Veeam Backup Cloud Edition - Long term storage ?

[collinp]

To put this another way. If I have 800 vm's and 50 of them are deemed "business critical" by the business. The 50 vm's get replicated to another site. All 800 vm's get backed onsite with Veeam and also to the Veeam Cloud Service. There is a disaster at your primary site and you lose all 800 vm's. Your 50 business critical machines are brought online at your DR site. But what about those other 750 vm's, some being very important. I could replicate all 800 of the vm's to another site as well as backup to the Veeam Cloud Service, but then I am storing 2 copies at another site - 1 for replication and 1 for backups in order to go tapeless. I would think that since these 750 vm's weren't deemed mission critical by the business that backups at another location along with the option for instant recovery would be sufficient. In the event of a disaster, I could bring these 750 vm's up through instant recoveries over a few weeks. I would think I would be in a better place from a DR perspective if those other 750 vm's Veeam backups were being replicated to a co-location site instead of the Veeam Cloud Service. That way I have access to Hypervisors where I can do instant vm recoveries over a few weeks. I understand the Veeam Cloud Service as an avenue to get rid of tapes and for archiving. But if I am going to copy my backups to another site, and if Veeam has this awesome feature of Instant Recovery, I think I would rather kill 2 birds with one stone and archive them to a place where I can do vm-level and file restores. BTW, I use instant recovery on a weekly basis for both Hyper-v and VMWare, and it has never failed. I think it can be considered a form of DR in some cases

[dellock6]

Why don't you use Veeam Cloud Edition to copy VBK files to the DR site, into a CIFS storage? Cloud edition can also map a cifs share. At the DR site you can use a Veeam Server to import the vbk, and start recovery from there, via Instant VM recovery or vmdk restore depending on your needs and possibilities.

I think Cloud Edition has many possible use cases, limited sometimes only by the fantasy of the designer

Luca.

[collinp]

Not sure that instant recovery would work from a cifs share in aws or azure. I think you would need access at the hyper visor level in the cloud.

[dellock6]

Wait, I'm not following you now. Long term (the topic of this thread) storage is a completely different stuff than Instant Recovery. Are you going to need to restore in minutes a VM that could be two years old?
IVR and Cloud backup are almost at the opposites in a backup strategy, both have their own role in it but are used for completely different purposes.

About my example, you can use Cloud Edition as a "mover" of vbk files from the primary repository to another one in a DR site, from here you can import the backups in another Veeam Server and start the VM even with IVR.

Luca.

[collinp]

That is good to know that the Cloud Edition would give you access to the .vbk's in the cloud. Through reading the documentation, I wasn't sure whether the Veeam Cloud copy was broken out into individual files for individual file restore only.

It sounds like your "mover" example would work in order to perform Instant Recoveries in the Cloud. You would have to find a cloud vendor that would let you host your own Hypervisor in their cloud. Not sure that the big guys like Amazon or Azure would let you have your own hypervisor server at their site. You obviously wouldn't be able to perform a IVR into Azure's/AWS's proprietary vm offerings.

Obviously, I wouldn't need to restore a 2 year old vm. The Cloud Edition will work great for long term storage and to move off of tape for long term. What I was looking to do is to only replicate those 50 mission critical vm's for DR. Those vm's that aren't mission critical, I was hoping to leverage IVR at another site. This way I don't have to go through all the complexity of replication 800 vm's every night. I can replicate 50, and have some assurance that the other 750 could be powered on via IVR, for the .00000099% chance that something happens to my primary site.

[tsightler]

The one problem with your theory is the idea that you could power on 750 VMs via IVR. That's simply not what it's designed to do and is far beyond it's design capabilities. IVR is a "spare tire" designed to quickly recover a VM or a small set of VMs. Certainly you can push the technology, I've worked with one customer to get to 17 VMs booting from instant restore, and I've heard stories of 20+ VMs, but that's still a long way from 750 VMs. Plus, Instant Recovery is not designed to keep VMs running for long periods of time, just long enough to move them to a "real" host.

In the case of having to restore 750 VMs over the course of weeks, you'd just run full restores back to whatever infrastructure you want, the instant restore step wouldn't really help very much anyway since your talking about weeks of time to restore, I mean, if I'm not going to restore a VM for a day, who cares if the actual restore takes 3 minutes or 30 minutes? As I described, in a pinch, you could probably do this today by installing CE inside an AWS instance (or a couple of instances), and using the AWS VM importer. It would be a multi-step process, but that would be true of IR as well will require migrations to "real" infrastructure all along the way.

[collinp]

So I could somehow crack open the .vbk file and gain access to the individual .vhd files (hyper-v) and import them with the AWS VM import tool?

[tsightler]

Sure, you can already "crack open the VBK" and get at the VHD files, that's what "Restore VM Files" is there for.

