Unstructured Data Sources

Product Overview

With Veeam Backup & Replication you can easily back up and restore content of various unstructured data sources including NAS file shares and object storage repositories. The solution can be flexibly scaled to reliably protect massive amounts of data, even for the largest enterprise organizations. To protect your unstructured data sources, you can use your existing Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure. Also, you can back up these sources directly on tapes with a separate file to tape job that supports the NDMP protocol. For more information, see Unstructured Data Backup to Tape.

For more information about how to configure protection of these workloads, see the Veeam Help Center.

Licensing

NAS backups, object storage backups, and file to tape backups are licensed based on front-end capacity. All paid editions of Veeam Backup & Replication support integration with these backups.

You can create a single license to cover all types of workloads protected by a single Veeam Backup & Replication server. The license file can be generated and assigned to the backup server installation using VCSP Pulse plug-in for Veeam Service Provider Console. Alternatively, a new license file can be generated on the VCSP Pulse Portal by adding the following workload types:

  • File Share workload type in the Manage Licenses > Request New License > Veeam Backup & Replication > File Share section.
  • Object Storage workload type in the Manage Licenses > Request New License > Veeam Backup & Replication > Object Storage section.

Note

The NDMP servers backup to tape job requires Enterprise Plus edition. However, this type of job does not consume licenses.

Veeam Backup & Replication rounds the protected amount of data for each file share down to 500 GB. For more information and examples, see this article.

Each workload under protection consumes the license at a rate in alignment with the VCSP Rental Point Per Unit (PPU).

Workload Type

Point Per Unit (PPU)

Object Storage (500 GB)

10 points

File Shares (500 GB)

10 points

File Shares (if total size < 500 GB)

Free

NDMP to Tape

Free

Usage Reporting

A new license usage report is generated on the first day of each month. It includes the number of monitored workloads for the past month. Usage for file shares can be tracked using the File Share counter name. Usage for object storage can be tracked using the Object Storage counter name.

The primary and recommended method to collect usage reporting data is Veeam Service Provider Console, an automated and free tool for license management and reporting. To enable license usage reporting, connect Veeam Backup & Replication servers. Once done, license usage from all workloads managed by that server will be included into the monthly License Usage Report.

Alternatively, license usage can be obtained by one of the following ways:

Then, the overall usage must be submitted through VCSP Pulse Portal.