Working with VMware vCloud Director

Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager allows you to perform the following operations with VMware vCloud Director (vCD) objects:

• Back up VMs, vApps and other containers
• Restore VMs and vApps
• Restore VM guest OS files
• Replicate vApps and other containers and fail over to their replicas

vCD service providers can allow self-service restore operations to their customers in the web UI based on Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.

• Service provider administrators have administrative rights in Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. Thus, they have access to the Configuration view of Enterprise Manager where they can configure vCD organization configurations, including repository quota and backup job template. These administrators typically have access to Veeam Backup & Replication console that controls vCD as part of backup infrastructure on the provider side.
• Members of vCD organizations do not need administrative rights for Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager — instead, they get access to Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal. There they can manage their vCD jobs, as well as restore VMs, files and application items within their scope.

How It Works

Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager uses native vCD authentication to authorize users that log in to Enterprise Manager. The authentication process and components interactions are shown in the figure below.

This approach helps to streamline administration and management tasks for service providers, as now they need to configure a tenant account only once in vCD, and then any change like a new password or a disable operation will be immediately reflected in Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.

What Service Provider Administrators Can Do

Service provider administrators can perform the following operations:

• Configure settings for their tenants (vCD organizations), including backup job templates to be used, backup destination and repository quota.
• Restrict job scheduling for particular tenants, for example, prevent the jobs from running too often. Administrators can even completely prohibit the tenant's ability to schedule jobs, instead setting the required schedule themselves (manually or using a script).

Together with Veeam built-in load balancing, these capabilities allow administrators to ensure infrastructure is protected from excessive resource consumption.

For more information, see Managing Configurations for vCD Organizations.

What Members of vCD Organizations Can Do

Members of vCD organizations can use their vCD credentials to access Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal. Once they log in, Enterprise Manager identifies the resources included in their scope — the entities the user is allowed to see and manage — and automatically filters vCD objects when displaying them.

Members of vCD organizations can perform the following operations:

• Create new backup jobs for objects in their scope, based on the predefined templates. Organization members are allowed to configure essential job settings (such as VMs to backup, retention, schedule, notifications, and guest OS processing options).
• Modify or delete jobs.
• Enable or disable jobs.
• Start, stop, retry jobs.
• View statistics on vCD backups.
• Restore vCD VMs to the original vApps and vApps to the original vDC.
• Perform application item restore for SQL Server and Oracle databases.
• Restore files from indexed and non-indexed VMs guest file system.

To simplify job management for tenants, advanced job parameters (like backup mode and repository settings) are automatically populated from the job templates. These templates are assigned by the service provider administrator to the particular organization.

In This Section

• Managing vCD Organizations
• Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal