VEEAM BACKUP DATA SOLUTION FOR CLOUD SERVER

Digital transformation in the 4.0 industrial revolution – data is the most important factor. And for businesses, data means money and survival in maintaining production and business activities. And for computer users, data is also an extremely valuable asset. Therefore, the need to backup data is becoming increasingly important.

The importance of data backup solutions is demonstrated by the fact that many big names in the information technology industry participate in providing solutions such as: Veeam, IBM, Dell Technologies, Rubrik, Commvault… in which Veam is considered the leading provider of data backup solutions in the world, especially in backup and recovery of cloud data.

According to Gartner’s assessment in July 2020, Veam has been honored 4 times as the world’s best data backup and recovery solution for the ability to execute criterion.

Because of Veeam’s superior capabilities, Cloudbase has chosen this data backup and recovery solution for its Cloud Server and Cloud VPS systems with the desire to bring customers the highest level of security for their data when stored on Cloudbase.

Let’s find out in detail why Veeam Backup solution is so highly rated.

I.  SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE DATA AVAILABILITY, BACKUP AND RECOVERY

Veeam has two main products, of which Veeam Availability Suite is for backup, recovery, data synchronization and system monitoring, reporting. This product includes Veeam Backup and Replication and Veeam ONE which is built by Veeam for virtualization environments (VMware and Microsoft).

Veeam has strong support on the two most popular virtualization platforms (hypervisors) today, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V with Agent-less backup mechanism.

Agent-less:  is a backup mechanism that does not require installing software that affects the virtual machine to perform backup/restore (agent, endpoint). Veeam will automatically detect virtual machines on the host (virtualized server) that need to be backed up so we can choose when creating a backup. The biggest advantage of Agent-less is that regardless of the operating system or application running on that virtual machine, we can still backup all data and status of the virtual machine. In addition, Agent-less helps us save deployment time, agent costs and does not change the performance of the virtual machine when the backup process is performed.

In addition to strong support for the two virtualization platforms mentioned above, Veeam Agent is an effective product for backup requirements on physical server environments (or end-user workstations when needed) or cloud environments of external service providers. With two versions of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux, Veeam has completely protected data integrity for any system from user workstations, to physical servers, virtualized servers or clouds in a new generation Modern Data Center designed for current technology trends in the world.

Veeam product packages are currently distributed in 3 main versions: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

14 REASONS WHY CLOUDBASE  CHOOSE VEEAM’S SOLUTION:

1. A single software that supports both important features for data protection: backup and replication.

2. No additional license is required when using the replication feature to another data center.

3. Support encryption, compression and deduplication

4. Supports both VMware and Hyper-V with Agentless mechanism (no additional Agent installation required for virtual machines).

5. Support quick recovery of each email (letter) without having to restore the entire Exchange Server data.

6. Supports quick recovery of some objects on Microsoft SQL, Active Directory, Oracle and Sharepoint.

7. Support for testing backup and replication contents when restoring when necessary by using the Virtual Lab environment to activate virtual machines from backup images and test components such as operating systems and applications on them.

8. Support quick recovery of virtual machines by activating the backup file to start as a virtual machine in the enterprise working environment without immediate recovery to ensure the fastest time for the virtual machine to return to operation.

9. Supports Windows Server 2016, Exchange 2016 and integrates Changed Block Tracking.

10. Support WAN optimization feature when transferring backup data between two centers

11. Secure backup and transmission data in network environment with end-to-end AES 256 bit encryption standard.

12. Optimize backup to Tape for long-term data storage needs using GFS mechanism (with Grandfather-Father-Son)

13. Support SnapMirror or Snap Vault for secondary storage systems.

14. Ability to create new environments with Sandbox for testing, labs, training new employees or troubleshooting.

It can be said that Veeam fully meets the basic and advanced requirements that system administrators set out. From there, it also helps administrators easily complete the overall solution set to convince the Company’s Board of Directors. And this is confirmed by the number of companies using Veeam software increasing month by month.

II .  COMPONENTS OF THE SOLUTION:

Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 Standard Edition includes the following core components:

– Backup Server.

