Transcript
Hi, welcome to VCSP Tech Hub. My name is Brandon McCoy, and today's video is all about managing your customers' Veeam backup and replication instances directly through the Veeam Service Provider Console. Quick look at the agenda, we're going to kick things off with a little how-to. How do I get my customers' Veeam backup servers connected to the Service Provider Console in the first place? So to do that, we're going to be talking about the Veeam Management Agent, which is a critical component to get the connectivity between the console and the customer Veeam servers, as well as how Cloud Connect plays a role in that. Then we're going to talk about deploying backup and replication to a remote computer, as well as upgrading and updating existing backup servers. We're going to transition into licensing very quickly. There's a whole other video on licensing, the deep dives. So we're just going to spend a moment talking about it here from a feature perspective, and then we're going to round things out with capabilities and limitations, what you can and can't do from the console to your customers' Veeam servers, and the differences between remote Veeam servers and internal Veeam servers when it comes to those features and limitations. Got a lot to cover, so let's jump right into the demo lab. Here we are in the demo lab. By the way, if you hear me say VBR, I'm referring to Veeam backup and replication. And if you hear me say VSPC, I'm referring to the Veeam Service Provider Console. Those are the acronyms that we typically use, and hopefully you don't mind me using them here just to keep things simple. Now, the first thing I want to talk about is the management agent, and I also want to talk about CloudConnect. Now, CloudConnect is a required component for the Service Provider Console to work. That's what gives the connectivity between you and the customer without any kind of VPNs. The management agent is what is installed on both your CloudConnect servers as well as all the customer VBRs so that they will show up in the Service Provider Console, and also so we can identify which customer a particular Veeam server belongs to. If I click on configuration here and the getting started tab, I've got this register your first Veeam CloudConnect server. This is hopefully something that you've already done based on the other videos. This was something that has to be set up first before you can even create a company and or connect a customer's Veeam server. So I've got a management agent installed. This is what happens when you add a CloudConnect server in this tab here. It installs the management agent. So let's exit out. Now, in order to get a management agent on the customer Veeam server, I first have to create a company. So that is also in another video and something that you should have done prior to this step. But I want to talk about creating the company just for a moment because that information is contained in the management agent. So let's just pick a customer here. I'm going to edit them, change them real quick so I can get to the next step. So the user info right here, you're going to create a username and password. And when you're connecting your Veeam customer to your service provider console, it's going to ask for the username and password and it's going to ask for the address of your CloudConnect gateway. That's how we will know that this Veeam server belongs to customer A. So hopefully we've already got a customer created with a username and password. Real quick, this discovery tab here, if I click on discovered computers, these are all of the machines that have a management agent installed on them. And then they've got a list of whatever Veeam product is associated with that machine. I can click download management agent here for Windows and I could manually install the management agent on a customer Veeam server. But I can actually do it from backup and replication. So that's what we're going to do. That's the easiest way. But I did want to show you this. We're going to come back to this later when we talk about internal Veeam servers in hosted IaaS scenarios. So let's head over to a customer Veeam server, keeping in mind that we've already connected our CloudConnect to the service provider console. So we have the management agent on the service provider side and we've created a customer profile with the username and password. Here we are at the customer side. The first thing I want to do is I want to go to backup infrastructure. I want to go to service providers and I'm going to add service provider. Now as you can see here, I've already created one in the lab. So I'm just going to edit the existing one. So the first thing it's going to ask for is the DNS or the IP address of your cloud gateway. So you know this is an example.com. Port 6180 is how the Veeam server connects to CloudConnect and then CloudConnect is going to relay that information to the service provider console. But in order for it to do that, it needs the management agent. All you have to do is check this box. So this is a requirement in order for us to install that management agent onto the machine. Check this box equals download the management agent. So simple but crucial step. Once I've got that, I'll click next. We're going to verify the SSL certificate on your CloudConnect. If you see this, it's just because you're using a Veeam self-signed certificate. We'll click okay. The username and password that I just referred to, that's what you'll enter in here. Putting in that username and password. Apply. We're going to verify that everything is correct. So here you'll see where it says updating remote management agent settings. That is the management agent that is either being downloaded or in my case just being reconfigured, reset. So this looks like it's finished. And while this is updating everything, I just want to quickly show you, close that, that if I search here for Veeam, I'll see my Veeam management agent. I always call it the blue fidget spinner. It's a good way to identify it when you're looking for it in services. And again, this is typically the reason for any kind of big issues like your license reporting is inaccurate. You're not seeing jobs show up. Customers not, the alarms aren't going off. Go into the customer's Veeam server. Look for the Veeam management agent. Make sure that you've got a green checkbox. It's reconnecting right now. Just verifying the cloud gateway and that port 6180. So that is what you should see. All right, so let's go on back over to the service provider console. And I'm back in discovery. So under discovered computers, again, these are any computers that have a management agent. Here's the one I just did. And then I can go to backup servers and I will see the actual Veeam backup and replication instance. This should pop up right away. It'll take a few minutes before it shows up as a backup server. So just give it like, you know, three to five minutes. You should see it show up. Boom. I can do things like remove the agent. I can reboot the server or just reboot the Veeam services. I can grab logs. We're going to get into some of this other stuff we can do in just a moment. Let's go back to discovered computers. And we're going to now talk about what kind of deployment options in terms of installation, upgrading and patching your existing Veeam servers. So first, we're going to talk about installing backup and replication directly from the console. So starting from version 12, you can do major version upgrades and you can also push out backup and replication. I'm not going to go step by step because we just don't have enough time, but this should give you a good idea of what you can do and where to start. So I'm actually going to pick a