CTO Blog – Architecture – Backup

In the last blog, I went into the main architecture of our cloud using VMware vCloud platform and vSAN. In this article, I’ll describe how we protect our infrastructure.

Today I will write about backup of the environment. DR and Backup to our cloud environment will be discussed in later articles. PeaSoup is using Veeam Backup and Replication to backup the customer and the management environment.

Why Veeam?

We had an architecture dilemma when we started with PeaSoup. Originally we planned to use VMware VDP Appliances while this was the only backup solution on the market that supports vSAN. However, we didn’t want any management servers on our customer cluster, and we did found out during testing, that VDP appliance needs to be installed within the resource cluster. We did look at the big brother of VDP, EMC Avamar, however, we did not find this the right solution.

In June Veeam released patch 4 for their Backup and replication v7 product which included support for vSAN. I’ve been working with Veeam for a long time and I really like the simplicity of their solution. Secondly, Veeam is fully vCloud supported, meaning we can select organization VDC’s to be backup’ed. We tested Veeam in our cloud using vCloud and vSAN and it really performs very well, both backup and restores were very easy and quick.

The next step was to create a design for the backup environment. As we are using virtual Veeam servers, we decided the best way forward is actually to create a separate cluster for the backup environment. This meant we can utilise different lower-cost hardware as we do not want to use vSAN as a backup target. The backup cluster uses traditional storage solutions and we are using this purely for backup and disaster recovery targets.

Later this year we will upgrade Veeam to version 8 as this will provide a repository as a service solution. This is a great option, while we can provide repository services to customers who have Veeam on-premise, and want to backup to the cloud or have a backup copy of their jobs stored outside their premises.

The image below depicts a logical overview of the architecture with the three clusters we have today.