In a nutshell… OVHcloud Managed Backups powered by Veeam

Veeam is a software solution for backup and disaster recovery available on OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud Premier and compatible with our SecNumCloud offer !

It is also available on our managed Bare Metal “Essentials” offer.

Our offer is to install and manage for you the SW and HW components. All you have to do is chose which VM’s to back up and let us do the rest. Well you still have to make sure that your backups are valid and test them regularly, but you knew that 😉

3 levels of services are available : Standard, Advanced and Premium.

These levels define different options and features

The service level chosen applies to to entire VMware Datacentre on which it is active and as such, on all the VM’s in the datacentre.

Currently, the features and options are as below :

Changing service level is possible after 15 days have elapsed on the current offer. Retention rule still applies until it expired (if you chose a new service with a shorter retention time).

Architecture

Let’s see in more details how does Veeam works and what is the system architecture.

When the Veeam backup option is enabled in the OVHcloud manager, a « backupserver » VM is automatically created by OVHcloud on your PCC host.

Creating this VM requires the usage of 1 Microsoft Windows license, taken from your Windows Datacenter licenses pack. If you haven’t subscribed to this option, a single Windows Datacenter license will be added to your next bill.

This VM is only accessible by the OVHcloud team and the SQL Db required is hosted on OVHcloud infrastructure. It only consumes the minimum CPU and memory required.

The same way, the VM backups are also stored outside of your PCC, on datastores dedicated to your backups, leaving your PCC storage unencumbered by backups.

With the standard service level, backups are stored in the same physical datacentre/location.

With the advanced and premium service levels, backups are replicated automatically on a distant location. (RGPD compliant)

All backups are encrypted by the Veeam « backup server » and the key stored in a PCI-DSS compliant database.

Each « backup server » and storage space for backup is personal to each customer.

Customer subscribing to premium service level will have 1 « backup server » on 1 host and an additional « backup proxy » VM on each other host in their PCC (each using a Microsoft Windows license).

Customers with a Standard or Advanced service level can request the deployment of « backup,proxy »on their hosts using the API :

GET /dedicatedCloud/{serviceName}/datacenter/{datacenterId}/backup/canOptimizeProxies

Long story short, this is how it looks like:

Adding « backup proxy » VM can be required if the number of VM to backup exceeds 15 on a given host or if the time to backup the VM exceed the daily backup window.

Backup jobs are programmed and executed automatically without human intervention.

• 3pm : VM inventory and assignment to « backup server » and « backup proxy »,
• 10pm : start incremental backups,
• 01am : start full backups,
• Between 8am and 9am : email report sent to Admin PCC NIC email (Premium service level allows for 1 more email to be configured).

In case of error during the backup jobs, a support ticket is automatically opened for investigation and resolution.

Note: a successful backup job is NOT a valid backup nor an immutable backup.

Test your backup regularly.

Our SLA’s for Veeam Managed Backup are

	Availability	GTi	GTR
Standard	99,9%	12h	72h
Advanced	99,9%	8h	48h
Premium	99,9%	4h	24h

GTI, Goal Time for Intervention: Maximum time OVHcloud will take to intervene on an incident

GTR, Goal Time for Recovery: Maximum time OVHcloud will take to recover from the incident reported automatically by the system or by the Client 

SLA does not apply on the backup content nor the time it takes for the backup job to run.

This is why it is important to consider the service level chosen not to exceed the backup window by using “proxys”

Day to day

A plugin allows for backup selection to be managed directly using your Vsphere interface for each VM. Well, either it’s selected for backup according to your chosen service level, or it’s not selected. It is very simple.

Or you can also use the API

Don’t forget : the entire VM is backed up, so the entire VM will be restored.

That’s all for today, stay tuned for more post like this !

Do you want to know more?  Please visit our Veeam Backup Managed pages