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Monitoring Nutanix AHV Backup Policies with Veeam ONE


Veeam ONE helps organizations meet the challenges that come with digital transformation, navigating hypervisors, and meeting the data protection requirements of today’s businesses. It provides insights into backup status, resource usage, SLA Compliance, threat mitigation and observability. By leveraging Veeam ONE’s monitoring and analytics organizations gain complete visibility into their virtual and backup environment.

The Veeam Data Platform continues to develop support for a variety of workload types, providing an easy way to protect data whether it resides in virtual, physical or cloud deployments, including enterprise applications and SaaS offerings. However, backup is only one factor when it comes to protecting an organization’s data. Organizations need also to consider how they can leverage security features, orchestrated recovery, and advanced monitoring to stay resilient and protected in today’s digital landscape. As workloads continue to move across platforms, it’s important to be able to have a tool that supports visibility into all data protection jobs, no matter where that data resides, as it moves across hypervisors, across cloud platforms and back again.  

With Veeam ONE, available in Veeam Data Platform Advanced and Premium editions, you can monitor data protection jobs across hypervisors, including VMware backup jobs, Hyper-V backup jobs, and Nutanix AHV backups. Not only that, but with the next release of the Veeam Data Platform, which was demonstrated at Veeam ON, Veeam ONE will continue to innovate to monitor backup jobs on the new hypervisors (Proxmox VE and Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager) that will be supported within the platform.

With this blog, I want to discuss some of the capabilities that Veeam ONE has when it comes to monitoring Nutanix AHV. These capabilities have been within Veeam ONE since v10. Yea, did you know you were able to do ALL this with Veeam ONE? And with every new release, the functionality continues to be enhanced offering you powerful monitoring and reporting for backups of Nutanix AHV.

Veeam ONE can provide insights into your Nutanix AHV backup policies, protected workloads, and backup infrastructure components.

Nutanix backup policies are shown right in the Data Protection view, you can easily see statistics about the jobs and their status.

Alarms Detecting Critical Events

Alarms detect issues that are occurring in the environment, providing details on the specific issue and supplies relevant resources that can support remediation. When it comes to data protection, we want to ensure backup policies are finishing successfully, backup components are not over-utilized, and jobs are occurring as scheduled. This aids in ensuring we are meeting compliance and SLAs. Not only that, but this can help prevent a scenario of not being able to restore data because your backups failed or even further, forgetting to re-enable a job due to patching or updates that needed to be installed. From working in the data protection space for about ten years now, one thing is for certain, anything is possible.

 Veeam ONE has many alarms that help with identifying problems, but when it comes to monitoring Nutanix AHV backup jobs, here are some of the alarms that can be useful:

  • Backup Job State
  • Job Disabled
  • Unusual Job duration

The above image shows that this alarm checks the status of a variety of Veeam job types, notifying you if they failed or ended with a warning. As you can see here, Nutanix AHV is just one of the many types of jobs that can trigger this alarm.

Now, you may be thinking, for visibility reasons, I want to be notified if a restore activity is happening. We want to ensure that there are no re-direct restore operations occurring in the environment. The Restore Activity Alarm will notify you if a restore session has been initiated so you can monitor these changes. These are just some of the alarms that assist you with monitoring backup policies, but alarms are only one aspect of Veeam ONE, there are also detailed reports available that can help you observe your environment.

Reporting for Nutanix AHV backup jobs

Veeam ONE provides detailed reports for documentation, analysis, planning and optimization.  Reports can help ensure you are meeting compliance, workloads are protected, and help forecast resource usage. With all the reports available in Veeam ONE, it’s important to know which reports support and show data regarding your Nutanix AHV backup policies. One of the core reports is the Protected VMs (Nutanix AHV), this will identify if you are meeting your RPOs, and address unprotected workloads.

This report is great in identifying protection status of your machines. This is available across workload types, meaning you can run this report to show VMware VMs, Hyper-V, Cloud workloads, Unstructured data sources and machines backed up using one of the Veeam Agents.

If you need a report that shows more details, you can use the Workload Protection History Report. This provides historical information on backup sessions.

This report is useful when you want to see all the backup sessions per workload, when they were run, the duration of each run, and amount of data transferred to the backup repository. This gives you additional details about the protection of your workloads.

There are also other reports that include information about Nutanix AHV backup policies. These reports include:

  • Backups on Repository
  • Capacity Planning for Backup Repositories
  • Immutable Workloads
  • Scale-Out Backup Repository Configuration
  • Backup Infrastructure Custom Data
  • Job History
  • Restore Operator Activity

Monitor and Maintain your Backup Environment through Veeam ONE

While organizations navigate the changes among the hypervisor landscape, it’s important to ensure your workloads are protected no matter where they reside.   Veeam is on a mission to ensure customers have choice no matter the platform or hypervisor they choose.   Veeam ONE makes it easy, supporting Veeam Data Platform, to monitor supported hypervisors and those backup policies. Through the different alarms it provides, it can easily notify of issues or problems with backups. It gives users reports for documenting their environment, provides information on changes that have been made, and helps forecast resources and capacity. Not only that, but reports can also assist with ensuring compliance and regulations are being met for the organization. Having these features  being available for Nutanix AHV backups, extends visibility for these jobs allowing for proper management and protection. Haven’t kicked the tires of Veeam ONE in a while?  Check out Veeam Data Platform Advanced or Premium to see what all is in store for you and your Data Freedom journey.  If you want to learn more about what Veeam can protect in regards to Nutanix AHV, be sure to check out this blog:

I am curious to see how many people in the community are using Nutanix AHV? If you are, please leave a comment below! I just started dabbling with the Nutanix Community Edition, and am learning a lot, so would like to see what community members are experiencing and doing with this hypervisor.

 

 

5 comments

Userlevel 7
Badge +21

That is really interesting that you can monitor AHV with VONE as well as the other applications.  Might need to deploy the CE edition and test this.  😎

Userlevel 6
Badge +6

@Chris.Childerhose - if you do, let us know how it goes. I hear a lot about Nutanix, but don’t hear too much from people who are using it.

Userlevel 7
Badge +21

@Chris.Childerhose - if you do, let us know how it goes. I hear a lot about Nutanix, but don’t hear too much from people who are using it.

I will definitely post back once I get to this on how it goes. 

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Nice post :)

I've had the opportunity to work in a Nutanix environment, and I must say, it is an outstanding HCI solution with a high degree of flexibility.

I tested Veeam ONE on Nutanix, and while it performs well for backup infrastructure, its capabilities are somewhat limited in this context. It would be fantastic if Veeam ONE could monitor the virtual infrastructure as effectively as it does in a vSphere environment. Additionally, incorporating more comprehensive reporting features for Nutanix, similar to those available for VMware and Hyper-V, would greatly enhance its functionality.

As it stands, the current support for Nutanix is good, but I look forward to seeing further improvements in the future.

 

Userlevel 6
Badge +6

@Mahmood.Alganadi - I agree, I would love to see more features when it comes to the virtual monitoring of Nutanix! However, the monitoring and reporting capabilities for the backup environment have come a long way. If you need help with forecasting, the backup on repositories and the capacity planning for backup repositories report will be of help.

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