Transcript
Engineer at Veeam and I will be showing you and talking about how to add immutable backup storage using the Veeam Hardware Repository. Before digging too deep into Veeam Hardware Repository, I want to talk about the different supported immutability options. So first off, we have the Veeam Hardware Repository. The second option is the object storage with its object log for both public cloud and on-premise free compatible storage. And the third option is the deduplicating storage appliances. Talking about the Veeam Hardware Repository, we have two different deployment options. We have the first one with Veeam infrastructure appliance. That's the purpose-built appliance by Veeam that is pre-hardened and secured from day one. And it's been stripped of everything not required for running the Veeam components. This is a great deployment option since it's predictable and simple. Now it does come with some minimum system requirements. The first two CPU and memory is quite low, so these needs to be changed depending on how many backups you're going to run at the same time to your repository. So the concurrent tasks, those are the system requirements, the minimum one for the OS and the server itself. The other one is the two disks. That is a hard requirement actually. So the 120 gigabytes for each disk is a hard requirement. So if, for example, those disks are what's presented to the installer. So if you're using RAID, for example, and using 120 gigabyte drives in a RAID 1, the RAID might remove some of the space. So it might be presented as a 118 gigabyte drive. That will not be accepted and the installer will fail. So keep that in mind. Same thing for the repository disk, the second disk. Those disks can be RAID 60, for example. You have multiple drives that is being RAIDed into one virtual drive or logical drive. Just keep in mind you can use whatever drives you like more or less, but the minimum capacity needs to be at least 120 gigabytes. Keep that in mind. That is a hard requirement. Otherwise, the installer will fail. The other option is using BIM Hardware Repository with your own custom Linux, so your choice of Linux. However, you cannot use any distribution that you like. You have to use one of the supported ones, which is shown on the screen right now. So those are the Debian, Red Hat, Rocky Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu. Now, this is the current supported distributions and also the versions. Please have a look at the user guide in Help Center to find out what supported distributions we have currently and also what versions. Keep track of that because it's going to change over time. But without further ado, let's jump into the demo. I'm going to show you how to install the BIM Infrastructure Appliance and the BIM Hardware Repository. All right, so here I have booted up on the BIM Infrastructure Appliance ISO and I'm presenting with three options. I'm going to select the third one, which is the BIM Hardware Repository. Then I'm presenting with three different options as well, install, upgrade, and reinstall. Since this is a fresh install, I'm going to select the first option. While this installer loads in, I want to explain some of the different options there. Fresh install is going to wipe everything. We're going to have a safety question soon, which is going to ask, are you okay with erasing everything? And why I'm bringing this up is because if you have a burned disk, for example, that has data that you don't want to get rid of, you don't want to wipe it, wipe it, then please disconnect it from the server because otherwise it's going to steal all the drives, all the storage it can see, and bundle it to one pool. So keep that in mind, that is very important, otherwise all the data will be wiped. And here is the security question or the safety question. So are you okay with this? And for me, I only have two drives and those two drives are wiped and clean, so I'm ready to go. Now it's going to install, it will take a couple of minutes. So when we get back, we're going to start configuring the different options, so hostname, IP address, time zone, et cetera, all the good stuff. But for the installation, this is it. All right, so the installation is done and we are presented with the license agreement. So we're going to go ahead and accept, and we give it a hostname, I'll call my via VHR, next. And then we set up the networking, you can use DHCP, I'm going to use static IP address. And then we have DNS, and then we hit apply. And then we go to next. Here we set up the time zone, so I'm living in Sweden, so I'm going to select Stockholm. And time is especially important here. So you want to be able to sync this setting, because time needs to be synced between the backup server and immutable storage. So immutability time is done correctly. Otherwise, there will be a mismatch and immutability will expire earlier than it's supposed to be, or prolong. So it's syncing here, everything is okay. Then we can go to next, then we have to set up a password. And we go to next, and then we need to set up a multi-factor authentication, because this is a secured installation, right? And then this, and I get a code. The first time, which is going to be used every time, of course, but it changes. Then we go to next. Then we