Operate
Now the service infrastructure is fully operational and it is time to use it.
This section contains recommendations to operate the service at its best.
High Avaiability
As any service that is exposed to customers that can use it at any time, the Backup as a Service solution has to guarantee the highest possible uptime.
In order to do so, each component must be made redundant. When that’s not possible (SPOF: Single Point of Failure) clear Restart/Restore/Recover procedures have to be put in place:
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Cloud Gateways: multiple gateways can balance incoming connections without the need for any external solution. To make the overall solution redundant, it’s important to deploy multiple gateways for each gateway pool. Small connections, sometimes dedicated to a single customer with a small amount of data, can be managed by a single gateway, but let’s remember that this design becomes a SPOF.
- Cloud Connect server: this is the management component of the system, and it’s a SPOF. Usual protection techniques should be applied to guarantee its highest availability. To mention a few:
- Host the server as a virtual machine to leverage High Availability, Fault Tolerance or similar technologies.
- Have frequent configuration backups stored in a secure and easily accessible location.
- Have a replica of the machine ready to be used.
- Have a spare/cold Windows server with Veeam Backup & Replication pre-installed. This machine can be then used to quickly create a new Backup Server using the clean installation of Veeam Backup & Replication with the Configuration Backup applied to it.
- Back-end database: Veeam Backup & Replication supports both Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL. Depending on which database has been selected, different availability technologies can be applies, for example Microsoft SQL Clustering. These technologies are transparent to Veeam software, as long as they are not specifically listed as non-compatible in Veeam documentation.
Additional resources
Veeam Cloud Connect
- Reference Architecture: backup operations
- Restoring from Insider Protection
- Air-gapped backups using Tenants to Tape
- Advanced operations
- Performance Tuning