Agent Based Veeam Backup of Guest VMs on StorMagic SvHCI

With SvHCI 2.x the only way to achieve Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is to utilize a third-party product.

This being guest operating system backups of individual virtual machines via an in-guest agent.

Each backup vendor provides different methods for this, however SvHCI 2.x is not yet integrated with third party backup vendors.

Bearing this mind, the use of in-guest agents enables virtual machines to be backed up as normal, with varying features depending on the vendor.

Veeam is a very popular backup product that focuses on protecting virtual infrastructure.

It provides workflows and processes for managing those backups, as well as disaster recovery and full site replication. Veeam itself is a huge product with a lot of options, but we will focus here on the basic backup story, how that works with in-guest agents, and run through some examples setting this up with SvHCI as the underlying hypervisor.

We will cover the recovery process in a separate document, where these options and processes are explored in more detail.

Step 1: Install Veeam

Veeam is generally installed in Windows as a guest VM within the infrastructure. In this example, it is outside the SvHCI cluster, but on the same local network and able to communicate with the two hosts over fast networking.

In our example, Veeam has its own local storage, however it offers the ability to consume external storage as a backup repository. This document does not go into backup architecture in more depth than the example shown.

Typically Veeam will have more than one location for backups, with a local drive as the first destination and often an off-site second location for disaster recovery, an external backup repository or SAN, and in some cases dedicated hardware for long-term retention.

For this example however, we are just going to perform basic full backups of the guest virtual machines and demonstrate how the Veeam in-guest agents are deployed and used.

Once installed and licensed, log into the Veeam Backup & Replication console using the credentials supplied during installation.

Typically with a VMware vSphere environment you would connect Veeam directly to vCenter and perform all backup operations through the hypervisor.

Since StorMagic SvHCI is not listed under Virtual Infrastructure, guest virtual machines must instead be treated as individual computers and protected using Veeam Agents.

This means the Veeam server connects directly to each guest operating system rather than communicating with the hypervisor.

Managing each virtual machine individually can become difficult as environments grow, therefore Veeam Protection Groups are used to organize machines and simplify scheduling.

The protection group will be a collection of individual computers (in our case virtual machines within SvHCI) and allow jobs to be created that represent the site's overall backup and protection strategy.

In our case, select the Individual computers option.

Add the IP address of your virtual machines and use the Add button to configure login credentials. Be careful to select the correct credential type:

• SSH for Linux virtual machines.
• Standard account for Windows virtual machines.

Credentials may also be stored for future use.

If the guest operating system is Linux, the configured account must have root privileges.

In this example three credential sets are available:

• vCenter (not covered by this article)
• Windows guest virtual machine
• Ubuntu guest virtual machine

Select Test Now to verify that the credentials are valid before continuing.

On the next page, configure the desired schedule and agent deployment options. Assuming the credential validation has completed successfully, the Veeam Agent installation is performed remotely through this wizard.

For reference, the Distribution Server is the Veeam backup server. Larger environments may contain multiple backup servers, allowing a server closer to the protected workloads to be selected.

Additional options are available for installing application-aware plugins, such as Microsoft SQL Server and file server integrations. These advanced options are not configured in this example.

Under Advanced Options there are additional settings, including bandwidth throttling. Leave these at their default values for this walkthrough.

The following page summarizes any actions that must be completed before the protection group is created.

Click Apply to install the required agents and create the protection group.

Once complete, click Finish.

After the protection group has been created, the discovery job begins automatically to locate and prepare the protected virtual machines.

As shown below, one machine completed successfully while another encountered a problem during discovery.

Troubleshoot any connection or credential issues before continuing.

Once the protection group has been created successfully, select Create Job or Policy.

Select Managed by agent.

Provide a descriptive name for the backup job.

Select Add... to add protected systems to the job.

Select the previously created Protection Group.

Select Entire computer to create a complete restore image, or choose file-level backup for granular protection. This guide uses the Entire computer option so a complete virtual machine restore can be performed in a later article.

Select Veeam backup repository as the backup destination.

Select the local Veeam Backup Server.

Choose the desired backup repository.

Leave the Guest Processing options at their defaults for this example, or modify them as appropriate for your workloads.

Configure the desired schedule for ongoing backups.

Review the job summary before creating the backup job.

Once the configuration has been reviewed, right-click the backup job and select Start, or click Start from the ribbon.

The job can be monitored while it is running. Progress is displayed in the Veeam console alongside any other physical or virtual backup jobs.

Once the job completes successfully, completed backups are displayed within the backup history.

• StorMagic Product Documentation 
• Agent-Based Veeam Restore Process of Guest VMs on StorMagic SvHCI