Veeam on AWS vs Azure Backup

[Dave-Departed]

Hi All,

We're at the planning stage of a cloud migration strategy, and I'm drilling down into the technical depths of DR/BC on both AWS and Azure.

As far as I can tell, if we went down the Azure route (using Veeam to restore our on-prem instances to Azure instances), once our VMs were in Azure, we'd no longer need Veeam - We could use Azure Backup to do the same thing, including file level restores, natively in Azure.

Now, in most respects, I prefer AWS over Azure. However, the AWS take on backup/restore seems to be somewhat behind that of Microsoft, as far as I see... I know I can take snapshots of EBS volumes, and if I want to do a file level restore, I have to mount that snapshot to another EBS volume, then run commands to copy the files back over the originals, etc. Sounds... laborious.

I know that we could just create an EC2 instance and install VBR on it, attach a big EBS volume and use that as a repository (I've done that in a test environment, and it works fine), but my question is... Is there a better way? Because I'd likely be using AWS snapshots to backup the full VM to a point in time, and Veeam would only really be needed for file level recovery, which seems like a bit of a waste, not to mention a cost overhead.

I also know that there are other products out there that deal with AWS FLR, but as we've been a loyal Veeam customer for the last 5 years, we'd like to continue using the interface/technology we know and love, where possible.

Any info welcome!

Many thanks

Dave

[veremin]

So, you're looking at AWS not as DR target to which you can easily switch your production workloads in case of disaster, but as a production environment, right? And you need to find the best way to protect VMs running there and to guarantee seamless AWS VM and file restores? Thanks.

[Dave-Departed]

Hi Vladimir,

That's correct, yes. We are looking to migrate our entire production infrastructure to the cloud.

[Gostev]

As far as I can tell, if we went down the Azure route (using Veeam to restore our on-prem instances to Azure instances), once our VMs were in Azure, we'd no longer need Veeam - We could use Azure Backup to do the same thing, including file level restores, natively in Azure.

Only if you are ready to ignore the 3-2-1 rule of backups, and if your company is ready to risk keeping all the eggs in one huge basket some other people control.

Otherwise, of course you'd still need a way to have a copy of your backups on-prem so that you could restore your critical systems in case of many possible disaster scenarios. Which, by the way, is something Veeam can already provide with our agents today - and moreover, even with free products alone.

[Dave-Departed]

Thanks Gostev, a very important point! I'm sure the company would look to export backups out of Azure in some way or other, whether that be to AWS somehow, or back to on-prem with Veeam.

But do you have any input regarding my question around AWS and Veeam? Am I missing a trick somewhere, or is building an EC2 instance running VBR in an AWS VPC with a couple of large EBS volumes attached as repositories the only real way to use Veeam in AWS? If so, I think it'd be another great string to Veeam's bow if you could come up with a way of dealing with EC2/AMI image restores and/or FLR capability from EBS snapshots!

Many thanks

Dave

[jmmarton]

There are two ways of leveraging AWS. First, there's what you suggested of provisioning a Windows Server, attaching storage, and using it as a backup repository. Another option to specifically leverage S3 & Glacier storage is to use Amazon's VTL gateway. Within VBR it simply looks like a tape library, but on the backend the "tapes" actually leverage S3 & Glacier.

Joe

[Dave-Departed]

Hi Joe,

Many thanks for the response! Are you talking about deploying the VTL Gateway within AWS? So we have a VPC that contains our EC2 instances (including a Windows instance running VBR), and we deploy a VTL Gateway AMI within that VPC, then use it to send VBR backup files to S3/Glacier? If so, that makes sense, and I'll give that a technical trial!

[jmmarton]

No, you install the gateway on-premises.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegatew ... teway.html

Joe

[Dave-Departed]

Hi Joe,

Ahh, I knew about the on-prem VTL gateway. But if you see above, we want to move our entire infrastructure off-prem and into the cloud (whether that be AWS, Azure or VMware cloud, we don't know yet). What I'm asking is, does anyone know what the best way to perform full VM restores as well as FLR type stuff is in AWS? It's very easy within Azure, using Azure Backup/Storage Vault, etc. But AWS doesn't seem to have a proper equivalent, unless I'm missing something? I know I can pretty much replicate the VBR setup which we have on-prem, using the resources available in AWS (as in I've actually done it, so I know it works), but I'm wondering if there's a better way to use Veeam actually within AWS?

[jmmarton]

Ah, I missed that. Yeah that's going to be a problem because for the most part restores have to be to the same hypervisor with the exception of our Direct Restore to Azure which can restore anything into Azure. Now once you get your VMs into AWS, you could use the Veeam Agents to backup them up and you should be able to do file-level and even application restores. But otherwise all you can do for now with AWS is use it to get your backups off-site. With Azure you'll have additional options.

Joe

[Dave-Departed]

Just did a bit more reading on AWS Storage Gateway - It would appear you could potentially deploy a VTL gateway within AWS...

From Amazon's Storage Gateway documentation:

You can choose to run AWS Storage Gateway either on-premises as a virtual machine (VM) appliance, or in AWS as an EC2 instance. You deploy your gateway on an EC2 instance to provision iSCSI storage volumes in AWS. Gateways hosted on EC2 instances can be used for disaster recovery, data mirroring, and providing storage for applications hosted on Amazon EC2.

So you could very likely deploy a VTL gateway as an EC2 instance, then connect it to VBR running on a Windows EC2 instance, which would see it as a regular tape drive, if I'm right!

I'll throw a quick test up in our AWS portal and report back.

Many thanks

Dave