Preparing for Veeam Cloud Connect

Overview

Before implementing Veeam Cloud Connect Backup or Replication services, there are several things you should evaluate to ensure that your environment is as protected as possible from disaster. This article will provide you with the resources necessary to analyze and harden your Veeam Backup & Replication environment.

Triage

As part of the pre-sales process at OffsiteDataSync, you should be prepared to answer the following questions:

1. What RTPO is needed for the offsite data?
2. What workloads are being protected? (i.e. Hyper-V, vSphere, vCloud Director, Nutanix AHV, Physical workloads, Azure, AWS)
3. What is the expected retention of the offsite data? (i.e. 7 days, plus 3 weeklies and 3 monthlies)
4. What is the expected data footprint?
5. What are the currently provisioned vCPU and RAM resources?
6. How many cloud repositories are needed? There should be one cloud repository for every Veeam Backup & Replication server that will be transmitting data offsite

While attempting to answer these questions, you may find the following resources useful:

• Veeam ONE (recommended) - Infrastructure monitoring and reporting tool
• RVTools - VMware resource usage collection
• Hyper-V VHDX Size Collector - Hyper-V data footprint collection script
• Hyper-V CPU and RAM Collector - Hyper-V vCPU and RAM collection script
• Veeam Backup Capacity Calculator - Veeam's official tool for calculating BaaS and Archive usage space

Optimization and Hardening

Once the questions in the previous section have been given to your assigned salesperson at CyberFortress, you should begin assessing your environment to ensure that the proper backup infrastructure is in place and configured for your workloads. The best place to begin is with the Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices Guide and Veeam User Guides. More specifically, the key areas of focus during optimization and hardening should be:

1. Are my VBR server and database sized properly?
2. Are my backup proxies sized properly and utilizing the best transport mode?
3. Are my backup repositories configured within best practices?
   1. Windows
   2. Linux
1. Are they configured for the best performance possible?
2. Are they properly hardened against malicious actors?
4. Should I utilize WAN accelerators and how should I size them?
5. Is DNS resolution working properly in my environment?
6. Is my vSphere environment optimized for Veeam?
7. Is network traffic properly encrypted?
8. Are my Veeam components properly hardened?
9. Are my Veeam components secured properly from my domain?
10. Are my backups encrypted?
11. Are my backups performing integrity health checks?
12. Are my backups utilizing guest processing, such as application-aware processing?
13. Can my users perform self-service file restores?

Once you have assessed your environment against these criteria, you are ready to begin implementing off-site protection with CyberFortress. As an added bonus, you will likely now see better backup and restore performance with existing Veeam protection and be more resistant to attacks orchestrated by malicious actors.

Additional Resources

Want to learn more about optimizing Veeam environments? Consider taking the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) and Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) training!