Veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication provides an award-winning platform for backup, recovery, and replication of virtualised applications and data. Servers Australia has chosen to use the #1 VM business continuity solution for VMware vSphere (ESXi) and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments. Veeam also supports the backing up of physical bare-metal machines running Windows & Linux. Veeam Backup & Replication uses backup agents installed on each computer. Veeam Backup & Replication operates as a centralised control centre for deploying and managing Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows & Veeam Agent for Linux

What is Veeam?

Veeam is an application that handles server backup and replication tasks. Veeam provides file-level backups (recovers a document if it gets deleted), or full image-level backups (copy of your entire PC, and if you get crypto locked you can restore) on your server to ensure business continuity. Veeam can replicate virtual machines (VMs) from one host to another (useful for when you two ESXi servers, and you want to copy on the second server or to another server to another host) to allow for redundancy. Veeam works with virtual and dedicated servers and supports Windows or Linux environments.

Primary Features of Veeam

Data Recovery

Veeam Backup & Replication offers the following types of recovery:

VM recovery — to restore entire VMs to different data protection environments: to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2 and so on.

Disk recovery — to recover and export disks.

Item recovery — to recover VM files, guest OS files and folders, and application items.

Secure restore — to scan data with antivirus software before restoring it to the production environment.

Application-aware backups (only for Windows environments)

Veeam can see that running and will ensure backups are done correctly, it is important because databases change so frequently.

Instant VM Recovery

Veeam allows you to immediately restore a VM into your production environment by running it directly from the backup file. When instant VM Recovery is performed, Veeam backup and replication uses the Veeam vPower technology to mount a VM image to an ESXi host directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file.

VM Failover

Veeam allows the VM to failover from one site to another disaster recovery (DR) site. When initiating a failover, Veeam will shut down the primary VM and instantly boot the replica, resulting in minimum downtime. This feature can also be used to migrate VMs from one host to another.

Replication

Replication is a technology that helps you protect mission-critical VMware virtual machines. When you replicate a VM, Veeam Backup & Replication creates an exact copy of the VM in the native VMware vSphere format on the target host. Veeam Backup & Replication maintains this copy in sync with the original VM. Replication provides a minimum recovery time objective (RTO) in case of a disaster strike because VM replicas are in a ready-to-start state.

We recommend you replicate VMs for which recovery point objective (RPO) of hours is required. If you need an RPO of seconds, consider continuous data protection (CDP).

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

Continuous data protection (CDP) is a technology that helps you protect mission-critical VMware virtual machines when data loss for seconds or minutes is unacceptable. CDP also provides a minimum recovery time objective (RTO) in case of disaster strikes because VM replicas are in a ready-to-start state.

Data Replication - First, CDP creates VM replicas and, then, keeps these replicas up to date.

CDP constantly replicates I/O operations performed on VMs. To read and process I/O operations in transit between the protected VMs and their underlining datastore, CDP uses vSphere APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO) that gives an option not to create snapshots. Because CDP is always on and does not create snapshots, it allows reaching a lower recovery point objective (RPO) compared to the snapshot-based replication — near-zero RPO which means almost no data loss.

Data of I/O operations are stored on the target datastore and relates to short-term restore points. The short-term restore points allow you to recover a VM to a state back to seconds or minutes ago (depending on the RPO that you specify) in case a disaster strikes. Information about short-term restore points is maintained in a special journal. This journal stores records about short-term restore points for a maximum of 24 hours. If you want to recover a VM to an older state, Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to create additional restore points that contain a VM state back to hours or days ago. Such restore points are called long-term restore points.

To facilitate replication over slow connections, Veeam Backup & Replication optimizes traffic transmission. It filters out unnecessary data blocks such as duplicate data blocks, zero data blocks and compresses replica traffic.

Compression

Data compression decreases the size of created backups but this can affect the duration of the backup procedure

De-duplication

With data deduplication enabled, Veeam backup & replication does not store to the resulting backup file. If a customer has Windows VMs assigned to the server, the Windows System Files only need to be backed up once.

Backup and Replica Verification (only offered to customers on their own dedicated Veeam backup server)

People want to know their backups & replicas are working, Veeam calls this feature “SureBackup” and “SureReplica”. With this option, you would back up a single VM, which then restores the backups of that VM to another and creates a private network between the two isolated environments. It tests that all VMs are backed up correctly and when the recovery process is over, the report is sent to the backup administrator by email.