Cisco HyperFlex 4.

0 with Veeam Backup

& Replication v11

Last Updated: 11-January-2022

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Please contact dCloud Support for more information.

This guide for the preconfigured demonstration includes:

Requirements

About This Solution

Topology

Get Started

Scenario 1. Introduction into Veeam

Scenario 2. Hyperflex Integration

Scenario 3. Backup HyperflexVMS

Scenario 4. Restore VMs in a HyperFlex Cluster

What’s Next?
Limitations

In this some features are available in the virtual machines as they would be in production deployment.

Requirements
The table below outlines the requirements for this preconfigured demonstration.

Required Optional

Laptop Cisco AnyConnect®

About This Solution

Veeam Availability Suite v11 provides full data protection for applications and data running on Cisco
HyperFlex. Highlighting the native snapshot integration between Veeam and HyperFlex, users can
demonstrate data protection tasks and solutions.

Cisco HyperFlex with Veeam Availability Suite provides full data protection for applications and
data running on the Cisco HyperFlex cluster. With this solution, users can not only perform
backup/restore, replication, and archiving with Veeam, but also restore VMs, files, and application
items quickly and easily. Highlighting the native snapshot integration between Veeam and
HyperFlex, users can demonstrate data protection tasks often performed by storage
administrators.
This demonstration provides an overview of the integration between Cisco HyperFlex and
Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) – using VBR to back up a HyperFlex cluster and restore a VM
from the backup. Once you are familiar with the key aspects of the software to note, feel free to
discover other features that your customer’s may be interested in seeing. The script is broken
down into four sections:
• Introduction to Veeam user interface – Easy to navigate with a familiar ribbon style menu,
quickly demonstrate initial configuration and setup.

• HyperFlex Integration – Fully integrated into the HyperFlex data platform, VBR is able to
leverage native HyperFlex APIs.

• Backing up HyperFlex VMs – Veeam compliments Cisco HyperFlex, to deliver modern

data protection and disaster recovery.

• Restoring VM data – Veeam Backup & Replication delivers lightning-fast and reliable
restores for individual files, entire VMs and application items.

Topology
This demonstration environment includes preconfigured users and components to illustrate the scripted scenarios and
features of the solution. Most components are fully configurable with predefined administrative user accounts. You can
 see the IP address and user account credentials to use to access a component by clicking the component icon in the
Topology menu of your active session and in the scenario steps that require their use.

dCloud Topology

Equipment Details

Get Started

FOR DCLOUD SCHEDULED DEMO

Follow the steps to schedule a session of the content and configure your presentation environment.

NOTE: It may take up to 10 minutes for your session to become active.

1. Initiate your dCloud session. [Show Me How]

2. For best performance, connect to the workstation with Cisco AnyConnect VPN [Show Me How] and the local RDP
client on your laptop [Show Me How]
a. Workstation 1: 198.18.133.36, Username: DCLOUD\demouser, Password: C1sco12345

3. On the wkst1 remote desktop screen, click the Remote Desktop icon on the task bar.

4. Open Remote Decktop Connection and select vb1 from the Computer drop-down menu and click Connect to
open the vb1 remote desktop. No credentials are necessary to log in to vb1.
5. On the VB1 desktop, double-click the VBR icon to launch the Veeam Backup & Replication Console (it may take a
minute or so for the application to launch fully).

6. Click to enable Use Windows session authentication and click Connect.

7. Briefly review the layout of the Veeam Backup & Replication console.
Scenario 1. Introduction into Veeam
Value Proposition: Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) can be deployed and configured with a backup server, proxy,
and repositories on Cisco UCS. VBR orchestrates jobs to create backups and/or replicas for the provisioning of
immediate data-protection. Manage all your backups and data from a single console with one solution that backs up
your data, no matter where it is. Achieve all your data protection SLAs while reducing costs.

1. On the remote desktop, launch VBR if it is not already open. Log in using Windows session authentication.
2. The navigation pane, located on the left side of the window, provides centralized navigation and enables users to easily
access Veeam Backup & Replication views. Scan through each major view to show how the information is organized.
a. The Home view allows users to schedule, monitor, and manage backup and replication jobs.

b. The Backup Infrastructure view defines the backup components and adds managed virtualized
infrastructure.

c. The Inventory view shows the virtual machines that are managed within the environment.

d. The Storage Infrastructure view defines the enterprise storage environment, like HyperFlex, and allows taking
storage snapshots directly.

e. The Tape Infrastructure view allows the addition of tape devices to the backup infrastructure for backup and
archive to tape.

f. The Files view allows users to perform file management tasks and to create File Copy jobs.

g. The History View provides an audit trail of all activities performed through Backup & Replication.

3. Click Backup Infrastructure in the lower navigation pane. This shows the Veeam components within the backup
infrastructure.

Review Veeam Proxy Server

1. In the upper navigation pane (inventory pane), click Backup Proxies.

2. Either right click VMware Backup Proxy and choose Properties, or click VMware Backup Proxy and select
Edit Proxy in the action area at the top of the window to bring up the Edit VMware Proxy wizard.
 NOTE Most tasks within VBR are wizard-based, which makes it easy to create and edit objects.

The Edit VMware Proxy wizard allows users to define the server on which the proxy will run, its transport
mode (how it connects and transfers data from production storage), and the repository that it will service.
Users can also change the number of concurrent tasks, which defines how many VMDKs can be
processed concurrently. The recommended number of concurrent tasks is calculated automatically based
on available resources. Backup proxies with multi-core CPUs can handle more concurrent tasks. For
example, for a 4-core CPU, it is recommended to specify a maximum of 4 concurrent tasks minus two
(for operating systems functions), for an 8-core CPU — 8 specify a maximum of concurrent tasks minus
two. When defining the number of concurrent tasks, keep in mind network traffic throughput in your virtual
infrastructure.

3. Click Choose next to Transport mode. Transport modes define how the proxy server accesses data from the
production data sources.
4. Click to enable the Direct storage access radio button, which enables the use of SAN or NFS access directly
from the production environment and allows faster data access.
5. Uncheck Failover to network mode if primary mode fails, or is unavailable. Then click OK.

6. Click Choose next to Connected Datastores. This option allows users to specify the datastore that the proxy server
will access.
7. Click Manual selection, then click Add to add connected datastores.

8. Expand vc1.dcloud.cisco.com to show the datastores available within vCenter and select hx-a-ds1. Then click
OK.
9. Click OK on the Datastores page.
10. Click Next to proceed to Traffic Rules, which are used when implementing in-flight encryption or throttling traffic
between two components.

11. Click Apply to apply the changes.

 12. Click Finish to complete the Proxy editing session.

Review Veeam Backup Repository

1. Click Backup Repositories to view the configured backup repositories. Either right-click Default Backup Repository and
select Properties, or click the Edit Repository action at the top of the screen to bring up the Edit Repository wizard.
 NOTE A Veeam Repository is a location where the backup files will be stored. It can be on a Windows
server (with attached storage), a Linux server running NFS, a CIFS/SMB share, or an integrated
deduplication appliance.

2. On the left panel, click Repository to view the Repository screen.

3. Review the Location field, which points to a visible location on an attached drive.

NOTE VBR only requires a visible location on an attached drive, whether that drive is housed on internal
disks or a SAN that is ISCSI or FC attached. VBR also provides load controls to limit the number of
concurrent tasks and data ingestion rate for the backup repository. These options help to control the
load on the backup repository and prevent possible timeout of storage I/O operations, especially when
contending with production storage.

4. Click Cancel to exit the wizard without saving changes.

Scenario 2. Hyperflex Integration
Value Proposition: Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) complements Cisco HyperFlex, to deliver modern data
protection, and disaster recovery (DR). HyperFlex provides high availability for the cluster by mirroring data within the
cluster, and proactively self-healing in case of hardware failure. VBR integrates with native HyperFlex snapshots to
deliver efficient virtual machine (VM) backup and replication to dramatically lower the recovery point objective (RPO)
to <15 minutes for ALL applications and data. Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and replication between
HyperFlex clusters, both data center and HyperFlex Edge, provides site level DR. VBR also provides backup and
recovery at the VM and
item-level for instant recovery from more common, day-to-day problems. These isolated VBR managed backups,
stored on secondary storage (e.g. Cisco UCS S3260 storage servers), cloud or tape, allow organizations to meet both
internal and external data protection and recovery requirements.
HyperFlex snapshot integration allows backup jobs to take advantage of native HX snapshots, providing faster
backups with almost no impact on the production
environment. This allows you to take backups much more frequently than conventional storage systems and
dramatically improve the RPO of the application.
There are two components of the integration:
• The ability to leverage the native snapshot as opposed to the VM redo snapshot provided by the hypervisor