– Backup Proxy.

– Backup Repository.

Commonly recommended backup solutions include system-level backups such as:

– The virtualization system using VMware vSphere software includes 03 physical servers, each with 02 physical CPUs.

– Veeam Backup & Replication software will manage and operate the entire data backup process from the virtualized system.

III.  MAIN COMPONENTS OF VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION SOLUTION FOR VIRTUALIZATION ENVIRONMENTS

To be able to backup virtual machines on a virtualization platform using an agent-less mechanism (without installing an agent on each virtual machine), Veeam uses ESXi snapshots. When performing a backup, a snapshot will be taken to create a point-in-time copy of the VM including configuration, OS, application, data, status… Veeam will use this point-in-time copy to create a backup file and can restore it in many different ways such as full VM recovery, VM file recovery, Instant VM recovery, File-Level recovery…

1.  BACKUP

a. Backup Job:

With Veeam Backup and Replication, a backup job can backup one or more VMs at once. A backup job can be configured to backup to a repository, set a backup schedule (on a certain day, time, or after a certain period of time, etc.) or performed manually, backing up what (VMs, data files, etc.).

Backup files compress and deduplicate VM data. The backup files created will be placed in the repository installed in the backup job and saved in the following types:

– Full backup (.vbk) saves the entire VM.

– Incremental backup (.vib or .vbr) saves the changed data of the VM.

– Backup metadata (.vbm) provides information about the backup job, the VMs in the backup job, the number and types of backup files… Metadata files can be imported into backup jobs or mapped to existing backup jobs.

To backup VM, we have 3 main methods:

– Forever forward incremental backup.

– Forward incremental backup.

– Reverse incremental backup.

The specifics of the methods are as follows:

Forever Forward Incremental

Forever Forwad Incremental backup chain:

– The first time you run a backup job, Veeam creates a full backup (VBK) in the backup repository.

– For subsequent backup job runs, Veeam only takes the changed data blocks from the most recent backup (can be full or incremental) and saves them to the incremental backup file (VIB) in the chain.

After adding a restore point to the backup chain, Veeam checks the retention policy that was set for the previous job. If Veeam detects that the number of restore points exceeds the retention policy, Veeam transforms the backup chain to save space for subsequent restore points.

Forward Incremental Backup

Forward Incremental Backup performs a backup chain with the first copy of the chain being a full backup. Additionally, a backup chain can include a synthetic full or active full backup (or both) to divide the backup chain into smaller chains.

Veeam forward incremental backup chain:

– The first time a backup job is performed, Veeam creates a full backup (VBK).

– In subsequent backup job executions, Veeam only copies the changed data blocks from the most recent backup and saves the data to the incremental backup file (VIB) in the backup chain.

– On the day of the synthetic full or active full backup, Veeam creates a full backup and adds it to the chain. Subsequent incremental backups will treat this full backup as the start of a new chain.

After adding a restore point to the backup chain, Veeam checks the retention policy that was set for the previous job. If Veeam detects that the number of restore points exceeds the retention policy, Veeam transforms the backup chain to save space for subsequent restore points.

Reverse Incremental Backup

Reverse Incremental Backup performs a chain with previous incrementals and ends with a full copy:

– The first time a backup job is performed, Veeam will create a full backup (VBK) in the backup repository.

– In subsequent executions of the job, Veeam Backup & Replication only copies the data blocks that have changed since the previous backup. Veeam “injects” the copied data blocks into the full backup, to keep the full VM copy in the latest state. In addition, Veeam creates a reverse incremental backup (VRB) containing the data blocks that are replaced when refreshing the full backup and adds this reverse incremental backup before the full copy in the chain.

After adding a restore point to the backup chain, Veeam checks the retention policy that was set for the previous job. If Veeam detects that the number of restore points exceeds the retention policy, Veeam transforms the backup chain to save space for subsequent restore points.

b. Backup Copy

To ensure the safety of your system data, Veeam recommends the  3-2-1 rule :

–  3 : There must be at least 3 copies of the data: one copy of the business data and 2 backup copies.

