An overwhelming majority of customers are adopting a hybrid cloud approach as the go-to IT infrastructure model. The ESG Hybrid Cloud Trends and Strategies eBook commissioned by Equinix, cites that the number of organizations committed to or interested in a hybrid cloud strategy has increased from 81% to 93% since 2017. Modern organizations are looking to take advantage of the scale, availability, performance, and economic benefit that the public cloud brings. Many are adopting a cloud-first policy for any new applications coming into their business, while offering their developers the opportunity to utilize the new services, security features and data analytics features of the cloud. This creates a number of decisions about how to deploy workloads in this environment.
In 2017, VMware simplified this choice by announcing a strategic alliance with AWS, offering the ability to run existing VM workloads on a SaaS based platform while also taking advantage of AWS services.
Today you can choose from a plethora of VMware-based public cloud offerings including Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Whether you prefer Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions or Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS), you can still leverage your investments in on-premises VMware products.
With the initial AWS offering Veeam was a principal strategic partner to fully protect, and support VMware Cloud on AWS and you can use Veeam with, and across, each of the current offerings to ensure consistent backup and recovery of your data regardless of which cloud it resides.
These solutions progress frequently and Veeam continues to validate and certify support across this growing ecosystem. You can always consult the VMware Compatibility Guide to view the growing list of VMware certifications achieved by Veeam.
You can see from this timeline how Veeam integration with different cloud providers in the VMware ecosystem has grown significantly, especially in the last two years.
Protect your VMware SaaS managed clouds with Veeam
SaaS Managed Clouds offer customers the ability to run their workloads without having to administer the underlying infrastructure while also integrating with platform services and features. You may not know that Veeam can integrate with those offered services and features as well. Whether it’s a backup proxy, backup target, a replicated workload or object storage for long-term retention, Veeam has many options when it comes to protecting your data. When it comes to archiving data, Veeam now integrates with Amazon Glacier/Deep Archive and Azure Archive Storage, giving you low-cost storage and comprehensive security while still being able to access your data at your preferred retrieval needs.
Leverage native AWS services through VMware Cloud on AWS with Veeam
VMware Cloud on AWS permits customers to leverage native AWS services such as EC2 or S3. Veeam customers can take advantage of integration to backup workloads into a EC2 repository or prevent against ransomware attacks with S3 Object Lock immutability. You can even replicate your workloads with Veeam to another AWS availability zone for redundancy.
Manage your Azure VMware Solution with Veeam
Azure VMware Solution is prevalent with Microsoft customers utilizing Azure services such as Azure Blob or Azure VMs. Whether using an Azure VM as a repository or Azure Blob for object storage; Veeam once again enables you to manage your data as needed through integration with the Azure ecosystem.
Veeam offers protection for Google Cloud VMware Engine
Google Cloud VMware Engine enables customers to extend their VMware environment into Google Cloud Platform services. Veeam is proud to be a founding data protection partner for this solution.
Secure Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and IBM Cloud VMware Solutions with Veeam
IBM Cloud VMware Solutions and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offer a VMware Cloud Foundation service and Veeam once again offers customers the ability to protect their data within these offerings. Similar to on-premises VMware environments, you have full access down to the bare metal hypervisor, enabling Veeam customers to utilize features such as DataLabs, Instant VM Recovery and SureBackup.
Take advantage of extended Hybrid Cloud capability with VSAN and Veeam
A foundational component to VMware-based clouds is vSAN, an integrated hyperconverged storage offering leveraging industry-standard servers. As hybrid cloud deployments expand, the role of HCI continues to grow. 451 Research estimates HCI adoption sits at roughly 35% of the overall IT market.[1] Veeam has been supporting VMware vSAN since 2014, the same year it launched.
In 2020, VMware expanded capabilities, introducing support for NFS shares with vSAN File Services. Once again, Veeam customers were able to take advantage of this capability but the use cases quickly grew seemingly in parallel to the rapid growth of unstructured data. Traditional storage has offered customers the ability to leverage storage snapshots for a variety of uses. Achieving high availability can be a challenge and Veeam together with the world’s leading storage providers enables you to create true backups and replicas from snapshots as often as you’d like — even during business hours. You may not know but you can also leverage vSAN file share snapshots with Veeam! Though vSAN Distributed File System (VDFS) snapshots are new, there is a way to manually manage them today. Remarkably, vSAN File Services has a built-in feature that allows you to create a read-only snapshot of a vSAN file share.
There are several advantages to using snapshots including:
- Achieve even your tightest backup window goals with fast backups and replicas made directly from VM and storage snapshots
- Dramatically reduce the impact of backup activities on your databases, applications and overall production environment
- Add even more flexibility to your RPOs — initiate backups at any time or frequency with little to no disruption to operations
For more on this, check out this VMware blog
Veeam protects Kubernetes workloads on VMware
In 2019, VMware introduced a re-architecture of vSphere with Kubernetes as its control plane and so began the journey to manage cloud resources like virtual machines, disks, and networks. You could now manage a whole application instead of individual VMs and accelerate development of modern apps. Being able to leverage Kubernetes-native APIs to access resources such as compute, networking, and storage helped IT teams rapidly provision and provide resources for development and scalable operations. The world had changed again.
Why is the shift occurring? The simple fact is that containerized workloads offer significant benefits to customers of all sizes as Analysis by VMware indicates. These benefits increase business velocity while reducing the cost of operations. A significant benefit for businesses on their digital transformation journey.
Though this shift is interesting, it’s important to understand the impact of Kubernetes on backup and recovery. Some of the features that make Kubernetes a powerful application deployment environment can also create new challenges when it comes to managing and protecting your data. Implementing Kubernetes-native backup for your applications is critical to protect your data in the event of an accident, system failure or even a deliberate attack. With a proper native backup strategy in place, you’ll feel more confident when utilizing the powerful, yet complex Kubernetes platform.
Modern Data Protection
At Veeam, we continue to support VMware innovation and provide a consistent Data Protection experience for Hybrid Cloud customers regardless of where they want to host their virtual environments. Hosting data in multiple clouds is now normal and allowing customers to maximise their operational efficiencies is key to realising the full benefit that VMware is offering. Partnering with Veeam provides the same experience for protecting data and allows corporations to confidently deploy production workloads wherever needed without compromising availability or recoverability.
Check out this video to learn more about Veeam’s comprehensive data protection of VMware workloads or download your free trial here.
1451 Research – Voice of the Enterprise: Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Technology & Platform Innovation 2020 study