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. We are interested in the Jobs page.

Click on Jobs -> Create

Within the Job settings, name your job, with a description that aligns with your own documentation. The retention period itself can be configured here, with the default being 7 days of retention.

This is controlled within Keep certain full backups longer for archival purposes, and by default is off. Clicking into Configure, you can customise this to your needs. Otherwise, click Next.

GFS (Grandfather, Father, Son) Retention

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.

Configuring GFS Retention:

In this example, the following is configured:

4 weekly backups, preferring the full backup from Sunday if multiple exist
12 monthly backups, to be kept from the first week of each month
1 yearly backup, using the monthly backup from January

Immutability

All our backup repositories are set to 7 days of immutability, for Ransomware protection. This means that a 7-day backup chain cannot be removed until another full 7-day backup chain is created.

Thus, you would have 14 daily backups before the original 7 can be removed. Please keep this in mind when trying to calculate how much backup space you may use.

Important: GFS Full backups are made immutable for the entire duration of their retention policy.

On the Virtual Machines tab, click Add.

Adding Objects to Backup

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.

Your VDC will be named similarly to the following, but with a different five letters combination in the middle. It will always have -VD at the end: SAU-FD694-VD

If your VDC is chosen, and you want to exclude a VM, this can be done by adding it within the Exclusions list instead.

In the below example we select the ‘cPanel 1’ vAPP. If you want to backup your entire VDC you could select the object above it in the hierarchy (denoted by -VD at the end of the order ID).

Once your backup source has been selected, click OK to add it.Once satisfied, click Next to continue to the Guest Processing page.

We recommend leaving the features within this page turned off, unless backing up an SQL database VM.

Guest Processing

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

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

If these features are unneeded for you, click Next.

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

Within the Job Schedule page, you can choose if the job should run automatically, what time it should run, the retry settings, and backup window it can complete within. We recommend leaving the Automatic Retry settings as their default.

Click Next to continue on to the Email Notifications page.

You can set up an email to receive backup notifications on the last page. We recommend keeping the default setting once this is enabled.

Once configured as desired, click Finish to finalise your first backup job. You can add vAPPs to this later on, either by editting the job directly, or within the VCD.

Add a vAPP to an existing backup job

Within Data Centers -> vApps -> Actions -> Data Protection with Veeam -> Add to Veeam backup job.

This will take you to a submenu with your current configured Veeam Backup Jobs.

Select the job that you desire to add it to. In our example, we're adding this vApp to the prior configured Daily Backups job.

Documentation Index

Backup your vAPPs with Veeam in VDC