–  2 : You must have at least 2 places to store copies of your data. For example, on your physical server hard drive and in the cloud.

–  1 : Must have at least 1 offsite backup. For example, backup on the cloud or in another secondary storage location.

Therefore, you must have at least 2 backups and they must be placed in 2 different places. If there is a problem in the main system, there is still a backup in the other secondary system to restore data.

To help you implement the 3-2-1 rule, Veeam offers backup copy. Backup copy allows you to create multiple copies of the same backup in different locations (onsite or offsite). The backup copies have the same format as the backup created by the backup job and can be restored when needed.

Veeam performs copy job backups fully automatically and lets you set how many restore points a copy can retain.

c. VM Copy

With Veeam Backup & Replication, you can execute a VM copy job to create a fully functional copy of a VM or VM container on a specified storage. VM copy is very useful when you want to move a datacenter, create a test lab, etc.

The copies of the VMs created are uncompressed and can be run immediately. Although VM copies are similar to replication in many ways, there are some differences:

– VM copy is a single-use process (that is, each time a VM copy job is run, it copies the latest state of the VM). Therefore, VM copy jobs do not support incremental running.

– Veeam does not create a restore for VM copies. If you set up to perform VM copy jobs periodically, each time the job runs, it will overwrite the previous copy.

– All VM copies have thick disks, while replication allows to retain the disk format or convert the disk format.

– No failover or failback capability for VM copy.

d. Backup Proxy

To reduce the workload on the backup server, Veeam uses Backup Proxy. Backup Proxy sits between the data source and the target and is used to process jobs and exchange backup traffic. The backup proxy’s job is to retrieve VM data from the storage device, compress it, and send it to the backup repository or to another backup proxy. The data processing is delegated to the backup proxy, so the backup server becomes the “point of control” for distributing jobs to the proxy server.

The backup proxy role can be assigned to a Windows Server (physical or virtual). You can deploy backup proxies on both the primary and remote sites. To maximize performance when performing multiple jobs at the same time, you can use multiple backup proxies, Veeam will divide the workload evenly between the proxies.

Using a backup proxy allows you to easily scale up or down as needed. As a lightweight service, it only takes a few seconds to deploy. Deployment is fully automated when adding a Windows server to Backup server, Veeam installs what is needed on that machine. Once designated as a backup proxy, Veeam starts the necessary services on the machine.

e. Backup Repository

A repository is a storage location that holds backup files, VM copies, and metadata for VM replicas. The repository types that can be configured are:

Simple backup repository:

Repositories are used by jobs to store backup files, VM copies, and metadata for replica VMs. Technically, a backup repository is a folder in backup storage. By assigning different repositories to jobs and limiting the number of concurrent jobs per repository, you can balance the load on the backup infrastructure.

Scale-out backup repository (not supported in Standard edition):

Scale-out repository is a logical entity. It groups multiple Simple backup repositories together. When setting up a Scale-out repository, we can create a pool for storage, devices, or systems, and centralize their capacity.

We can also expand the scale-out repository at any time. For example, if the backup data grows and reaches the limit, we can add a new storage system to expand the repository. The free space of the storage system will be added to the scale-out repository. So there is no need to move the backup files to a new, larger repository.

2 .  RECOVERY

a. Instant VM Recovery

With Instant VM recovery, you can restore a VM to your enterprise environment by running it directly from a backup file. Instant VM recovery improves your recovery time (RTO) and minimizes VM downtime. It’s like having a temporary copy of your VM: Users can continue to operate normally while repairing the failed VM.

When performing Instant VM recovery, Veeam uses vPower technology to mount the VM image directly onto the ESX(i) host from the backup file. Since there is no need to extract the VM from the backup file and copy it to primary storage, we can restart the VM from any restore point (incremental or full) in just a few minutes.

The VM is moved to read-only state to avoid unwanted changes, all changes are pushed back to the NFS server and will be deleted or merged with the original VM as soon as the VM is restored.

b. Veeam Explorer

Veeam Explorer is a tool that allows you to view and restore application components from within the VM backup or replica. Popular applications supported by Veeam Explorer include Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Oracle. Therefore, you do not need to restore the entire virtual machine and boot it up. Instead, Veeam will mount the file system of the backed-up application virtual machine to the corresponding server, creating a mount point on it. The application database will then be searched (automatically or manually) and the Veeam Explorer screen will display the corresponding contents in the directory tree.

