Long-time reader, first-time poster. I thought I’d document my initial experience with Vault from a Veeam Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) perspective, to share the journey with others who may be heading down the same path and to highlight a few gotchas. As with anything new, your mileage may vary and subject to change.

We started with a Backup as a Service customer who wanted to use vendor-backed cloud storage. They had spoken to Veeam, were happy with the offering, and it was something we were planning to explore anyway as an alternative to Wasabi.

Gotcha #1 – As of writing, VCSPs cannot consume Vault through the VCSP programme and must instead purchase it as a “traditional transaction” through distribution (at least here in New Zealand). What became clearer later in the journey was that there’s a restriction in the VCSP programme requiring the provider to purchase and “own” the storage subscription. This could be an issue depending on the customer type and use case—particularly if they wish to retain ownership of the Vault subscription.

So, off we went to our local distributor to purchase a one-year subscription. Enter Gotcha #2 – the email address used to place the order will be tied to the initial my.veeam.com Vault login. This may or may not be an issue. In my case, I was able to get the credentials from that team, perform the initial login, and then add the appropriate additional logins for management access.

I won’t go into creating the Vault in this post—it’s well documented by Veeam.

Gotcha #3 was connecting the customer’s VBR server to the Vault. All the documentation stated I had to log in with my Vault account when creating a new repository in the tenant’s VBR. My first thought was, “Wait, that’s my my.veeam.com account—do I really want to enter that into a customer’s VBR server? There’s a lot associated with my account.” It wasn’t something I was comfortable doing.

I considered a few options, like using a dummy email address per tenant. After some discussions with knowledgeable people, I settled on the following method:

Login to my.veeam.com with your account credentials

Locate the vault in question (I gave it a meaningful name as the default name doesn’t have any relevance)

Take a copy of the Storage Account Name (it’s blanked out in this image)

Take a copy of the Access Key

Login to the customer VBR server and start the new repository wizard, using the Veeam Data Cloud Vault option

The key part is to select Enable manual credentials input wizard mode (advanced)

On the Account page, create new credentials using the Storage Account Name and Access Key copied earlier. 

From here, setup would be the same as an other Cloud repository. 

In summary, there are a few teething issues to be aware of—as expected with any new product. None of these would have been a problem in a straightforward customer transaction. However, the VCSP programme added complexity. That said, we now have a functional Vault setup that we can expand for more tenants.

Veeam is aware of these issues and is working on improving VCSP support. It’ll be great to see Vault consumption fully integrated into the programme!