come to the security officer. The security officer is a role that just approves or denies sensitive actions. So it's not a required role per se, but it does increase the security of the server. So for production environments and production installations, I would highly advise you to set this up, because if you don't do it in this step, you cannot add it afterwards. So keep that in mind. If you disable it, like I'm going to do here, I'm going to skip it, because of the simplicity of the demo. But keep that in mind. If you skip it here, you cannot add it later in the future. Then you would have to reinstall. I'm going to hit next. I'm going to review my settings, and they look good. So then I'm just going to hit finish. So now it's going to apply the configuration I have selected, and the next step is to add the Veeam hardware repository that we just installed and configured into the Veeam Cloud Connect server. All right, so here I have the Cloud Connect server. I'm on the home page. We want to go to backup infrastructure, and then we go to backup repositories, and we select or click on add repository. We select direct attached storage, and then the Linux hardware repository. We give it a name. So mine is vmvhr-repo1, for example. Then we go to next. Now I don't have any repository server added yet. I haven't added the Veeam hardware repository server, so that's what we're going to have to do. Click add new. Then we enter the address of the server. Click next. Now for the infrastructure appliance Veeam hardware repository, we can select connect using certificate-based authentication. That's the recommended one. However, if you have used your own custom Linux distribution, then you would have to use single-use SSH credentials. This was the same for version 12. I'm running version 14 now, but I'm going to select the first option. I can also check this optional components and advanced connection settings, and if I go to components, you can see we have a lot of different components here that we want to install. You can uncheck them if you like. However, when we install it with Veeam hardware repository, it cannot hold anything else than the Veeam hardware repository itself. So these components are actually going to be skipped. I'm going to have them checked just to show you what it looks like. I'm going to be presented with the certificate. I'm trusting this server, so I'm going to click yes. As you can see, it says it's going to be installed, but you will see now when it runs the installation that it's going to skip them. As you can see here, they've been skipped because it's restricted on this particular role of the server. Keep that in mind. You cannot do anything wrong really if you don't remember them, for example. Then don't worry, they will not be enabled. You will keep your Veeam hardware repository as secure and safe every time you install it. That makes this installation very predictable and very easy to configure and manage. Everything has been collected. It has installed some updates. In this case, the host is being mentioned as the Veeam hardware repository. If it needs a reboot, it's going to be automatically rebooted. That's good. It also means that we are up to date and everything. Then we click next. Everything has been okay, so we click finish. Now we have the repository server here. Then we can click populate to see the different apps that we have available to us. As you can see here, we have the Veeam repo, the data volume. It's presenting us with where we can mount backups or where we're going to mount backups. Where we can mount backups or where we're going to put the backups. We can also see the full capacity and what's free. This is my secondary drive. That's 200 gigabytes. We can go past the folder and select Veeam, backup, and in here. If you want to add multiple repositories, let's say for example you have the need to have one repository with 30 days immutability and the other one with 60 days, then you can create a separate folder here, naming it perhaps backup early days. Didn't quite select my newly created folder. There we go. We're going to use FastClone, of course. We want to use the immutability setting, so selecting 30 days here. We can also limit the concurrent tasks. How many backups do we want to run against our repository? This requires, if you expand this or increase this, then obviously you need more IO, more resources on the server. Keep this in mind. You don't want to set this too high. Then we click next. Then we select the mount server, just as any other type of repository. I'm going to select next and then we click apply. Now this process is the exact same for Veeam backup replication and cloud connect. There is no difference. If you're doing this for a Veeam backup replication server, the steps are the exact same. The only difference is with the Veeam cloud connect, is of course that you have cloud repositories, but those are virtual or logical repositories based on the actual hardware repository. Everything is good and dandy. We click finish. As you can see, I have my hardened repository here. I can select and create multiple from the same hardware, just as I showed you with the different folders, but there is nothing more to it. It's this simple and easy. Thank you for watching and see you next time.
