Veeam Cloud Edition

Veeam has recently (as of yesterday 11.02.2013) released a new product called Backup and replication Cloud Edition.
This product allows you to setup backup to a public cloud provider.

For instance, you can now setup a backup plan to store your backups on a blob in Windows Azure. Veeam will can also define how much backup it can done before it costs too much to store (I’ll show you in a bit how to set it up)
But this opens up a new world for it-departments that doesn’t have a secure (Veeam can encrypt file names and data with AES-128bits encryption) way to take data securely off-site to a remote destination for DR purposes.

Veeam Cloud Edition can be downloaded for testing purposes from here à
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup/download.html?ad=backup-cloud-edition

After you have installed it you can just start it from the start menu.

So we just start the backup wizard, then we are presented a lot of choices

Here we are going to choose what Cloud provider we use for our purpose. In my case I have a Azure account which I am going to setup for this purpose.
You can either setup an account here or you can go back to the main console and press the file button there.

And as you can see we have a lot of options here, so Veeam have done their homework regarding choices.
So when I choose Azure I choose add a new account, and from here I need to enter my information (Regarding endpoint in azure and my primary key)

And I choose a container (If you are unsure where to get this information you can logon the Azure portal and go into the storage pane and get the first url part of the Blob storage.
So you need this part of the blob url and down below you choose the “Manage Keys” and you get out the Primary key from there and enter it into the Veeam console.

Now we can also specify a cost of the backup, (In case the backup exceeds the cost, Veeam will not continue the backup

And we can also get Veeam to present the azure share as a local folder on the server (This requires installation of the virtual driver and also a restart)

So for instance you can get Veeam to present this share to your users as a network share and Veeam will handle the traffic from the endpoints to Azure.
After we have setup all the account information we can create a backup plan.

So choose the account you enter previously and click next à
As I mentioned before Veeam has the option to encrypt all of your data stored in the Cloud (This is not a default option)
v

We are going to choose Advanced mode which supports encryption and continue on from there à

Next we choose what folder to backup

Next we choose encryption algorithm and enter a password, and if we want it to encrypt the file names as well.
(ill show you later how they appear in Azure)

Then we create a purge option (how long and how many versions should we store in Azure)

And if we should run any commands and notifications after the job is complete

And after you are done with this you can run a backup.

After that Is done you can see in the Azure storage portal that the filename as encrypted

And that the data is compressed. Pretty neat ? 😉
If you go back to the server where you installed the Veeam console (And you have the virtual driver installed)
You can on the local folder there see that the data is not encrypted and that Veeam is decrypting the data in real-time.

This is the first release from Veeam which contains the functionality to store data in the cloud.
I am impressed with the amount of vendors that are supported in this release, and I am looking forward to what we can expect from them later.

Leave a Reply

Scroll to Top