Hi,

You’ve said the license is for VBR, not VBfMA, can you confirm if it’s a VUL license or a perpetual socket license? As a VUL is usable with VBfMA as well.

Assuming it is perpetual and hence you’re using agents to protect the Azure VMs, you absolutely don’t want to try to backup to an Azure SMB file share, I’ve not seen anything to indicate that would be supported, but I certainly wouldn’t trust this. You also can’t backup VMs directly to Azure object storage, as native object storage, with VBR, only VBfMA supports this, but this will change with VBR v12.

To attempt to achieve 3-2-1-1-0 best practices as best you can, I’d look to create two copies of data within Azure. First I’d allocate a virtual disk to your VBR Azure VM, or create another VM for a repository, doesn’t matter which way, but this will be your primary backup copy, it’s still stored on object storage, but in a way that Veeam can interact wtih natively, this way you’re getting far superior performance & reliability compared to using Azure SMB file shares, and it’s still stored on Azure object storage, just within a virtual disk file instead of native objects.

To get a second copy, we can add this repository to a SOBR, and configure it with a ‘capacity tier’ which CAN be object storage, so we could configure a second Azure region, or even a second region within another Azure tenant for better isolation of data, and then configure the SOBR to copy backups immediately to capacity tier.

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the very detailed response. I just checked and what they have is Universal License with 10 Instances. The approach you mentioned makes sense by adding virtual disk and offloading it to object storage as copy. This should satisfy their scenario. 

One of my doubt is if they don’t want to use the VBfMA, it means there is no appliance in between.

Is there any other way to add the azure VM instances that I want to backup on the VBR? or is the only way to backup those VM’s,  is to add it as managed server (basically install agent) and then create backup job as windows computer. Is this correct? Please suggest if there is other option.

Thanks

Hi,

(Name’s Michael but dw bout that!)

Your two options are the VBfMA appliance, which gives you Azure native processing such as snapshots of the VM in addition to backups.

Alternatively, you need to work within guest using the Veeam Agent, managed by VBR.

I’d certainly suggest the former, but the latter will work

@VeeamRBL 

Some notes on Azure File Shares.

1. To this date, it’s still not clear to me if Azure File Shares actually “chunk out” the data to Blob or not; Microsoft lists that it keeps the data on a storage account so I assume this is the case, but it’s a black box technology that makes it hard to say supported vs unsupported. If the data actually gets chunked to blobs, it’s not supported as the only way to officially use Blob storage is via Capacity Tier (in v12, you can do direct to Azure Blob, which is preferable)
2. In actual environments I’ve reviewed with Azure File Shares, the performance has been awful. Check the file limits here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-files-scale-targets#file-scale-targets Don’t get mislead by IOPS, they are a pure fantasy term for all intents and purposes, and only real-world baseline tests will help you predict actual performance. Even within the Azure data-center, you’re restricted by load and you still might have cross-region activity, so it’s best to test before committing to a deployment. But in terms of what we saw from cases, any transform operation (merge or synthetic full) was extremely bad which basically leaves you with periodic active fulls, but this puts pressure on the production machine even with Agents (long lasting disk shadow), and the write performance and the file limits on the share can be show stoppers

All in all, I’d really review the resistance to the native Veeam Backup for Azure with your client. What are the pain points for them? How do these weigh against the multitude of benefits that it offers like native backups formats, no pre-installed agent, snapshot or Azure Blob storage, copies to on-premises, higher performance, etc.

Hello,

Is possible use AZURE Object Storage also as Backup Repositories  in VBR Community Edition ?
Because I can create Backup Repositories in AZURE Object Storage, but when I can use this , I don't see this Repository in Backup Repository menu.

Many thanks
Jaroslav Jasek

Unfortunately not, currently within VBR there’s no direct backup to Object Storage regardless. Currently Object Storage has to be attached to a scale-out backup repository as a capacity tier, with backups then “offloaded” either via immediate copying of backups to object storage, or via “moving” older inactive backup chains to object storage.

Further to this, Scale-Out Backup Repositories aren’t supported in the free “Community” Edition:

https://www.veeam.com/products-edition-comparison.html

I don’t know what will happen though in v12 when direct backup to object storage is available, if this will be free, as nothing is ever final until it ships, but it appears this will not be included in the Community Edition:

https://forums.veeam.com/object-storage-f52/s3-object-storage-without-scale-out-backup-t81776.html

Hope this helps

Hello,

Many thanks for the answer - no good for me :-(

Regards

Jaroslav Jašek

What’s your exact scenario? Lets see if we can find a way forward for you.

Is it on-prem to cloud backups you’re trying to achieve? Or VMs in the cloud etc?

Hello,

I try use AZURE Object Storage for “Backup copy” our backups.
For the bigger security our servers.
We are small cloud provider and we use servers (as VM) for ERP systems and applications.

Regards
Jaroslav Jasek

Hi @Jaroslav Jasek 

As a cloud provider (I assume you provide ERP services to third parties) you have to use a licensed version of veeam. The rental license is necessary to backup customer data located in your datacenter. You can‘t use the community edition for that use case. Please see chapter 4.0 in our enduser license agreement:

https://www.veeam.com/eula.html
 

I suggest to get in contact with our veeam sales to discuss the correct licensing. And with the rental license, you will be able to use object storage for your backup copies.

Thanks

Fabian

Hello - OK, I know about the license , … but firs I would like try, how this product work, …
(also other products for backup I try )

Regards
Jaroslav Jasek

You can register for a 30 day trial license. This will give you access to all features. Even object storage can be tried out with the trial license.

https://www.veeam.com/free-trial-availability-solution.html