different server because this is the one we added, but it's already got Veeam installed on it. I'm going to instead select another machine. Now, this is a Windows machine that has the management agent installed, but there's no Veeam product. And so I'm going to click install backup server and I can download this or I can just go to the install tab here and I can pull the latest ISO from the Veeam website. I can also pull a saved file on a file share that I have somewhere. I could do a previously downloaded version. Maybe you're looking for an older version. So just pick the most recent one. And then it would ask for the credentials for this machine. It would ask for you to fill out an XML file. That's going to have some options you need to edit the XML file and say, you know, does this have a license or do you want to use Postgres or SQL and just the typical things that would be prompted for in a traditional installation of VBR. And you could assign your license, assign it to a company, and you can even schedule when you would like the installation to happen. So now let's go back over to backup server. So these are the features you can accomplish when you've already got backup and replication installed. So I'm going to choose the one we downloaded earlier. Under manage updates, I can do a patch. So just grab the latest hotfix. I can download an upgrade file or upgrade. So very similar to the installation, just from a upgrading to major versions again, starting from version 12. So let's keep moving and let's get into licensing. Now I have another video where I deep dive into licensing, the integration with Pulse, usage reporting, all that stuff. For this video, I'm really just talking about the fact that you can manage your licensing with VBR servers. So let's take a look at it very quickly. Now if I go to configuration and the plugin library, this is where you integrate your Pulse portal with the service provider console. I've already created a license, assigned it to a company, and Pulse matched that company with the service provider console company, Atlantis Technology, that we've been working with. Now I'm going to push that license out. So let's just show it real quick. So from the licensing tab right here, if I go to Veeam backup and replication and I click on the Veeam server, the company that I want, I can click install from VCSP Pulse and it'll show me any license that's been assigned to that customer in Pulse. Now if you're watching this video and you're trying to push out a license and you don't see this, it's probably because you didn't assign the customer to a Pulse account. You have to be registered. The customer has to be a registered entry in Pulse and you have to assign that license to that customer. I really recommend that you watch the video on licensing Pulse integration through the console. I really dive deeper into it, but this is just to kind of show you that, hey, this is another feature of managing VBRs through the console. Okay. All right. So we're almost finished here. I want to round things out with the management capabilities. So what can you do and not do around job functionality, right? And visibility. So let's go under management and backup jobs. Now I want to preface this and we're going to explore both, but there's two types of VBR servers when it comes to the service provider console. One is remote and that's what most service providers are managing is customers remote VBR servers somewhere out there in the world. And then you've got your internal VBR servers. This is a hosted IaaS scenario. So you have a data center, the customer's production workloads live in that data center and your internal Veeam server manages those workloads. It may even be multi-tenanted. And we're going to talk about that for this first part, this is for remote VBR servers. And also keep in mind that as versions change, new features are updated. So right now we're on version 8.1. So these are the features and limitations of remote VBR job management from the console. So here I can see virtual machines and I can see that I've got two different companies. I've got some Veeam servers here so I can see the success of those jobs. I can start, stop, retry, enable, disable, and that's it. I cannot create jobs. I cannot edit existing jobs and I cannot do any type of restores. Now you will notice a tab here that says job and it says new. Hey I thought you said I couldn't create jobs here. Well that is for the hosted VBR servers. So we'll get into that in just one second but let's just kind of finish up here. So when it comes to remote backup and replication, you cannot really manage the job. Start, stop, and you can get visibility. I can click on one of these and see all the machines in the job. I can see the size of the backup. So lots of great information. If I go to my active alarms I can see all the information about like a job failed, a job took too long. So it's more visibility here when it comes to remote VBRs. Now when it comes to hosted, so this VBR is internal. Now first of all how does the service provider console know the difference? Well let's go back to the management agents. If I go down to the discovery tab here, rather than from your internal Veeam server where earlier I went to add the service provider, put in the DNS, clicked that check box, installed the management agent. Instead what I will do is I will go to discovered computers, download management agent, select windows, and I'm going to do this manually. Because if you do it from the Veeam server and you add service provider, it's looking for cloud connect. And as you recall cloud connect is how remote VBR servers can talk to your console across different networks. Well this is an internal management agent and the difference is it's not looking for cloud connect, it's looking for your service provider console. So I would click company and I would select this first one. This is the name of my company, US Demo Lab, and this is a local network internal usage. And the management agent again is not looking for cloud connect on 6180, it's looking for the service provider console on port 9999. So I would download that, install that onto my local machine, and I would also need to configure it. So if I go back to companies and I select, I believe this is my internal, and I edit this company. When I get to services here I need to specify that this is a hosted Veeam server, specify which server it is, the repository that I have access to. Once that's been done now I can actually do some job management. I still can't do any type of restores, but I can say job, new job, vSphere. You can see that it automatically picked that company because that's the only one that supports it. And I can come in here and I can say, hey why don't you back up this. I don't have any advanced options like compression settings and things like that. It's really just, you know, pick a location, how many days would you like it to be backed up for. I can do some GFS, I can encrypt the backup, I can schedule it, and I can run that job. I can also assign existing jobs to a specific company. So I can create a bunch of jobs. This is good for multi-tenancy. So you got one Veeam server and the service provider console sees a company equals a VBR. So if you have multiple customers on one VBR, you can say this job is for company A and that job is for company B. You can also create different reports and alarms for those customers so that all of the things that are happening on a particular VBR server can be dispersed among the various customers that are on that Veeam server. That's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for your time. Please make sure to check out the other VCSP Tech Hub videos. We'll see you next time.
