How It Works: Integration Details

The main component that enables integration of Veeam Backup & Replication with the Nutanix AHV cluster is a proxy appliance (Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV). The proxy appliance is a Linux-based virtual module that acts as a coordinator between the Nutanix AHV platform on one side and the Veeam backup server on the other side.

The proxy appliance is responsible for the backup, entire VM restore, and VM disk restore operations. The proxy appliance communicates with the AHV platform over Nutanix RESTful API, assigns necessary resources for backup and restore operations, reads/writes data from/to AHV datastores and transports VM data to/from target Veeam backup repositories. The proxy appliance is also responsible for job management and scheduling, data compression and deduplication, applying retention policy settings to backup chains, as well as performing other backup- and restore-related activities.

The proxy appliance is deployed as a VM on a Nutanix AHV cluster. For one Nutanix AHV cluster, one proxy appliance is required. That is, to back up and restore VMs on two clusters, you will need to deploy two proxy appliances, one per cluster.

Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV comes with a web-based portal that allows users to perform the following tasks:

• Configure connections to components in the Veeam backup infrastructure.
• Configure and run backup jobs for Nutanix AHV VMs.
• Restore VMs back to Nutanix AHV clusters.
• Restore VM disks and attach them to VMs hosted on Nutanix AHV clusters.

In addition to restore options available in the proxy appliance web UI, you can use the Veeam Backup & Replication UI to perform the following recovery operations.

• Restore VM guest OS files
• Restore application items
• Export VM disks to VMDK, VHD and VHDX formats
• Restore VMs to Microsoft Azure
• Restore VMs to Amazon EC2