• The ability to use NFS to provide for faster transport of data from HyperFlex to the backup server, which
involves providing the Veeam Proxy Server with NFS access to the HyperFlex data layer. The proxy server used for
HyperFlex backups should be able to access the VLAN (hx-storage-data) that the HyperFlex cluster uses. The proxy
server and the backup server are on the same server in the demonstration
environment.Steps

Examine Backup Server’s Network Configuration

1. Click the Windows icon in the lower left corner of the vb1 screen and select Control Panel.
2. Choose Network and Sharing Center.

3. View the two NICs configured for this server: Ethernet0, which is connected to the standard VM Network, and
Ethernet1 which is connected to the hx-storage-data VLAN network. To simplify the demonstration environment,
these NICs were pre-configured.
4. Close the window.
5. Ensure that the VBR proxy server can access the HX IOvisor, by verifying open firewall ports on the ESXi host on
which the IOvisor is running.
NOTE For ease of management, the demonstration environment is pre-configured with a vSphere
VIB installed on each HX node (or ESXi host), which will provide that access.

6. On the WKST1 desktop, open Google Chrome, and click the vc1 (html) tab.
7. Enter the user ([email protected]) and the password (C1sco12345) . Then click Login.
8. Click the vm icon in the upper left-hand corner of the window. Then select Hosts and Clusters in the left
navigation pane.

9. Expand dCloud-HX-DC-A and then expand hx-cluster-a. Select one of the nodes within the hx-cluster-a
HyperFlex cluster.
10. In the center window, select the Configure tab.
11. Scroll down the Settings column and click Firewall. This will list all of the firewall rules in place.
12. Verify that the NFSAccess rule is available with TCP ports 111, 2049, 2449.
13. Repeat Step 9, on page n through Step 12, on page n for nodes hx-a-2.dcloud.cisco.com through

hx-a-4.dcloud.cisco.com, and verify that the NFSAccess rule is available with TCP ports 111, 2049, 2449 for all nodes.

Add HX Data Platform Storage to Veeam

The purpose of this section is to use the Veeam Backup & Replication UI to add the HX data
storage platform to Veeam.

The HX storage integration process requires the cluster management IP address and
credentials for the HX Cluster. For this demonstration, the information required is listed below.

Information Value
Cluster Management IP Address 198.18.134.200

Login User Name Admin

Login Password C1sco12345

Required Optional

Laptop Cisco AnyConnect®

1. On the VB1 remote desktop, open the VBR Console if it is not already open. Log in with Windows session
authentication.
2. Click Storage Infrastructure in the lower navigation pane. This view allows users to add storage for snapshot
integration, take snapshots and recover from snapshots, and configure backups from snapshots.
3. Click Add Storage to add the Hyperflex Data Platform.
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4. Veeam provides integration with several storage partners. Click Cisco HyperFlex from the available partners
and add the storage.

5. In the resulting wizard, enter the cluster management IP address (198.18.134.200). Then click Next.

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6. In the Credentials screen, click Add.

7. Enter the credentials of the Storage Controller (username admin/password C1sco12345) click OK, then click
Next.

8. At the Certificate Security Alert window pop-up, select Continue, and then click Next.

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9. In the VMware vSphere screen, click Choose to select the proxy server that will be accessing the
HyperFlex Data Platform.

10. In the resulting window, choose Use the selected backup proxy servers only and check VMware Backup
Proxy, the proxy server that has been configured for access. Then click OK.

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11. Click Next to see the summary page.

12. Click Apply.

13. Click Next.

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14. A storage discovery process starts which will scan the storage and validate NFS connectivity to the
storage for Veeam. When the process completes and the Success message appears, the storage has
been successfully added. Click Close.

