Storage Infrastructure and flex-v7000 clarification

[paccit]

Hi all,

I have inherited setting up Veeam and just want some confirmation on the Storage Infrastructure option.

We have an IBM x3650 with Server 2019. It has a fibre channel adapter which is connected to the convergence switches attached to a flex-v7000.

I have Veeam connected to vSphere fine.

I have been reading the documentation but just want to confirm, adding the flex-v7000 via Storage Infrastructure is for faster copying of the vm's to our backup medium (tape)? So it copies over the fibre directly from the v7000 rather than through the network?

Does anyone know what user group is needed for the Veeam credential that connects to the flex-v7000? I can see CopyOperator but would like to use the least privileged group possible.

These may be dumb questions but I also inherited managing the x3650 and the flex-v7000. Things I have no experience of! Fun...

thanks

p

[Andreas Neufert]

Hello paccit,

The IBM Storwize (now part of IBM FlashSystems) can be integrated into Backup & Replication for Storage Snapshot processing with vSphere as workload.
You can use it for Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot. It will reduce the overhead for VM snapshot processing and fast backups directly from the storage without load on the ESXi hosts. As well you can Orchestrate Snapshot for better RPO/RTO windows. Backups are usually done once a day while you can do snapshots way more frequently as they do not have to transport any data. As well you can restore from these Snapshots and use them for Labs or Restore verification (SureBackup). You need an Enterprise Plus license or Veeam Universal Licensing for most of the features here.

Regarding group: The integration need to create volumes (are used for Clones at restore), destroy them (after restore), create snapshots, delete snapshots, create Hosts and Host Groups (and remove them when you remove the plug-in). So a lot of rights needed anyway. Currently only the Admin Group is supported I think. I am not sure how flexible the rights management is, maybe you can create a user that can perfom these tasks but has no rights on changing the mdisk pools and mdisks?

You said you want to backup to tape. Veeam first backup target needs to be a disk system for fast backup and restore. Then you can use Backup to Tape Jobs to offload these data for longer retention. I suggest as well to place then the library at another site (with good LAN connection to the backup environment) and as well create offline tapes at least once a week. So that any hacker can not delete those. This is one of the most common attacks now. Ransomware sleeping getting admin access by keylogging and others. Hacker comes identifies backup hard and software. Destroys everything that he can see and encrypt the primary data and ask for a ransom.

[paccit]

Thank you very much for the response Andreas.

We have the Enterprise licence. I added a veeam account to the Administrator group on the V7000.

Sorry we do have disks for the backups before it goes to tape.

As for another site with good LAN connection... I wish. We have another site with tons of storage but it is via a 100Mb/s connection that is shared by other services.

I am getting an error when scanning the storage. I can definitely see that Veeam is successfully connecting to the V7000 system but get the following:

Failed to refresh IBM flex-v7000 configuration Error: Unable to get IBM storage 'blah.blah.blah.blah' volumes information
Failed to rescan IBM flex-v7000 Error: Unable to get IBM storage 'blah.blah.blah.blah' volumes information

Arrrrgh! Having a look in the x3650 IMM there is no activation key for the fibre, only IBM IMM Advanced Upgrade and ServerRAID. Guess this means the fibre cahnnel adapter is unusable?

[Andreas Neufert]

Never heard about that there needs to be an activation key for FibreChannel HBAs within standard servers.

Check Switch Zoning for the Veeam Proxy (potentially the B&R Server itself?).
As well you have to create a host entry manual for our Proxy Server and his WWNs.

[paccit]

Ha! I have everything working. Was just some config on the convergence switch.

Thanks for your help Andreas!