Veeam Cloud Connect in Azure – Part 2

Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

For those who are new to the blog, welcome, and to those returning a big thanks! In part one of this series ( https://iamitgeek.com/?p=145 ) I discussed the Veeam Cloud Connect offering within Azure for Service Providers, some of the requirements as well as the initial configuration within Azure portal. In part two I will walk through the configuration of Veeam Cloud Connect and some of the different options that can be offered to customers.

I finished the previous post at the point where we had provisioned the virtual machine. 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.

That concludes my blog series on Veeam Cloud Connect in Azure, I hope you enjoyed this series and I would love to know what you thought so please feel free to leave a comment in the comments section. Until next time, ‘IamITGeek’ over and out!