15. In the Veeam Backup & Replication console window, Cisco HyperFlex will now be listed under Storage
Infrastructure in the inventory pane and the HyperFlex cluster management IP address of 198.18.134.200 will
be present in the working area.

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Scenario 3. Backup HyperflexVMS

Value Proposition: Veeam Backup & Replication integrates with Cisco HyperFlex and allows you to improve
performance of backup and replication of VMware vSphere VMs hosted on Cisco HyperFlex.
For backup and replication of VMs hosted on Cisco HyperFlex, Veeam Backup & Replication does not use
VMware vSphere snapshots to preserve VMs in a consistent state suitable for backup or replication. Instead, it
relies on native Cisco HyperFlex VM snapshots. Use of Cisco HyperFlex VM snapshots lets users avoid the
overhead produced by VMware vSphere snapshots removal on the production environment.
To create HyperFlex VM snapshots, Cisco leverages VMware vSphere Storage APIs Array Integration (VAAI).
VAAI enables VMware vSphere ESXi hosts to communicate with storage devices and offload storage operations
such as snapshot creation and cloning to the storage array. As a result, Cisco HyperFlex can create space
efficient VM snapshots almost instantly. Veeam Backup & Replication, in its turn, can use HyperFlex snapshots
for VM data processing, which helps speed up backup and replication operations, reduce impact of backup and
replication activities on the production environment and improve RPOs.
Implementation of integration with Cisco HyperFlex is different from those provided for other supported storage
systems. When Veeam Backup & Replication processes VMs hosted on Cisco HyperFlex, it leverages snapshots
created at the VM level, not snapshots created at the storage volumes level. The results of the VM processing
are reported in job results: if a VM is processed with Cisco HyperFlex snapshots, Veeam Backup & Replication
displays the 'Creating VM native Cisco HX snapshot' message in job statistics.

Launch an Existing Backup

1. Open Veeam on the VB1 remote desktop if it is not already open, and Use Windows session authentication to
log in.
2. On the left navigation panel, click Home.
3. The Home view displays the backup or replication jobs that are created and scheduled. There is one job that
is already available, for the Active Directory server named AD1 and the SQL Server 2016 server named
SQL1.

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4. Right-click Jobs in the inventory pane to view the types of jobs that can be scheduled and launched from this
screen. These are also listed in the Action bar section at the top of the screen.
5. Click Backups > Disk. Expand AD1 & SQL! Agent backup job to view the backups that exist in the Backup
Repository and how many restore points are available.

6. Right-click any VM to view the restore options available from those restore points. If there is an Explorer
that can be leveraged, the system will also provide the ability to recover application Items for that application.

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Launch a Backup from the Actions Bar

1. While still in the Home screen, click the Home tab. Click Backup Job in the Action bar and choose
Virtual machine. This will launch a wizard to create a new backup job.

2. Enter a name for the backup job or use the default name supplied, and add a description. Click Next to
advance to the Virtual Machines screen and define what is being backed up.

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3. Click Add, then navigate to vc1 > dCloud-HX-DC-A > hx-cluster-a.

4. Click myVM-A1 then shift-click myVM-A2 to select them both. Click Add to add the VMs to the job. (These
are the VMs in the hx-cluster HyperFlex cluster.) Then click Next.
NOTE Veeam provides the ability to add all VMs on an ESXi host or within a specific resource pool,
folder, cluster, or data center, and change the order of backup with the up/down arrows. Notice
the Total Size at the bottom of the window. The Total Size will affect the size of the backup file
and how long it takes to back up the job.

5. Click Advanced to see more backup options.

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NOTE The Storage screen provides the ability to choose which Backup Proxy and Backup
Repository will be used for the backup job. For a scheduled job, the number of backups to keep
(restore points) is configurable, as well as whether a remote copy is created, and where.

6. Page through the tabs in the Advanced section.

The Backup tab allows users to define several different backup types, including active full
backup, incremental backups, or synthetic full backups. The default settings are for forward
incremental with weekly synthetic full backup.
NOTE For more information on the different incremental backups, see Backup Methods in the
Veeam Backup & Replication V11 Users Guide for VMware.

The Maintenance tab allows users to run regular health checks on the backup storage and fix
corrupted data on disk drives. The “Defragment and compact” feature provides the ability to
clean up and defragment full backups to improve storage utilization.