Note that the Standard version has limited features of the Veeam Explorer tool compared to the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus versions. For example, it can only restore one entity at a time (for Active Directory services), and there is no feature to restore to the original mailbox (for Microsoft Exchange services).

This requires the administrator to make a decision on which version is correct for the system and the needs of his business.

c. Full VM Recovery

Unlike Instant VM recovery, full VM restore requires unpacking the entire VM to primary storage. Although full VM restore takes more resources and time, no additional steps are required to complete the recovery process. Veeam will move the VM data from the backup repository to the specified storage, register the VM with the selected ESX host, and if necessary, power up the VM. Full VM recovery allows for maximum utilization of the VM performance, while Instant VM recovery provides a backup of the VM and limited vPower NFS throughput.

A VM can be restored to its original location or moved to a new location. When restoring to its original location, the original VM is automatically shut down and deleted before restoring. This ensures the restore can be performed as quickly and with the least risk.

When restoring a VM to a new location, we need to configure some new properties for the VM such as the new name of the VM, the host and datastore the VM will be located on, the format of the disk (thin or thick) and the network. Veeam will change the configuration file and save the VM to the selected location.

d. Restore virtual disk

When a VM’s virtual disk fails for some reason, such as a virus, it can be restored from an image-based backup. The restored virtual disk can be placed in the original VM to replace the failed disk, or it can be connected to another VM. With virtual disk restore, the format of the disk can be preserved when restored or converted to thin or thick format.

Note: If the VM has multiple disks, Veeam Backup & Replication will perform restore of the disks concurrently.

e. Restore VM File

Veeam can restore individual VM files (.vmdk, .vmx …) when the files are deleted or damaged. This feature is a great alternative to full VM restore. If the VM configuration file is lost and needs to be restored, instead of restoring the whole VM, we just need to restore that configuration file.

f. Restore to Microsoft Azure

Veeam allows restoring VM from Veeam backup to Microsoft Azure:

– Restore VM from Veeam backup to Microsoft Azure

– Migrate VM from existing infrastructure to cloud

– Create a cloud environment to fix errors – troubleshoot, test patches or updates …

3.  REPLICATION

To ensure efficiency and reliability for data protection in virtualized environments, Veeam Backup & Replication adds image-based replication.

Replication is the process of copying a VM from one host to another. Veeam creates a complete copy of a VM (replica), registers it on a target host, and maintains synchronization with the original VM.

Replicaton provides the best RTO (Recovery Time Object) and RPO (Recovery Point Object) because we always have a copy of the VM available. That is why replication is recommended for high-critical VMs (VMs running tier 1 applications) that need minimum RTO. Veeam Backup & Replication can replicate both onsite for HA scenarios and offsite for DR scenarios.

In case of replication over WAN or slow connection, Veeam optimizes traffic by filtering unnecessary data blocks (such as duplicate data blocks, empty data blocks or swap file blocks) and compressing them. Veeam also allows bandwidth limitation to avoid replication jobs consuming all network bandwidth.

A replication job can handle one or more VMs. You can run the job manually whenever you need to copy a VM or schedule it to run automatically. Scheduling options are as simple as backup jobs.

4. Tape Infrastructure

Tape is one of the most widely used media for offsite backup. Using tape backup, we can implement the ‘3-2-1’ rule (3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite copy), which is considered the best method for data protection and disaster recovery. Veeam Backup & Replication supports tape devices, allowing data to be saved to tape and restored when needed.

Saving data on disk is managed the same as saving on disk. We can keep full and incremental backups, set retention policies, choose restore points, etc. Compared to disk storage, tape requires more time to write data if the tape is placed offsite.

In addition, with Tape, Veeam supports the advanced GFS (Grandfather – Father – Son) feature that helps us store important data for 5 years but only uses about 20 tapes.