CDP Infrastructure in Veeam Cloud Connect

The following CDP infrastructure components are required in the Veeam Cloud Connect environment.

Components on the SP side

Alternatively, if the SP uses VMware Cloud Director in their virtualization environment, they can provide cloud hosts to tenants through organization VDCs.

Components on the tenant side

Note

This section contains overview of CDP infrastructure components in the Veeam Cloud Connect environment. To get a detailed description of each component, see the Backup Infrastructure for CDP section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

SP and Tenant Backup Servers

The backup server is the configuration, administration and management core of the backup infrastructure. The SP and tenant backup servers run the Veeam CDP Coordinator Service:

The source and target Veeam CDP Coordinator Service communicate with each other through a persistent connection to coordinate replication and data transfer tasks, and control resource allocation.

Source Host

The source host is located on the tenant side and contains production VMs for which the tenant wants to create CDP replicas offsite. The source host must be a part of a VMware vSphere cluster managed by vCenter Server. vCenter Server must be connected to the tenant backup server.

To be able to use the source host for CDP, the tenant must install the I/O filter on the VMware vSphere cluster. To learn more, see I/O Filters.

Tenant VM data from the source host is moved to the cloud host located in the SP Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure.

Cloud Host

The target host in the Veeam Cloud Connect environment is represented by the cloud host. The cloud host is located on the SP side and contains CDP replicas of tenant VMs. The SP can provide tenants with cloud hosts of the following types:

To be able to use the target host for CDP, the SP must install the I/O filter on the VMware vSphere cluster or VMware Cloud Director organization VDC. To learn more, see I/O Filters.

I/O Filters

To be able to use hosts for CDP, the SP and tenant must install I/O filters on the source and target hosts.

After the SP installs the I/O filter on the cluster, Veeam Backup & Replication automatically installs the filter on all hosts added to the cluster. Likewise, after the SP installs the I/O filter on the organization VDC, Veeam Backup & Replication automatically installs the filter on all clusters and hosts that provide resources to this VDC.

Note

If you add a new organization VDC to the Cloud Director server after the I/O filter is installed on the existing VDCs, you must do the following:

  1. Install the I/O filter on the newly added organization VDC. To do this, at the Organization VDC step of the I/O Filter Management wizard, select check boxes next to the VDC where the I/O filter must be present and finish the wizard. For details, see the Select VDC Organizations section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.
  2. Update properties of the cloud gateway through which the tenant who will use the newly added VDC connects to the SP. To do this, launch the Edit Cloud Gateway wizard for this cloud gateway, click Next at each step of the wizard and then click Finish at the Summary step of the wizard.

Once the SP completes these steps, the tenant can rescan the SP in the tenant Veeam backup console and start using the newly added VDC as a cloud host.

  • On the tenant side, the I/O filter must be installed on the VMware vSphere cluster where VMs they plan to replicate reside. For details on how to install the filter, see the Installing I/O Filter section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

After the tenant installs the I/O filter on the cluster, Veeam Backup & Replication automatically installs the filter on all hosts added to the cluster.

I/O filters are built on the basis of vSphere API for I/O filtering (VAIO) and perform the following operations:

  • Read and process I/O operations in transit between the protected VMs and VM replicas, and their underlying datastores.
  • Send and receive data to and from VMware CDP proxies.
  • Communicate with the Veeam CDP Coordinator Service on the backup server and notify the service that the backup infrastructure must be reconfigured if any proxy becomes unavailable.

Source and Target VMware CDP Proxies

A VMware CDP proxy is a component that operates as a data mover and transfers data between the source and target hosts. We recommend you to configure at least two VMware CDP proxies: one (source proxy) in the production environment on the tenant side and one (target proxy) in the disaster recovery site on the SP side.

The source and target VMware CDP proxies perform the following tasks:

For more information on VMware CDP proxies, their requirements, limitations and deployment, see the VMware CDP Proxies section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Related Topics

Getting Started with CDP