The Storage tab allows user to turn on/off deduplication and compression and define the
desired level of deduplication or compression. It may be necessary to change these
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settings, depending on the network speeds/bandwidth or the type of data (i.e.,

compressed file types like video and images, compute/memory
resources can be conserved by turning this feature off). This section also controls
encryption for the backup file. Users can also exclude certain components like swap files
and deleted blocks from the backup. This
reduces the backup file size and shortens the time for the backup job.

The Integration tab lets users define whether to use storage snapshots for backup. This
feature is enabled by default. Check Enable backup from storage snapshots to take advantage
of the HyperFlex integration.

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7. Browse other Advanced Settings as time and customer interest permit. Click Cancel to exit.

8. Click Next to move to Guest Processing.

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Guest Processing is where users can choose to enable application aware processing for this
backup. This will enable Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to quiesce the guest OS
environment and provide an application consistent backup. For those applications that do not
support Microsoft VSS, VMware Tools can be used to quiesce the file system (e.g., for Linux
environments).

Note Veeam also provides the ability to enable guest file system indexing. This is important for use
cases with file level restores, that require the fast search capability.

9. Click Next to advance to Schedule. To schedule the job to run automatically, check Run the Job
Automatically and select the preferred scheduling. For manual backups, more parameters are available
to control the job, including limiting the job to a specific backup window of operation.

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10. Click Apply to save changes.

11. On the resulting Summary page, review the settings. Click to enable Run the Job when I click Finish to
run the backup job. This backup job should take 3-4 minutes to complete. Then click Finish.

12. To watch the status of the newly created backup job, go to the Home pane and select Jobs. The newly
created backup job will be present in the working area.

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13. The working area displays a list of all backup jobs. Click Backup Job 1 to see more information.
14. Click the Statistics action button in the Job tab of the top action bar to launch a window that provides
the statistics from the last job run. This screen shows an overall visual of the backup transaction,
including the duration, throughput, data transfer/data reduction, and status for the job. The Statistics
windows also identifies the bottleneck of the backup job so that potential optimizations can be made.

15. There are two areas in the Statistics window which will verify that Veeam is using HyperFlex snapshots
and transporting using NFS.
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16. Click one of the VMs in the Name window. This will change the steps listed in the Action column to show
only the information for the selected VM.
17. In the Action column, locate the line that indicates whether VM snapshots or HyperFlex snapshots are
being used for the backup. Ensure that for this environment, HyperFlex snapshots were used.
18. Secondly, a line in the log identifies the backup proxy being used and the transport mode. Ensure that
the transport mode listed at the end of that line is nfs.

19. Click OK when both backups complete.

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Scenario 4. Restore VMs in a HyperFlex Cluster

Value Proposition: Veeam Backup & Replication delivers lightning-fast and reliable restores for individual files,
entire VMs and application items, ensuring that you have confidence in virtually every recovery scenario to give
you the ability to attain low recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Restore entire VMs in minutes with Instant VM Recovery. Run any virtualized application directly from the latest
backup, instead of making users wait while you provision storage, extract the backup and copy it to production.
After restoration, you can use VMware Storage vMotion or Veeam’s Quick Migration to move VMs back to
production storage.
There are many ways of restoring data from Veeam backups. The purpose of this scenario is to explore the
three most popular recovery scenarios:
• Instant VM Recovery
• File level Recovery
• Application Item Recovery (using SQL Server and Active Directory)

Time may not permit doing all of the recovery scenarios – they are added as optional demonstration
capabilities.

Instant VM Recovery

1. On the VB1 remote desktop, open Veeam Backup and Replication if it is not already open. Click Home in
the side menu.
2. Click Backups in the inventory pane and expand Backup Job 1 in the working area to see the VM's and the
number of restore points for each.

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3. Right-click myVM-A1 and either right-click the VM and choose Instant VM Recovery, or select the Instant
VM Recovery action from the Backup tab in the top action bar.

4. In the resulting Instant Recovery to VMware wizard, select the machine with restore point and click Next.

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5. In the resulting Restore Mode screen, click to enable the Restore to a new location or with different
settings option and then click Next.

