Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Veeam Backup & Replication

Sure, most of you are already familiar with this topic, but I wanted to share my latest blog post here as well. I have had some meetings over the last few weeks, and this topic has been raised every time. I decided to summarize what the current capabilities are.

I'm getting more and more questions from my customers about alternative Hypervisors. In today's fast-paced IT world, I've seen how businesses are increasingly looking for hybrid solutions that blend the scalability of the cloud with the control and performance of on-premises infrastructure. Through my work, I've found that Azure Stack HCI and Veeam Backup & Replication are two standout technologies that meet these needs, offering powerful solutions for hybrid infrastructures and comprehensive data protection.
I want to get into this in a bit more detail and highlight how Azure Stack HCI is supported by Veeam.

What is Azure Stack HCI?

Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) is a hybrid cloud solution from Microsoft which brings together the best of both worlds: on-premises infrastructure with the cloud's scalability and flexibility. It's been essential in modernizing data centers by integrating compute, storage, and networking into a single, streamlined platform.

• Compute: Azure Stack HCI leverages Hyper-V to run virtual machines (VMs) efficiently.
• Storage: With Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), it creates highly available, high-performance storage from local servers.
• Networking: Advanced networking features like RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) and software-defined networking (SDN) ensure low-latency and high-throughput communication between nodes.

Azure Stack HCI allows me to run virtualized workloads on-premises while seamlessly connecting to Azure services for cloud-based management, monitoring, and backup.

How Veeam supports Azure Stack HCI Workloads

Most of the customers are afraid about the migration from their current hypervisor to a new technology. Since 2011, Veeam Backup & Replication has supported Microsoft Hyper-V. Given that Azure Stack HCI is built on Hyper-V, we can leverage Veeam's features to expand and migrate existing infrastructures into a hybrid solution. Veeam connects to Azure Stack HCI Hosts, triggers VM snapshots, create a backup out of these and store them independently from the hypervisor’s location.

1. Hybrid Cloud Integration and Migration: Veeam’s Instant-Recovery feature has made it easy to migrate VMs from hypervisors and physical servers (Windows, Linux, Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix etc.) into Azure Stack HCI or directly to Azure. (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/restore_azure.html)

    

2. Secure Cloud Backup Storage: Veeam leverages Azure Blob Storage for short and long-term retention of backup data, ensuring that backups are securely stored and easily retrievable from the cloud. Your backup strategy can also be extended to a local Repository to fulfill the 3-2-1-1-0 rule.

With a wide feature set Veeam supports you to protect your workloads, ensuring a reliable backup, disaster recovery and an easy-to-recovery process for your applications.

1. VM Backup: Veeam creates consistent backups of VMs running on Azure Stack HCI, supporting application-aware processing to ensure transactional consistency for applications like SQL Server, Exchange, and Active Directory.
2. Instant Recovery: With Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery, you are able to quickly restore a VM directly from a backup file, significantly reducing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
3. Veeam Explorers: Veeam Explorers enable granular easy recovery of individual items from backups of various applications and databases, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, Active Directory, and Oracle.
4. Replication: Veeam replicates VMs from Azure Stack HCI to another location, providing a simple and reliable disaster recovery solution. In case of a failure, you can quickly failover to the replica VMs.

5. Automated Backup and Recovery: Veeam’s orchestration and automation capabilities enable scheduled backups, automated recovery testing, and seamless failover and failback processes.

    

Licensing

Azure Stack HCI has a mixed licensing (Hardware + Software/Guest OS):

• 10$/month per physical processor core on the Azure Stack HCI Host

• Additional the regular Microsoft CALs license (per Microsoft guest OS) needs to be added to your calculation

   

More informations: aka.ms/azurestackhcipricing

Veeam licenses are based on the Veeam Universal License:

• 1 VM needs 1 Veeam Universal License (only backed up VMs needs to be licensed)

• No host licensing is needed !

   

Veeam + Microsoft: Better Together

In my opinion, Veeam simplifies your journey to the cloud, ensuring all your future workloads are secure. Thanks to the strong partnership between Veeam and Microsoft, we offer a wide array of data protection tools for Microsoft Azure Services.

For cloud and hybrid customers using Azure Stack HCI, Veeam expands data protection with versatile solutions:

• Veeam Backup for Azure: Protects Azure-based workloads with native Azure integration, offering reliable backup and recovery options.
• Kasten K10 by Veeam: Provides Kubernetes-native backup and disaster recovery for containerized applications, ensuring data protection for Kubernetes clusters.
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365: Safeguards Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams with comprehensive backup and recovery solutions.

Conclusion

Azure Stack HCI and Veeam Backup & Replication together have transformed the approach to modernizing data centers and ensuring data protection. Azure Stack HCI offers a high-performance, cloud-managed, scalable infrastructure for running virtualized workloads, while Veeam ensures these workloads are securely backed up and can be rapidly recovered in the event of a disaster