Introduction
Veeam product management alliances completed a project to create a sample workflow for Cisco Intersight Orchestration. This sample workflow automates the deployment of Veeam Agents to newly provisioned bare-metal servers and creates data protection policies for these new servers.
What Is Cisco Intersight Orchestration?
Cisco Intersight Orchestration simplifies the orchestration and automation process for infrastructures and workloads across the hybrid cloud by providing an easy-to-use workflow designer. Based on a library of multi-domain tasks (either custom or provided by Cisco), Cisco Intersight Orchestration enables users to create workflows quickly and easily. This enables the automation and deployment of any infrastructure resource, including servers, virtual machines (VMs), networks and applications. Customers benefit from Cisco Intersight Orchestration by reducing the complexity that comes with managing their hybrid IT environment.
Why Did Veeam Build a Solution With Cisco Intersight Orchestration?
The benefits of IT automation are well documented, including reduced operating costs, increased productivity, reduced errors and improved overall systems flexibility. Leveraging Cisco Intersight Orchestration to automate Veeam Backup & Replication tasks and workflows enable IT organizations to bring these benefits to hybrid cloud data management. With automation like Cisco Intersight Orchestration, Veeam Backup & Replication’s infrastructure and policies can be deployed, configured and optimized at a speed that is unachievable when performed manually. This frees up the most expensive IT resource — the IT staff — to focus on things that are more important to the organization.
What Did Veeam Build With Cisco Intersight Orchestration?
Veeam’s Cisco Alliance solutions architecture team built a sample Cisco Intersight Orchestration workflow to demonstrate the value of automating your Veeam Backup & Replication tasks and workflows in Cisco Intersight Orchestration. This sample workflow (available on VeeamHub and from Cisco Intersight Orchestration Community) showcases the following use case:
An IT organization has just purchased Cisco UCS servers to run Windows or Linux-based workloads, like databases, on bare-metal servers. IT leverages Cisco Intersight Orchestration to provision and deploy everything from the UCS Server Profiles to the OS all the way through the deployment and configuration of the database software. IT also wants to ensure that all the new physical database servers will be protected with the company’s database server backup policy. Because these are bare-metal servers, Veeam Agents will need to be deployed and those agents will be added to a Veeam protection group that is scheduled to run a backup job every day.
To see Veeam Backup & Replication and Cisco Intersight Orchestration in action together, check out this demonstration video:
This is but one example of a Veeam workflow being automated by Cisco Intersight Orchestration. Other automation examples include:
- The protection of new VMs
- New Edge site data protection infrastructure and policies
- Creation of cloud-based storage for off-site backup storage
Conclusion
Cisco Intersight Orchestration delivers automation for Veeam’s comprehensive data protection across hybrid cloud environments. Cisco Intersight Orchestration leverages standard APIs, like RESTful API, for the deployment, configuration and setup of Veeam components and policies to deliver the benefits of automation.
If you are not an existing customer of Cisco Intersight or Veeam Backup & Replication, please consider taking a test drive of these products in your IT environment. Please follow these links for a free trial of Cisco Intersight or a free trial of Veeam Backup & Replication. For existing customers, please consider this solution in your own IT environment.