Backup your vAPPs with Veeam in VDC

Backup your vAPPs with Veeam

You can easily backup your VMs using Veeam, directly from your vCloud Director tenant portal.

Create a new backup job.

On the top menu, click ‘More’ → ‘Data protection with Veeam’.

This will take you to your Veeam self-service dashboard.

Click on ‘Jobs’ → ‘Create’

Set the job name, description, retention policy, and archival restore point configuration. Please note that keeping archival backup points can consume significant amounts of backup storage depending on your vAPP size, and backup retention schedule.

Set GFS Retention Policy (Grandfather, Father, Son)

Important: GFS retention policy functions in combination with short-term retention policy. After you enable the GFS retention, the backup chain switches from the forever-forward incremental policy to forward incremental policy. Thus, the increments are no longer merged to the full backup file. If you enable only yearly full backups without monthly and weekly backups, this can result in a large number of increments in a backup chain. To avoid this, it is recommended to enable an additional weekly GFS cycle. The Weekly GFS cycle will update the backup chain every week which will allow you to remove excessive increment files.

Click Next

Add Objects To Backup

On the Virtual Machines tab, click ‘add’.

You can either select individual vAPPs to add, or you can choose your VDC to backup all vAPPS. If you choose your VDC, all new vAPPS that you create will automatically be backed up. Please be sure this is what you want before you select your VDC as the backup source.

In the below example we select the ‘AlmaTest’ vAPP. If you want to backup your entire VDC you could select the object above it.

Click OK once you have selected your backup source.

Click next.

Guest Processing

On the Guest Processing page, you can set up application-aware processing, and guest filesystem indexing.

These features require you to provide administrator logins to the vApps. 

We recommend leaving these features OFF unless you’re backing up an SQL database VM.

If you enable Application Aware Processing, make sure you use 'Standard Account' for Windows, or Linux Account for Linux VMs.

Click next.

Scheduling

On the ‘Job Schedule’ tab, you can choose if the job should run automatically, and what time. You can also set retry settings. We recommend leaving the automatic retry settings as default.

Click next.

Email Notifications

You can set up an email notification on the last page.

Click finish once complete.

Now that you’ve created your first backup job, you can add additional vAPPs to it later on.

Add a vAPP to an existing backup job

By using the vAPP ‘Actions’ menu.