For AWS you'd have to have an AWS VM with a lot of local storage (they have some nice "big storage" options already), perform the "Restore VM FIles" to the local AWS instance you are running, and then use the tools to upload the VHD files into AWS as new VMs. This might be easier on Azure.

Theoretically, by using Azure and the "Virtual Drive" option you should be able to restore the VHD directly from the Veeam backups in the cloud right back into your Azure storage account, but I haven't been able to get that to work yet as I get some weird permissions error. For Hyper-V, that should make the process quite easy.

[LMG]

I am currently trialling the functionality of Veeam Cloud Edition to sync my Veeam Backup images to S3 storage and have discovered that Veeam Cloud edition is actually Cloudberry Backup Server under the hood - which is another product I have used in the past.

Is there anyone from Veeam who could let me know what the advantages of using Veeam Cloud Edition are over using Cloudberry native product? The reason being is that Cloudberry server Backup is significantly cheaper than Veeam Cloud Edition as it is a relatively low one off cost to purchase vs £400 per year for the Veeam product.

P.S I am not flaming the Veeam product or cost of it in anyway. It is a genuine question.

Thanks

[veremin]

You’ve been merged to the existing discussion, kindly see answers provided by Anton Gostev at a first page regarding CloudBerry/Cloud Edition relationships.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[rw_ga]

No, it is not the same. UI is almost the same, but upon a closer look, you will find slight differences in the available options, plus some internals have been modified to accommodate this particular use case. Original CloudBerry product was simply never designed for handling large backup files reliably. Basically, they considered 10GB file to be "large" when building the product, as they had a totally different use case in mind.

Gostev,

I've been looking into both products as well. I ran across the following thread on CloudBerry's site. There forum admin states they can handle 5TB files. http://www.cloudberrylab.com/forum/?g=posts&m=10390

CloudBerry Explorer freeware can move the files up to 5GB, CloudBerry Explorer PRO can move the files up to 5 TB. CloudBerry S3 Backup Server Edition can move the files up to 5TB too. In addition you can take benefits of Block Level Backup for the files larger than 5GB and your exchange database fall under this realm.

Do you know of something that has changed in their product since 2011 that no longer allows them to handle the 5TB files? Is there unmodified product not reliable at transferring the large Veeam B&R files?

Thanks,
RW

[foggy]

Ryan, I think you'd better ask this question at the CloudBerry forum as we cannot comment on their own products. If you are concerned about Veeam B&R Cloud Edition, than it handles files of this size just fine.

[Gostev]

Do you know of something that has changed in their product since 2011 that no longer allows them to handle the 5TB files?

Yes, I know. What happened is our fantastic QC team has actually tested their product with very large files closely

I cannot comment on what fixes from Veeam branch are making it into CloudBerry branch, because that branch is managed solely by CloudBerry staff and our QC does not test the other branch. I do know for sure that there are two separate code branches and there are differences between them.

And, obviously, from support perspective we only support Veeam branch, and will not be able to assist you with any backup or restore issues involving any other version.

[dellock6]

Anton, I'm also interested in the "block level" file move. At the moment, I never tested Cloud Edition carefully, but I remember you guys saying several times Cloud Edition is "file level", so for example reverse incremental will create a new complete upload everyday. Any change this will change in the future? It would be a killer feature for sure! (also because, by the way reverse incremental works, you already know which blocks have changed )

Luca.

[Gostev]

I am pushing for it.

[rw_ga]

Yes, I know. What happened is our fantastic QC team has actually tested their product with very large files closely

I cannot comment on what fixes from Veeam branch are making it into CloudBerry branch, because that branch is managed solely by CloudBerry staff and our QC does not test the other branch. I do know for sure that there are two separate code branches and there are differences between them.

And, obviously, from support perspective we only support Veeam branch, and will not be able to assist you with any backup or restore issues involving any other version.

Gostev,

OK, I talked with my inside sales rep and I THINK I have a better understanding of the cost difference. 24/7 support comes with the Cloud add-on. CloudBerry only provides email support with their product. So, I've subscribed to the Veeam version!

As far as the block level backup, the CloudBerry product says it has this capability if using Amazon S3.

http://blog.cloudberrylab.com/2011/10/c ... ucing.html

Has that been removed out of the Veeam version?

Thanks,
RW

[Gostev]

Yes, this capability was not architected to support large files at all (with the use case CloudBerry was originally built for, "large" files were considered to be 10GB files). While Veeam backup start at a few hundred GB, and go up to a few TB. So, this functionality removed from Cloud Edition for now for reliability reasons. It should come back once they redesign the engine to accomodate our file sizes though... I keep pushing for this, as in my mind, this is the top pending feature for the Cloud Edition. Thanks!