One of the biggest news of Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 is for sure the support for VMware vCloud Director.
Before the 7.0 version, those using vCloud Director were forced to use a “trick” to backup it: since a single Customer vDC in vCloud was mapped as a Resource Pool in the underlying vCenter Server, the Resource Pools were used as starting objects for the different backup jobs. In this way it was possible to group the VMs per “tenant” (thus almost always per customer). This method was not completely accurate: for sure a Service Provider was able to restore files or entire VMs in the underlying vCenter, and then import the VM itself in vCloud.
But vCloud has its own specific objects, that cannot be seen in vCenter. Above all, vApp and Organiations. If for example we select a single vCloud user, running a VM in his own account, this is his view:
The user named “Customer 1” has a vApp named “C1-vApp” and inside it there is a VM named “C1-vCloud-WebApp”.
Cloud Provider instead, connecting to the underlying vCenter, has a different view:
vCenter does not know anything about the organization, the several Customer vDCs assigned to the same Organization (in my lab vDC-C2-B e vDC-C2-C are both owned by Customer2) and most of all there are no vApps in vCenter, but only the VMs beloging to those vApps. Since you can create objects like vApp Networks inside a vApp, the lack of knowledge about vCloud objects results in an incomplete backup if it is created from vCenter.
With Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 this limit has been removed, and now Veeam can read the informations directly from vCloud. To configure a new backup of a vCloud infrastructure, you only need to add a vCloud configuration to Veeam:
When you add objects to a backup job, ou can now choose to save the whole vCloud Director structure, ot the lower objects, like a complete Organization, or Organization vDC, vApps or simple VMs:
If for example you create a Job for each Organization, you can now have a perfect 1:1 mapping between a customer and his vCloud objects. Even if the customer has several Organizational vDCs, those can now be saved inside the same Job.
This configuration gives at the end two benefits: it can protect specific objects inside vCloud Director that are not visible in vCenter, and you can create dedicated “backup isles” for each customer. The latter is really useful to then use another feature of Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0: self-service restore. By showing to a customer all his owned objects, he will be able to do his own restores, without the need to request a restore to the Service Provider.
[This post was originally written by Luca Dell’Oca, and published on the blog www.virtualtothecore.com ]