6. The Destination screen configures the destination for this newly restored VM – whether it will be
restored to a specific ESXi host, a folder on that host, or in an existing resource pool. It is important to
change the name of the new VM to differentiate it from the original production VM. In the Restored
VM name field, enter myVM-A1_restored and click Next.

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7. The Datastore screen allows users to choose a location for the Instant VM Recovery job. Leave the Redirect
write cache checkbox unchecked to accept the default, and click Next.
NOTE When a VM is in Instant VM Recovery mode, all writes to the VM will be written to a cache for
later ingestion back into the VM. A default NFS write cache is defined when the Backup Repository
is created.

8. In the resulting Reason screen, enter a reason for the restore and click Next.

9. Review the settings on the Summary page. To make changes, click Previous to go back to previous screens.
There are two check boxes on the summary screen - Connect VM to network and Power on target VM
after restoring. Leave the boxes unchecked and click Finish to start the instant recovery job.
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NOTE. These two boxes would be checked during a production environment outage, where the
original VM is down, to perform an instant VM recovery in about two minutes.

A window appears that shows the progress of the Instant VM Recovery. Note that the inventory
pane of the Home console shows that there is one Instant Recovery job running. When the
Waiting for user to start migration message is generated, the VM has been recovered and
available for use. Later, the migration can be started which will migrate that backup file into
production and ingest in all writes that have been cached - this migration is outside of the
scope of this demonstration.

10. Click Close to close the status window.

11. Return to the vc1 (html) tab In Google Chrome on WKST1. If necessary, enter the username
dcloud\demouser, and password C1sco12345. Click to enable Use Windows session authentication
checkbox. Then click Login.

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12. In the upper left-hand corner of the window, click the vm icon, then select Hosts and Clusters.

13. In the left-hand pane, expand hx-cluster-a to view the guest VMs. The new myVM-A1_restored VM will be
present and available to be powered on and connected.

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14. Return to the Home console window in VBR on VB1 and click Instant Recovery (1) in the inventory pane to
display all open Instant Recovery tasks

15. In the working area, right-click the VM to show the available options – migrate the VM to production or stop
publishing it. Migration is outside the scope of this demonstration. Click Stop Publishing to begin to dismount
and remove the newly recovered VM, clean up the Instant VM Recovery job, and put the environment back
to its previous state.

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16. Click Yes at the stop publishing confirmation pop up.

17. Click OK when the unmount is finished.

18. If you return to the vSphere Web client on WKST1, you see that the VM myVM-A1_restored has been
removed.

File Level Recovery

Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) also provides granular recovery of a file, or group of
files, from a backed up VM. The purpose of this section is to use the Veeam File Explorer
to find files and quickly restore them to their original location or an alternate location.

1. Open VBR on the VB1 remote desktop if it is not already open, and click Home in the lower
navigation pane. Expand Backups and click Disk in the inventory pane to see all the available
backups.
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2. In the working area, expand AD1 & SQL1 Agent backup job to see the various backup
instances.

3. Right-click sql1 to see the available restore scenarios. For file level recovery, click Restore
guest files and select the operating system Microsoft Windows.

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4. In the resulting File Level Restore wizard, select the first restore point and click Next.

5. On the Reason screen, enter a reason for the restoration. Click Next.

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6. Review the Summary screen and click Browse.

The restore point will be opened, disk information from the backup file extracted and then
mounted to the backup server. The Backup Browser window will now be launched, which
can be used to find the desired file for restoration. The Backup Browser shows the entire
file structure within the disk, which is browsable - similar to a Windows explorer window.

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7. Return to WKST1 and click the Windows icon on the taskbar in the lower left-hand corner of the
screen. Select Remote Desktop to open RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

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8. From the pull-down menu, select SQL1. Then click Connect to log into SQL1.

9. On SQL1, open File Explorer in the taskbar and select Local Disk (C:) in the navigation pane. Delete
the Software folder.

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10. Return to the RDP window for VB1. In the Backup Browser, right-click the Software folder,
select Restore, then select Overwrite to restore the folder to its original location.

11. When the files have been restored, a window will pop up with the restore status. Once the
Success message appears, click Close to complete the process.

