calculate that we see only a gain of 1 to 2 TB. So 1 to 2 TB have been deleted on capacity and we now have 20TB on archive. According to veeam support engineer this has to do with the way VEEAM writes to BLOB storage, only changes are wirtten. Which is of course superb but now we are in a sitauation we told the customer it would be cost effective to move older data to archive storage and in practice it might even be more expensive, because we gain almost nothing on capacity and have a lot on archive storage...

So maybe one of the product specialists on the forum can comment on that?

[Gostev]

Don't forget that Archive Tier is designed for long-term storage of GFS backups. You will gain cost benefits from using Archive Tier as you archive more and more GFS backups there which need to be stored for multiple years, as required by many regulations. In this scenario, after some years you'll have let's say 200TB worth of data sitting in a cheap Archive Tier, but still only 20TB in a much more expensive Capacity Tier. While without the Archive Tier, you would have all 200TB sitting in the very expensive Capacity Tier, which would result in a few times higher costs than without Archive Tier.

Example for Azure blob:
200 TB in CT costs $3600 per month
20 TB in CT + 200 TB in AT costs $560 total per month (with the AT part being just $200).
That's 6.4 times more cost effective, so you did not lie to your customer

By the way, keep in mind that deleting "only" 1-2 TB from CT releases enough storage costs to store 18-36 TB of data in AT instead.

[gaj71]

This might help someone else in the future. We were having the same issue with our offload to archive tier. The cause was an expired password for the account we were using to connect to Azure Archive Storage.