Solving The Hybrid Cloud Puzzle With PernixData, Veeam, and Amazon S3

We have recently received a couple of customer requests asking for more detail on our Veeam Backup offering when used with our Cloud hosting platform?—?so this blog post will briefly document the setup.

Summary of components

• PernixData-powered vCloud platform

• AWS Storage Gateway

• AWS Direct Connect

• Veeam Server and Proxies Detail

PernixData

We use PernixData FVP™ software on our Cloud platform to provide high-performance storage acceleration. So far, so good. However, you can imagine the potential for inconsistency should you attempt to back up a VM whose cached writes have not yet been destaged from flash. Happily, the guys at PernixData have already thought of this and published Technical Reference TR1007 (Using FVP with VADP based backup solutions)?—?while it’s essential that a helper VM run on the FVP cluster, it can also be flagged as a VADP appliance with the FVP CLI for Powershell.

Customers don’t need to worry about these commands particularly, as we will add them whenever we provision a proxy?—?however it often comes up when talking about host-side write-caching.

AWS Storage Gateway

The AWS Storage Gateway can be deployed external to AWS within a VMware or Hyper-V deployment- here it presents Amazon S3 storage to Veeam, using iSCSI.

AWS Direct Connect

As mentioned in a previous post, we offer Amazon Direct Connect?—?its primary purpose is to securely link a Cloudhelix VDC with an AWS VPC, with servers on both platforms able to route to each other using their private IP addresses. However, public services such as S3 are also available over the same connection?—?Amazon advertise their prefixes to Cloudhelix using BGP and we can then allow customers to connect to Amazon’s public services without going over the internet.

Veeam Server & Proxies

We provision Veeam Servers & Proxies where required to balance load across the Veeam infrastructure. As of v7 Veeam supports vCloud Director, so can easily be used to back up one or more virtual machines from a customer VDC. The Veeam servers connect to iSCSI storage provided by the AWS Storage Gateway, and the FVP-blacklisted Proxies hot-add virtual machine disks during backup operations.

Putting it all together

To cut a long story short, the solution described above allows customers to keep consistent backups of their virtual machines away from the primary hosting platform?—?another piece of the hybrid cloud puzzle.