Hello there,
I can now say openly that I have been working in VMC and good thing too. I quite like it. And I am happy to say - thanks to some hard work by Veeam developers, you can do backup and restore of virtual machines, and even replication too. So for any Veeam customers that will be moving into the VMC cloud, with the next patch release you will have the updated bits that work.
As I said I have liked working in VMC - once I got used to the differences - meaning no host root access, and no admin access in vCenter - and so how about a quick tour before I show the Veeam stuff?
When you log in you get this screen.
This initial screen is pretty clean. It has a good overview of your environment. But it also has an invite button in the top right which is handy, and in the bottom right is the Support Chat which has been very good. They have really helped me out.
If you select View Details, will see something like below.
You have a number of useful tabs here like Network and Connection info, but you still have the support chat icon in the bottom right.
I really like the Network tab. Lots of info on that one.
This is where you do the rules for your firewall and see about your VPN or AWS connection. So quite interesting and important too.
If you use any of the Open vCenter buttons you see the vC.
Notice the two resource pools - one starting with Compute, and one starting Mgmt? The Compute is the one for us, and the one called Mgmt is for management functions that we have no direct access to.
We see something similar in the datastore view.
The WorkloadDatastore is for us, and the other one is not for us.
But now, I would like to show you some Veeam stuff.
What we see above is a backup - successful too - of a VM that is in VMC.
What we see about is a successful replication of a VM in VMC. If you had a VPN connection with your on-prem environment you could in fact replicate from there to VMC.
Now, while backup and restore works, there are things that don’t work. SureBackup Jobs, non - windows file level restore and IVMR, for example, do not work at this time. This is something that Veeam alone will not be able to implement as we will need things in VMC to be improved.
BTW, my access to VMC is over very soon. So you won’t see much more from me. Which is too bad of course!
Updates
- 2/2/18 - Here is an article in the Veeam KB that will provide full info on our functionality in that environment as well as some help for firewalls. Here is the VMware KB article on it.
- 1/6/18 - so a little while ago Update 3 shipped and that means you can now do backup / restores / replication in your SDDC. Here is a link to our entry in the VCG.
- 9/2/17 - I saw this great technical article by Frank that I think is pretty interesting.
- Yes, 9/1/17 I did lose access. Too bad as I had started an interesting article a out using a local DC - in its own domain - as the auth source for the vCenter. I had a lot of trouble with that and while I think support can help you with it now it would have been cool for me to write about it.
Michael
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Hi Michael,
am I right that I can choose the AWS region where to store my backups? Like with all AWS solutions? Cloud backup is really cool but it all depends on your internet connection speed and that can be a real dealbreaker in many regions. Or the expenses are just too high for the needed speed and companies stay with on premise hardware.
Hi Patrick,
My test and play was all with a local repository (inside VMC). But, I am working on understanding what options are cost effective to have a repository outside VMC inside AWS. There are a number of options and varying costs too. My goal is to have a location inside my region and outside the region. But need to research what the best and cheapest options are. Hopefully next week.
Michael