How to protect Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack HCI
There are a lot of misunderstandings about Azure Stack solutions and how to protect each one of them. I want to help you better understand each solution within Azure Stack portfolio and how to protect them using Veritas NetBackup. As you already know, Veritas NetBackup is an enterprise-class backup and recovery suite that provides unified data protection for multi-cloud, virtual and physical environments that can be globally managed from a single console, including all Azure Stack solutions. The usual misunderstanding is to think Azure Stack is a solution itself, but Azure Stack is a portfolio of products comprised of three distinct offerings – Azure Stack Edge, Azure Stack Hub, and Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack solutions help you extend Azure services and capabilities to your environment of choice – from the data center to edge locations and remote offices. The confusion kicks in mostly between Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack HCI and how to protect them. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/operator/compare-azure-azure-stack?view=azs-2108 The most important feature of HCI is that it can run “disconnected” from Azure, in other words, HCI is just like your branch office server. It is a box that contains compute, power, storage, and network connections and holds Hyper-V based virtualized workloads and it has the option to connect to some Azure services. And so, as it is like a Hyper-V server, you can use Veritas NetBackup Hyper-V policy type to protect it along with all the features Veritas NetBackup already provided for Hyper-V: NetBackup for Hyper-V uses snapshot technology to keep virtual machines 100% available to users. NetBackup for Hyper-V creates quiesced Windows snapshots using Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). NetBackup for Hyper-V performs full backups and file-level incremental backups of the virtual machine. With the WMI backup method, it also performs block-level incremental backups and Accelerator backups. Can restore the full virtual machine from the following: Full backups of the VM. Block-level incremental backups of the VM. Accelerator backups of the VM. Can restore individual files of the virtual machine from the following: Full backups of the VM. File-level incremental backups of the VM. Block-level incremental backups of the VM. Accelerator backups of the VM. Can restore to the original virtual machine, to other locations on the Hyper-V server, or to a different Hyper-V server. For details on how to protect Hyper-V, please check the NetBackup for Hyper-V Administrator’s Guide on the following URL: https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/21357025-151824041-0/v21357050-151824041 On the other hand, Azure Stack Hub is really the on-premise extension of the Azure public cloud. Almost everything you can do in the public cloud, you could also deploy on Hub: from VMs to apps, all managed through the Azure portal or even Powershell, including things like configuring fault and updated domains. In this case, you can still use the same deployment of Veritas NetBackup to protect your in-cloud workloads. The cloud data protection framework leverages the CloudPoint infrastructure to drive faster proliferation of cloud providers, since v8.3, CloudPoint can protect assets in AWS, AWS Outpost, Azure, Azure Stack hub and GCP clouds. Features includes: Automatic discovery of cloud assets: NetBackup retrieves the cloud assets pertaining to the cloud accounts every 2 hours by default. This period is configurable. Protection of intelligent cloud groups based on a set of filters called queries. All the assets satisfying the query conditions will automatically be protected. Protection of Microsoft Azure resources using resource groups. NetBackup Accelerator backups. Application consistent snapshots. You can perform original location and alternate location restores. Incremental snapshots. Backup from snapshot. Restore from snapshot copy, replica copy, backup copy or duplicate copy. Restore VMs to an alternate configuration, to a different region, to a different subscription, and restore VMs or disks to a different resource group. Granular files and folders restore For details on how to protect Cloud Assets, please check the NetBackup Web UI Cloud Administrator’s Guide on the following URL: https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/150074555-150074602-0/v130722342-150074602Deployment of Veritas NetBackup on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
As customers adopt a multi-cloud strategy (public, private, and hybrid), the need to align services with key cloud characteristics, such as deployment, cost management, and scaling, is increasing. Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed container orchestration service used to deploy, scale, and manage Docker containers and container-based applications in a cluster environment. AKS enables the provisioning, scaling, and upgrading of resources per requirement or demand without downtime in the Kubernetes cluster. In addition to the traditional deployment of Veritas NetBackup in the cloud, customers can deploy NetBackup’s infrastructure in a native, extensible format for greater performance and resiliency and to optimize costs when using AKS. NetBackup powered by Cloud Scale Technology delivers automation, artificial intelligence, and an elastic architecture to improve the agility and data security of any cloud, at any scale. Optimized for the cloud, NetBackup simplifies data management and delivers unmatched cyber resiliency, control, and visibility. As a prerequisite to deploying Veritas NetBackup on Azure Kubernetes Services, you will need to: Create Azure Container registry Download Container images to the Azure Container registry Create a user-assigned managed identity The container images can be found here: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/veritas.netbackup You will have to download all six images to the same Azure Container Registry: NetBackup Operator NetBackup Server MSPD Meta Data MSDP Controller MSDP Engine MSDP Operator Figure 1.: Azure Marketplace – Veritas NetBackup powered by Cloud Scale Technology – Container Images Once you downloaded all images, you will use the Veritas NetBackup powered by Cloud Scale Technology – Deployment on AKS, to deploy the images in an integrated manner. Now you can start configuring the parameters for each NetBackup component, you will go through the Basics, Cluster Configuration, Primary Server Details, Media Server Details, and Storage Server Details. The typical deployment, which consists of one primary server, one media server with two replicas and one MSDP (Storage Server) with four replicas will take approximately 45 minutes until the environment is fully up and running. After that, your Veritas NetBackup on Azure Kubernetes Service is ready to start protecting your workloads. For more information about Veritas NetBackup deployment on Azure Kubernetes Service, check the following links: https://www.veritas.com/content/dam/www/en_us/documents/technical-documents/TB_netbackup_deployment_on_azure_k8s_V1568.pdf https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/154778686-154778690-1What's new in NetBackup v10.0 - Nutanix AHV Restore from Snapshot
Nutanix™, a leader in HCI, offers a single platform that integrates storage, compute, networking, resources, and virtualization to provide a comprehensive view of your infrastructure. The advantage of HCI is being able to move mission-critical data and applications into a simplified, unified infrastructure. However, increasing data protection and disaster recovery issues have also increased demand for a scalable and flexible data protection solution that supports the robust requirements of hyperconverged environments. Veritas NetBackup™ v10 release introduces a new feature that makes use of snapshot technology to perform full VM restore of Nutanix’s AHV virtual machines. This feature adds a faster recovery capability to the extensive list of features already available for Nutanix AHV, such as agentless full backup and restores, pre-recovery check incremental backups, role-based access control, WebUI integration with Intelligent backup selection, resource throttling, iSCSI support, application-consistent backup, agentless granular recovery, restful APIs and more. This newly introduced feature makes use of snapshots to perform the full VM restore of Nutanix’s VMs. NetBackup creates the snapshot and stores it on the Nutanix container to perform the backup operation. In the case of accelerator and incremental backups, NetBackup keeps that snapshot for reference to calculate the changed blocks in the next backup. We leveraged the reference snapshot for quick restore. Restoring from a recent backup is a common scenario in a customer environment. Rather than restoring VM from the backup image we can use the snapshot available on the Nutanix cluster and run the snapshot restore. This is a much faster restore as there is no data movement from the NetBackup media server to the Nutanix Cluster, nor presents additional load on the network, Nutanix AHV cluster, and to the NetBackup media server. The virtual machine will only be restored from a snapshot if there is a snapshot available otherwise it will automatically fall back to a backup image. The table below lists down the restore options which are supported by the approach. This feature is available with NetBackup v10 release deployment by default.
