Another post about the use of the new Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 in conjunction with vCloud Director. After the configuration of backup jobs with vCloud Director, you can also allow your users/customers to restore files or VMs by themselves, without any need for help from the Veeam Backup operators.
First, you need to publish Enterprise Manager to the internet, so it can be reached remotely from your users. Beeing it a pure web console, this operation is really easy.
Then, you need to creare the logins and assign them to your users, and configure the “scope” they will have. Enterprise Manager does not have internal users, but it relies on the local users of the windows server it is installed on, or the Active Directory users if the server is joined to a domain. So, before configuring Veeam, you need to create all the required users, and give them a strong password. They do not need to be special users, basic users are enough. In my lab, I created Customer1 and Customer2.
Once they are readty, go into Enterprise Manager with an administrative account, and open Configuration -> Roles -> Add:
To completely separate users, and let them see only their own backups, by using the button “Choose” you can set the scope for the user “Customer1”. First, select “vCloud object” to be added:
Then, browse the complete vCloud Director tree, and select the part you’d like your user to see, in my example is his own Organization, named “Customer1”:
Once you configured the new roles, in order to test the restores you simply need to logoff from Enterprise Manager and login again using for example the Customer1 login. You will instantly see the interface is different, and you only have the tabs for VMs or Files restore. In the VM list, you will only see those belonging to “vDC C1-A” tenant, that is the one owned by Customer1:
From here, Customer1 can initiate a self-service restore for example of the VM named “C1-vCloud-WebApp”:
In order to restore a complete vApp, you will still need to use the complete Veeam Backup & Replication console, but anyway this is a huge step forward in designing a self-service restore solution for vCloud Director.
[This post was originally written by Luca Dell’Oca, and published on the blog www.virtualtothecore.com ]