Backing up VMs in hosted environment (VCloud Director)

[andybh]

Hi,

Over the past year or two we have slowly been moving away from the traditional world of buying and replacing hardware on premise and towards using a hosted service to run our VMs.

This works well generally and avoids the boom and bust nature of capex spend on hardware.

What I miss though is the ability to run Veeam to backup these hosted machines.

My only interaction is through VCloud Director as the VMs will be in a shared environment I don't get full access to the host machines. The recent release of 8.2 made reference to VCloud Director support so I was hoping that this would mean I could point my on premise (physical) Veeam server at the remotely hosted VMs in "the cloud" (still hate that term) and pull backups down the pipe to my backup stores. From the twitter replies I'm assuming that this is still not possible ? Will it ever be ?

I don't have anywhere near the level of confidence I'd need in the providers own backup solution to treat the hosted VMs as my "primary" location but if I could backup/replicate all the hosted stuff to my local stores it would be a great solution.....


Thanks,

Andy

[dellock6]

Hi Andy,
as we started to discuss over twitter (and thanks for coming here and giving us a way to better explain...), vCloud Director support is meant for infrastructure owners of vCloud itself. As a Veeam user yourself, you know we interact with the hypervisor, so even in the case of vCloud Director, we need access also to the underlying vcenter. This is by the way how VADP libraries are designed, there are no backup libraries at vCloud level, only at vSphere. What we do is we identify a VM, we map it both at vCloud and vSphere levels, and we retrieve all the meta information from vCloud (vApp, networks...) and all its VMDKs from vCenter.
This means Veeam needs to be deployed with access to the hosted environment, and so in this scenario the deployment is in charge of the Service Provider running vCloud Director. We have many many providers using Veeam to protect their customer VMs, and many are very clear with their customers: all the backup reports are sent directly to customers so you can really trust that a backup has been made every single day, or at the frequency you agreed. Some also allow you to download your own backup sets.
Maybe your provider is already using Veeam, you simply don't know...

Luca

[andybh]

I do already know they do not alreasy use Veeam as I'm been nagging them since I first started using remotely hosted VMs. Apparently they have already investigated supporting Veeam and ruled it out as not being suitable as a hosted offering in a multi-tenant scenario. For replication they offer Zerto and for backup they support only Attix5. Very disappointing for me but as they are also our ISP using their hosting was the natural choice.


Cheers,

Andy

[Gostev]

ruled it out as not being suitable as a hosted offering in a multi-tenant scenario

That is simply not a true statement - otherwise, how hundreds of other service providers are using Veeam in the very same multi-tenant vCloud Director based environments? Also, I Googled "Attix5 vCloud Director" and there is zero mentions, so Attix5 does not even integrate with one!

[dellock6]

Indeed. I guess if they did a POC by themselves and maybe missed some feature, or they were tutored by a partner/Veeam SE. Because we can surely offer multi-tenancy support for vCloud Director, and customers can do complete self-service restores via Enterprise Manager.
Not sure Andy how much you can push them further info, but I wrote a whitepaper some months ago on this same exact scenario:
https://www.veeam.com/wp-achieving-best ... ation.html
And at last VeeamON I presented on multi-tenancy in Veeam:
http://go.veeam.com/veeamon-free-sessions (look for video "Multi-tenancy: Roles, scopes and encryption in Veeam Enterprise Manager")

Luca