SLA based BackupDate 6/7/2015

Important Note: As a Veeam employee, many of my posts will be utilizing Veeam products. My posts are not reflecting any official instruction/recommendation/preferences etc.… from Veeam as corporate. My posts reflect my own experience without any connection to Veeam as a company.

For a long time now, this backup challenge has been turning over in my mind. Making me a little restless in finding an answer. But now I’ve got a solution.

I’ve been trying to find a better and easy way to help my customers apply SLAs to their backups. Finally, after gaining more experience through Veeam, the rewards have come to fruition and many of the features Veeam offers can now apply to a SLA based backup in an easier, more productive way. One of the many features a Veeam backup and replication offers is a selection set of VM's using VMware Tags. That you can base an actual SLA backup policy on. In this post, I want to provide a step-by-step process of how to deploy the SLA based backup using Veeam and VMware Tags. And start this journey through the customer’s challenges, requirements, process, and deployment. So let’s take one customer example: The Scenario:Company A is interested in having a backup and recovery solution based on the requirements below:

1. Simplified backup and recovery process.2. Reducing cost of ownership

a. The cost of managing backups.b. Restoration manpower costs.c. Restore flexibility (AD, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint item restores).

3. Backup to a cloud storage of old data.4. Full monitoring and reporting visibility.

Current Challenges:

1. Overloaded IT Staff.2. A difficult recovery process.3. No monitoring and reporting visibility.

I’ll look to keep things as simple as possible, as the aim is to show how to use Tags to achieve an easy and straightforward SLA based backup based on the above customer requirements. The first thing Company A must do is change their mindset from just a desire to backup their business data to one of enabling their services (servers) to reduce applications/services downtime costs. In order to provide solutions to this crucial business question Company A must start with Data classification. What’s data classification? It’s the fastest and easiest way to define the company’s maximum tolerance of a service downtime, which is unique for each company.

The Process:As we discussed before, Company A needs to go through a process of data classifications. There’s numerous ways to classify company data. I take a simple approach and use the business tolerance for downtime by splitting the company data into three categories, Business Critical, Business Vital and Business Static data.

So what exactly are these categories?

Business critical: A set of Data/services that will cause significant damage to the business even by a short period of disruption. They must be kept online, no matter what. Business Vital: A set of Data/services which are important to the daily operations of the business.

Business Static: A set of retired Data/services that are no longer on the front line but still vital for the overall service delivery of the business. Once the above have been identified, by talking with each of the company departments (stakeholders) on how they use or leverage their data, Company A can apply an SLA for each of the above categories based on their business tolerance to downtime. The Infrastructure:Company A has 2 ESX(i) hosts with 7 VM's running on one ESX(i) host as below: DC2Srv - Domain Controller.AppSrv - Application Server.Ex14Srv - Exchange Server.FsSrv - File and Share Server.SpSrv - Sharepoint Server.SqlSrv - MS SQL Server. And VCCSrv - Legacy Application server. After the Data classification session, the below classification decision is made:

Business critical Business vital Business Static

DC2SrvAppSrvSQL

Ex14SrvSpSrvFsSrv

VCCSrv

The Solution:Time to commence building the SLA Groups. The selected approach uses the below SLA definitions: Gold (Business Critical) requires the highest level of SLA (RPO of 10 min).Silver (Business Vital) requires a middle level of SLA (RPO of 1 hour).Bronze (Business Static) requires the lowest level of SLA (RPO of 24 hours or 1 Day).

Business critical Business vital Business Static

DC2SrvAppSrvSQL

Ex14SrvSpSrvFsSrv

VCCSrv

Gold Silver Bronze

The Deployment:Finally the fun part.After the final decision by stakeholders, Company A arrives at the stage where its deployment process can begin. I’m going to assume you already have Veeam installed and configured (as that topic falls outside my post). To kick off the deployment, Company A must commence preparation of the VMware infrastructure using the agreed way to backup the company VM's based on the chosen SLA using VMware Tags.

Note: This process can be a time consuming process if VMware tags or Folders aren’t currently deployed and used. But the good news is this task only needs to be done once. Once deployed and agreed, customer A can modify the VM template for each Tag/Folder category for future use.

A. VMware side:The next step is to Add VMware Tags to each of the VM's as below:

a. Create a VMware Tag Category

b. Create a Tag

c. Assign the Tag category to each of the servers

B. Veeam Backup side:Open Veeam Backup, Replication GUI and create a new job as below:

Silver

The lack of monitoring and reporting is the key standout challenge Company A would face. But it’s easy to fix, Veeam software provide an excellent tool for Monitoring, Reporting and Capacity planning of the virtual infrastructure and for the backup infrastructure (Veeam backup). With this great tool, company A can configure the monitoring and reporting of every backup job created on the previous sections.

To configure the SLA reporting and monitoring, company A must follow the next steps. First we will create the SLA report based on the VMware Tags.

Run VeeamOne Business View:

Browse to “Configuration – Categories” and then Add a new Category

In V9, with this category already available, delete and create a new category with the same name as below:

Browse to Groups – SLA

And create 3 categories, naming them Gold, Silver, and Bronze:

Once all the categories added, time to add an intelligent to these categories, meaning, list all the VM’s with Gold Tags under Gold_SLA etc… to do so, press on the Group Expression button and add the below:

CASE

WHEN Tag("SLA_Cat") = "Gold_SLA" THEN "Gold_SLA"

WHEN Tag("SLA_Cat") = "Silver_SLA" THEN "Silver_SLA"

WHEN Tag("SLA_Cat") = "Bronze_SLA" THEN "Bronze_SLA"

ELSE "Other"

END

After creating the configuration and in order for the configuration to take effect immediately, you need to browse to Server – Configuration (Veeam Reporting WebGUI) and select “Object properties collection task” – and choose to run it now. Otherwise you will need to wait for the next default collection run at 3am.

Monitoring the performance of the SLA categories:

The below customized Dashboard is just an example to show how you can configure the dashboard for your company specific monitoring needs.

To build a monitoring SLA Dashboard:

1. Run VeeamOne Reporter

2. Add a Dashboard

By pressing on the +

3. Access the new created tile (Gold_SLA)

4. Add the first information view. For this demo, I will add the below info for each of the SLA’s:

A. Backup summary view.B. VM Weekly Growth Rate.

C. Alarm for Disk Space.

A. Backup Summary view configuration:

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

Add widget:

C.

Once Created, you will be able to share the Overview widget URL using the following steps:

Using the URL:

As you can see, Veeam provides a great way of applying SLAs to the backup jobs. Whether you wish to use the Tags or VMware folders, the process will always be the same. Hope this post has shed some light on simplifying SLA based backups so you can add another great solution to your toolbox.

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