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12. Close the Backup Browser window to exit the restore scenario.
13. Return to the RDP window for SQL1 to verify the Software folder is restored. When finished, exit
the SQL1 RDP session and return to WKST1.

Application Item Recovery for SQL Server

Another recovery option to demonstrate is using Veeam Explorers to restore application

items for Microsoft Active Directory items like users or groups, Microsoft Exchange items
like full mailboxes or individual emails, Microsoft SharePoint objects and files, and
Microsoft SQL Server databases. The purpose of this section is to show both transaction
level recovery for SQL Server and Active Directory object recovery.

1. Examine the backup job runs for the SQL Server. Open the RDP window for VB1, and in the Home
console, click Backups > Disk. Expand the AD1 & SQL1 Agent backup job.
NOTE The jobs listed for the SQL Server include image level backup and the transaction
logs. Transaction logs are generally backed up on a different schedule than the database
image. This allows us to do transaction level recovery.
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2. Right-click SQL1 to show the recovery options available or use the action buttons in the Backup
tab of the action bar. Click Restore application items > Microsoft SQL Server databases.

3. In the resulting Microsoft SQL Server Database Restore wizard, click to enable the Restore from the
latest available backup radio button and then click Next.

4. In the Reason screen, enter a reason for the restore request and click Next.

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5. On the Summary screen, click the Browse button.

NOTE The restore process will begin, in which a restore point will be opened, and the disk
information will be extracted from the backup and mounted to the backup server. The Veeam
Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server window will now automatically launch with all the databases
available in the backup listed. The WideWorldImporters database is a sample transactional
database for SQL Server 2016.
6. Right-click WideWorldImporters to see all the recovery options for restoring or exporting the
database, schema, or both. The purpose of this section is to restore a database, so select
Restore database and then Restore latest state to SQL1

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7. The restore process will then be calculated, after which a confirmation window will appear to
perform the database restore. In the interest of time, Cancel the restore and exit from the Veeam
Explorer.

8. Close the VEEAM Explorer for SQL Server window to exit the restore scenario.

Application Item Restore for Active Directory

The purpose of this section is to delete a user from the running production Active Directory
on the AD1 server, then use VBR to restore the database at a point before the user was
deleted.

1. Return to WKST1 and click the Windows icon in the lower left-hand corner and select Remote
Desktop Connection.

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2. From the pull-down menu, select ad1, then click Connect to log into AD1.

3. On the AD1 taskbar, click the Active Directory Users and Computers.

4. Click the Management OU in the side panel, and right-click any user in the work pane. Select
Delete from the resulting menu to delete the user.

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5. Click Yes at the confirmation pop-up.

6. Return to WKST1 and reopen the VB1 RDP window.

7. In Veeam, click Home in the lower navigation pane. Click Backups > Disk in the inventory pane.

8. Either right-click AD1 and choose Restore Application Items > Microsoft Active Directory
Objects or select the Application Items action from the action bar, and then Microsoft Active
Directory.

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9. Click a restore point and click Next.

10. In the Reason screen, enter a reason for the restore and click Next.

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11. At the Summary screen, click Browse.

12. The Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory automatically launches.

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13. The Veeam Explorer displays the Active Directory information to the user in a format similar to the
native Microsoft Active Directory Users and Computers MMC. Expand dcloud.cisco.com > Users
and Computers, then select Management in the navigation pane.

14. Click the Home tab in the top action bar, and click the Compare with Production and Show
Changed Objects Only buttons one at a time. This is a very useful feature for AD
administrators so that they can compare the backup to the actual running Active Directory
and show only changes between the two versions.

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15. In the working area, right click the “Yogi Berra” user previously deleted and click Restore
objects to ad1.dcloud.cisco.com.

16. A confirmation window will appear confirming the restore succeeded. Click OK to close the
confirmation window.

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17. Return to WKST1 and open the RDP window for AD1. In the Active Directory Users and Computers
window, right-click Management and click Refresh. The previously deleted user will now appear,
verifying the restore was successful.

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What’s Next?
Check out the related technology information:

• https://www.veeam.com/vm-backup-recovery-replication-software.html

• https://www.veeam.com/wp-cisco-ucs-solution-brief.html

• https://www.veeam.com/wp-veeam-availability-cisco-ucs-deployment-
guide.html

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