vCloud director support

[ashleyw]

Hi,

What support exists in terms of vCloud Director support?
What we want to do is to restore specific objects in a multi-tenancy environment.
I see info on "Avamar vCloud Protector" and I'd like to if/when this sort of solution could be integrated into Veeam.

At the moment, I can only see that we could use things like continuous protection using CBT etc to back up the entire vcloud director architecture, but how would we restore individual vCloud objects?

cheers
Ashley

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Ashley, this is covered in our sticky FAQ topic, please have a look. Thanks.

[CvBarney]

I've a similar question. I've read the FAQ and the answer is only for a service provider. We want to provide self service integration for our customers so they can manage their own object backups in vCD (like the Avamar vCloud Protector solution), and it seems VEEAM doesn't cover this (yet?).
Can you say something about time lines or if it's already on the roadmap? Otherwise we have to look to another solution. vCD is about self service.

[Gostev]

Hi Christian, yes it's on the roadmap, however we cannot provide timelines for future releases. Thanks.

[vmbackupuser]

We too have encountered this topic in our vCD 1.5 implementation.

The following VMware document explains & gives recommendations for VM restores in vCloud Director 1.5. In particular the restores at the vSphere level (under the hood ) and the relationship with the vApps at the vCD layer.

Page 46 - Virtual Machine Backups - VMware vCloud® Architecture Toolkit - Private VMware vCloud Implementation Example
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcat/Pr ... xample.pdf

...most backup products that support VADP (VMware APIs for Data Protection) to backup vSphere can also be used to backup the virtual machines managed by vCloud Director. With these products you can backup all of the data representing the virtual machines, but cannot capture the metadata of the vApp, including the owner, network, and organization. Without this data a restore of the virtual machines within a vApp requires some manual reconfiguration. vCloud Director 1.5 introduced maintenance for vApps that prevents changes to the properties of virtual machines and vApp metadata for non-system administrator users, which is useful to preserve the state of the vApp during backup and recovery. The simplified steps to perform a virtual machine restore are to shut down the vApp, perform a recovery of only the VMDK files associated with the virtual machines in question, and then power on the vApp. Because none of the metadata associated with the vApp or virtual machine configuration (UUID, MAC address) was changed, recovery will have no impact on vCloud Director.

Backing up, and restoring, VMware vCloud Director provisioned virtual machines
http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2010/09/ ... hines.html

[tsightler]

The simplified steps to perform a virtual machine restore are to shut down the vApp, perform a recovery of only the VMDK files associated with the virtual machines in question, and then power on the vApp. Because none of the metadata associated with the vApp or virtual machine configuration (UUID, MAC address) was changed, recovery will have no impact on vCloud Director.

If the VM still exist in vCenter inventory, this is almost always the best way to perform a restore anyway, regardless of whether vCD is in use or not. Restoring the full VM creates an entirely new VM with new VM-id. This can impact many things, including the Veeam backup job itself, especially if you are selecting VM object individually. If the VM is still around in inventory, simply restore the VMDK files and nothing else about the VM will change.

[Gostev]

With Veeam B&R v6, performing regular full VM restore to the original location over the existing VM will preserve VM ID, and thus the recovery will have no impact on vCloud Director either.