This post is aimed at helping anyone looking at utilizing Veeam Cloud Connect from the Azure Market Place.
This service is more applicable if you are a Managed Service Provider (MSP) as it allows you to host your customers backups on a multi-tenanted platform, offsite into the public cloud. Most IT professionals will have heard of Veeam and its range of products as they are one of leading vendors when it comes to data backup and replication.
The above diagram shows an overview of how the Veeam Cloud Connect service looks. As you can see you have multiple customers backing data over an SSL connection to cloud repositories in Azure. To be in a position to use this service, the end user/customer needs to meet the following prerequisites:
- A Veeam Backup & Replication server is deployed and functioning in their on-premises infrastructure
- The infrastructure is running on Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware (Veeam Agent for Windows is also supported for physical Windows servers)
- The Veeam Backup & Replication Server has an Internet Connection
or a Managed Service Provider to be able to offer this service they must meet the following prerequisites:
- A current Azure tenant subscription
- Is a Veeam Cloud Service Provider and has signed a rental agreement
Before going into the steps required to configure this service lets go through some of the key roles and concepts:
Roles and Concepts: The communication in Azure is between two parties, the Service Provider and the tenant. The Service Provider is the organization that provides the cloud infrastructure (mainly the repository) to the tenants, and the tenant is the customers who send data off site and stores their backups in the cloud infrastructure.
In Azure, the Service Provider needs to perform the following tasks:
- Configure the Veeam Cloud Connect Infrastructure
- Create the relevant backup repositories
- Setup SSL certificates to allow for data encryption in transit
- Create Cloud Gateways
- Create and document the tenant user accounts
The customer (or in this case ‘tenants’) need to perform the following tasks:
- Connect to the Azure hosted Veeam Cloud Connect platform from their on-premises Infrastructure.
- Configure backup jobs targeted at the Veeam Cloud Connect repository
To get started with the Veeam Cloud Connect service in Azure you need to provision the virtual machine first via the ‘Azure Marketplace’. Now you have two options and it all depends on your requirement. If you are an Enterprise level company wanting to extend your backups offsite into Azure then ‘VCC for the Enterprise’ is the correct choice. For Managed Service Providers (MSP) who wish to run a multi tenanted solution in which they can send multiple customers backups into Azure then ‘VCC for Service Providers’ is what they require and that is what I went for.
One thing to note is the current version in the bottom left. As of the time of me writing this post. You will need to make sure you are good with your patching and your on premises Veeam services are at the latest version otherwise you will need to update the version in Azure once the virtual machine is provisioned.
When you click on ‘Create’ it then takes you to create a virtual machines where you can select the relevant configuration including:
- Virtual Machine name
- Azure Region
- Resource Group
- Size
- Administrator username and Password
Once this process is completed you need to ensure the version of Veeam Backup & Replication installed on premises matches the version installed in Azure, and as I mentioned the version currently available within Azure is 9.5 update 3 which is not the latest version. After upgrading Veeam, we are ready to start configuring the Veeam Cloud Connect Service Provider platform.
When you initially login to the Azure virtual instance the Veeam Cloud Connect Wizard will automatically start. To proceed any further you will need your Service Provider license which you should be sent once you have registered with Veeam for the Service Provider rental agreement. The rest of the wizard then takes you through the steps you need to follow in the Veeam Backup & Replication software both on-premises and Azure. The steps include the following:
- Configure Cloud Gateway in Azure: Customers, or ‘tenants’ do not communicate with the repositories in Azure like they do when dealing with an on premises Veeam server. Instead the Cloud Gateway is used to mask the repositories so they make a connection (by default over port 6180) to the service provider cloud gateway. You will need to ensure you configure a DNS name on the Azure virtual machine before you can do this.
- Configure Cloud Repository on the Azure Virtual Machine: This needs to be a location on an attached disk where you will store all your tenants backups. You may need to create some storage within the Azure platform and attach it to the virtual machine before you can do this.
- Configure Tenants in Azure: You will need to configure a tenant username, password and repository within your main backup location for each customer. Most important part of this is ensuring you document credentials for each tenant as these are needed when configuring the backup job on premises.
- Add the Service Provider on-premises: In Veeam Backup & Replication you need the customer to add you as a service provider. You will need to give them your Cloud Gateway FQDN and the port (6180) and they will need to ensure that this port is allowed outbound to ensure Veeam can communicate with Cloud Connect platform in Azure.
At this point the majority of the configuration is completed, however we are still not ready to send data into the Azure platform. Before we can do this we need to ensure the transfer of data is secure, which is done by installing and configuring an SSL certificate which will allow you to encrypt data in transit so customers data is secure whilst being backed up.
The final part is to setup the backup jobs so the customer can start backing up data to the Veeam Cloud Connect service hosted in Azure. With the backup configuration you have the exact same features you would with an on premises backup job, including the notification features as well as scheduling.
The main benefit of the Azure offering of the Veeam Cloud Connect service is that not all Managed Service Providers have the luxury of being able to host a private data center where they can house the amount of Infrastructure required for a good size Veeam Cloud Connect Service. The Azure offering takes care of that issue and more, as with most private cloud services you get the added redundancy, durability and availability of the Microsoft Azure Data Center. Also Azure have added disk sizes that makes it a much more scalable cloud provider offering.
Please feel to drop me a reply if you have any questions