Snapshot orchestration is critical, especially in IT environments that seek agility in application protection and recovery operations. The capability for fast restoration from snapshots also helps reduce downtime and minimizes business impact.
Veeam Backup & Replication can integrate with storage systems and create backups using storage-based snapshots, minimizing production impact and accelerating the backup process.
In addition to the traditional Backup Job, Veeam offers the Snapshot Orchestration Job. It automates the creation, management, and deletion of snapshots, ensuring consistent backups, minimal impact on production systems, and more efficient storage use.
Together, the Veeam Backup and Veeam Snapshot Orchestration enable the implementation of a comprehensive data protection and recovery strategy.
vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC)
In critical VMware environments that require high availability, VMware High Availability (HA) is a technology that provides cluster-based monitoring of virtual machines running on included ESXi hosts. If the storage, network, or host fails, the remaining ESXi hosts coordinate to restart the affected virtual machines on unaffected hosts.
VMware HA is made possible via shared storage. Without shared storage, VMs and their data cannot be seen by surviving hosts, and therefore a disaster restart operation is not an option.
VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) is a configuration designed to enable high availability, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance for virtualized workloads by integrating VMware vSphere with a storage solution that supports synchronous replication across two geographically separated data centers.
When combined with vSphere's HA features, vMSC ensures that virtual machines (VMs) running on one site can quickly be restarted on the other site in case of failure without losing data.
vMSC is also fully compatible with vSphere DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) features, which help ensure that virtual machines are automatically recovered and resources are balanced across sites.
Additionally, vMSC uses synchronous storage replication to keep data mirrored in real-time between two storage systems, usually in separate data centers (metro distances). This ensures that both sites have an identical copy of the data, providing fault tolerance and minimizing downtime.
Pure Storage Purity ActiveCluster
Purity ActiveCluster is a feature of FlashArrays that enables two-site synchronous replication for high availability. It is a fully symmetric, active/active bidirectional replication solution that provides synchronous replication for RPO zero and automatic transparent failover for RTO zero. VMware virtual machines can access storage in both sites simultaneously without clustering multiple sites, enabling clustered arrays and hosts to deploy flexible active/active data center configurations.
When paired with VMware's vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) configuration, VMware virtual machines can access storage in both sites simultaneously, without interruption, even if one site fails.
On the other hand, when Purity ActiveCluster is combined with VMware High Availability (HA), automatic failover across sites ensures that VMs maintain high availability even if a data center goes down.
Additionally, Pure Storage's synchronous replication allows data to be consistently shared between two different sites, but the storage access technology can be configured differently at each location. It exposes paths to local hosts as active/optimized paths and exposes paths to remote hosts as active/non-optimized.
The optimized path is defined on a per-host-to-volume connection basis using a preferred array option; this ensures that a VM or application will have a local optimized path to that volume regardless of what host it is running on, as presented below.
The Purity ActiveCluster consists of three core components: the Pure1 Mediator, active/active clustered array pairs, and stretched storage containers.
Some key features include:
- Integrated Pure1 Cloud Mediator: An automatically configured passive mediator that enables transparent failover and prevents split-brain scenarios, eliminating the need to deploy and manage additional components.
- Active/Active Clustered FlashArrays: Utilize synchronous replication to maintain identical copies of data across both arrays and present them as a consistent copy to hosts connected to either or both arrays.
- Stretched Storage Containers: Management containers that group storage objects, such as volumes, and stretch them across two arrays.
- Synchronous Replication: Writes are synchronized between arrays and stored in non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) on both arrays before being acknowledged to the host.
- Symmetric Active/Active: This option allows read and write operations on the same volumes on either side of the mirror, with optional host-to-array site awareness.
- Transparent Failover: Automatic, non-disruptive failover between synchronously replicating arrays and sites, including automatic resynchronization and recovery.
- No Bolt-ons and no Licenses: No additional hardware or costly software licenses are required—simply upgrade the Purity Operating Environment to enable active functionality.
- Simple Management: This feature allows data management operations, such as provisioning storage, connecting hosts, creating snapshots, and cloning, to be performed from either side of the mirror.
Snapshot Orchestration: Pure Storage FlashArray and Veeam Data Platform V12
The previous context is crucial for understanding how Veeam Backup & Replication v12 or later versions can orchestrate snapshots of Pure FlashArrays configured in ActiveCluster mode.
Synchronous replication in ActiveCluster mode provides a symmetric, active-active solution that enables volume mirroring at the storage layer. A volume or storage snapshot created on either array is synchronously replicated across both arrays, ensuring data consistency.
With the release of the Veeam Backup & Replication v12, Veeam has enhanced the functionality of its USAPI v2. This new API version supports the orchestration of replicated snapshots and enables the offloading or archiving of storage snapshots in their native snapshot format to secondary storage.
When integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication via USAPI v2, Purity ActiveCluster's primary use case is to leverage a Veeam Snapshot-Only Job to create a synchronous storage snapshot on both the local and secondary FlashArrays.
This snapshot is then used as the source for a Veeam Backup Job.
In addition, Veeam's Application-Aware Image Processing ensures application-consistent backups. This ensures that the snapshot captures all necessary data, allowing for the recovery of applications to a consistent state without corruption or data loss.
The most important benefit is that storage snapshots allow you to accelerate backup and replication for VMware vSphere VMs with disks hosted on storage systems, reducing the VMware VM snapshot lifetime and minimizing the impact on applications.
Configuring Snapshot-Only Jobs + Backup Jobs from Snapshots
Veeam has released a highly informative document titled "Advanced Storage Snapshot Integration with Pure Storage FlashArray and Veeam Platform V12."
The document effectively illustrates the scenario described earlier: a Veeam job that orchestrates the creation of storage snapshots on the remote Pure FlashArray, followed by the creation of a Veeam backup job using the storage snapshot from the remote Pure FlashArray in ActiveCluster mode.
Below, the job action panel shows that the snapshot-only for synchronous replicated VM was successfully created and executed. Highlighted in red, we can see that Veeam is aware of the synchronous replication relationship; the snapshots were made simultaneously on both the local and remote Pure FlashArrays and the backup was created from the snapshot.
You can access the document here on this link:
https://www.veeam.com/resources/wp-pure-storage-veeam-advanced-storage-snapshot.html
Conclusion
Veeam Backup & Replication v12 and later versions provide a robust solution for orchestrating and managing storage snapshots in environments utilizing Pure FlashArrays in ActiveCluster mode. In this scenario, Veeam ensures consistent snapshot creation across local and remote arrays by leveraging synchronous replication, minimizing the impact on production systems while enhancing backup and replication efficiency.
Integrating Veeam’s Snapshot-Only Jobs and Application-Aware Image Processing guarantees application consistency during backups, ensuring reliable and efficient data protection. Furthermore, offloading and archiving storage snapshots to secondary storage simplifies backup operations, offering a scalable and flexible solution for critical VMware vSphere environments.
Overall, this integration accelerates backup processes, reduces downtime, and ensures data integrity, making it an essential tool for businesses that require dependable disaster recovery and high availability.
References
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/storage/snapshot_only_job_perform.html?ver=120
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/storage/backup_from_storage_snapshots.html?ver=120
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2015/06/VMW-TMD-vSphr-Mtro-Strge-Clster-USLET-1.2.pdf
