Veeam Cloud Connect Replication

With Veeam Backup & Replication, SP can offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to their customers.

Veeam Backup & Replication provides disaster recovery through image-based VM replication. The SP can expose resources of his or her virtualization environment to customers as cloud hosts.

Tenants can utilize cloud hosts provided by the SP to create VM replicas offsite. In case of a disaster on the production site, tenants can quickly and easily switch to VM replicas in the cloud and use the SP infrastructure as a remote disaster recovery site.

The SP can provide Veeam Cloud Connect Replication resources for the following virtualization platforms:

• VMware vSphere
• Microsoft Hyper-V

As well as a cloud repository, the Veeam Cloud Connect Replication infrastructure has a multi-tenant architecture. The SP allocates computing, storage and network resources for a replication target and provides them to tenants through hardware plans. For the SP, a hardware plan is an abstraction layer that lets the SP virtually partition a virtualization host or cluster into multiple replication targets. As a result, the SP can expose replication resources to several tenants and store tenants’ data in the cloud in an isolated and segregated way.

For a tenant, a hardware plan appears as a cloud host that can be used as a regular target host for off-site replication.

To make VM replicas on the cloud host accessible over the network after failover, Veeam Backup & Replication provides every tenant with network resources — network extension appliances and dedicated VLANs. The tenant can fail over a group of production VMs (full site failover) or individual VMs (partial site failover) to VM replicas on the cloud host. Veeam Backup & Replication establishes a secure channel between VM replicas in the cloud and VMs on the production site and offers traffic encryption capabilities.

Data protection and disaster recovery tasks targeted at the cloud host are performed by tenants. Tenants can set up necessary replication jobs and perform failover operations on Veeam backup servers deployed on their side. Tenants can perform the following operations:

• Replicate VMs to the cloud host.
• Perform failover tasks with VM replicas on the cloud host:

• Full site failover, when all critical production VMs fail over to their replicas on the cloud host in case the whole production site becomes unavailable.
• Partial site failover, when one or several VMs become corrupted and fail over to their replicas on the cloud host.

• Perform failback tasks with VM replicas on the cloud host.

Tasks associated with full site failover can be performed either by a tenant or by the SP. This lets the SP test the full site failover process and switch tenant’s production site to the cloud host upon tenant’s request if the tenant has no access to the backup infrastructure after a disaster.