Veeam Backup & Replication v11 marked the initial launch of Continuous Data Protection (CDP), which provides the lowest recovery point objectives (RPOs) for organizations that can’t afford to lose data or time.
With Veeam Backup & Replication v12, support for Veeam Cloud Connect and VMware Cloud Director was introduced, thus allowing Veeam Cloud & Service Providers (VCSP) to leverage CDP in addition to snapshot-based replication to start building truly compelling DRaaS offerings for remote customers. This included single port access and data transfer, multi-tenancy with out-of-the-box self-service capabilities, and network extension appliance support to enable secure connectivity between customer and service provider clouds during disaster recovery (DR).
Listening to the feedback from our VCSP community, the Veeam R&D team kept iterating and improving the CDP engine. As a result, Veeam is excited to introduce improved scalability and new functionalities with our latest version of Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1.
This blog outlines the key features of this V12.1 release to help service providers further differentiate their DRaaS offerings and deliver key outcomes to their customers.
#1: Up to Three Times Better Scalability and Service Cost Optimization
According to tests using V12.1, a single Veeam Backup & Replication server (16 vCPU cores, 32GB RAM) can protect 2000 VMs (3 virtual disks each) with 15-second recovery point objectives (RPOs), all by using CDP policies. While that’s not a hard limit, it’s already up to three times more protected VMs compared to V12’s tests.
Other internal scalability tests have shown stable performances for up to 250 VMs (i.e., 500 virtual disks) per target ESXi host. For service providers, in addition to stable performance, this provides you with a more appealing cost of running the service, since you can pack more replica VMs on fewer target hosts.
#2: NEW I/O Anomaly Visualizer
While performing a failover in the restore point selection wizard, a significant I/O throughput is now highlighted right on the point-in-time selection ribbon. This makes it easy to identify the moment when many changes were made within the VM, or potential ransomware activity. With this information and new visual, it’s easier than ever to locate and select the restore point you need to reinstate VMs right before the incident.
#3: NEW Planned CDP Failover
In addition to existing partial failovers and full site failovers, we are introducing planned CDP failovers too. Now you can perform a smooth manual switch between production and replica VMs with little to no interruptions for customer production application operations.
This means a customer can schedule infrastructure maintenance without putting mission-critical applications offline. Another common scenario is switching the business over to a DR site in anticipation of a natural disaster (like a hurricane). Once the production environment goes back to normal, the organization can use failback to transfer changes back to production VMs.
Lastly, this also gives you an easy migration path to lift your customers’ applications from on-premises onto your IaaS platform that runs vSphere and VMware Cloud Director, all without losing any data.
#4: NEW File-Level Restore
This latest release also brings file-level restore functionality, which is especially useful in the context of CDP. Let me give you an example:
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A customer is running a virtual server with shared folders, and it gets hit by ransomware. With regular backups or snapshot-based replications occurring once a day, your customer may lose up to 24 hours of data before the attack. However, if this VM was processed by CDP Policy, your tenant could simply restore specific files or folders to their latest valid state in just a few minutes. This can all be done self-service, which means that tenants can do this without having to make any calls to service providers or logging support tickets, thus streamlining the user experience and preserving data integrity and business continuity. |
#5: NEW Session Details on Veeam Cloud Connect Servers
For each tenant VM that’s processed by CDP Policy, you can access a detailed session view on the Veeam Cloud Connect server as well. This includes details like the amount of transferred data, bottleneck, last long-term restore point-in-time, etc.
To give your customers better visibility and insight into their CDP session results, you can use the Veeam Service Provider Console built-in report, which obtains information about whether VMs in CDP policies meet your service level agreement (SLA) requirements. Corresponding data is also available via REST API, so you can incorporate those metrics onto your own cloud portal as well.
Lastly, you can gain even better visibility over CDP Policy performance and results via Veeam ONE’s reporting capabilities, including a CDP SLA Compliance report:
All-In-One Toolbox
By combining CDP with existing backup and snapshot-based replication capabilities, service providers can protect any customer workload, regardless of platform while meeting their RPO/RTO requirements and SLAs.
- Backup copy jobs for workloads running in any platform, with up to a 24-hour RPO requirement.
- Replication jobs for vSphere/Hyper-V workloads, which must be available on DR locations at any moment, with low to mid I/O throughput, and an 8- to 24-hour RPO requirement.
- CDP Policy for mission-critical and high I/O throughput vSphere workloads with a near-zero RPO requirement.
So, in the end, by using a single Veeam Cloud Connect server (with Veeam Service Provider Console acting as a management plane), you can provide a comprehensive service offering for off-site backup and DR solutions while meeting RPO and RTO expectations with Veeam Data Platform.
Plus, don’t forget, that both replication and CDP supports network-extension appliances to stretch the networking between tenant production environments and a service provider’s DR in a secure, multi-tenant way.
To learn more about the CDP configuration process looks from the tenant side, check out this video:
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap! As you can see with this V12.1 release, we introduced several new features as well as the enhancements to the engine to allow you to create the best DRaaS offering.
Now it’s time to test, build and start providing this service for your customers. Also, if DNS is configured correctly and after onboarding your first customers to CDP-based DRaaS, make sure to apply for the DRaaS VCSP Competency. By getting this badge, you are not just making yourself distinct from other VCSPs, but it’ll be also easier to find your service in our Find a Partner directory.
If you want to learn more about this CDP technology, check out this technical webinar.
