This week at Veeam we kicked off the first of our H2 releases when we made available for GA Veeam Backup for GCP v2 (Build 2.0.0.530). Available through the GCP Marketplace the product can be deployed within five minutes and be ready to backup GCP Virtual Machine instances. This v2 release builds on the initial v1 release and adds new features and functionality. Again, as is the way at Veeam, apart from the technical aspects, we are offering FREE Edition will backup up to 10 Virtual Machine instances out of the box and is fully featured.

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform v2 delivers fully automated Google Cloud backup and recovery to easily protect and manage all your data. Utilizing native snapshots, backup to multiple object storage classes and flexible recovery options, you can eliminate the risk of data loss — even at scale — for all your GCP data, while saving big.

Apart from the bonus of the free edition to get started with, there are a number of capabilities in v2 release which have improved on the v1 release and will prove valuable for customers looking to consume the product.

  • Backup archiving This will automatically tier backups to Google Cloud Archive Storage for the lowest cost long term retention.
  • Shared VPC networking Shared VPC networks allow improved security and manageability by sharing subnets from host projects. Veeam Backup for GCP v2 now fully supports Shared VPC configurations.
  • Public API As with other newer Veeam Products, v2 has the ability to securely connect to, integrate, automate and manage Google Cloud backup with other workflows and dev tooling.
  • Ready for integration in Veeam Backup & Replication Like AWS and Azure before it, this will mean Google Cloud backup can be controlled and managed from the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

Deployment and Initial Configuration

Below is a quick walkthrough of the deployment and configuration steps for Backup for GCP. For me, this was a fresh experience as I don’t use GCP a lot in my day to day… for seasoned GCP users, this should be straight forward. One of the great things that we have built into this process is the ability to pick on issues and offer remediation features from the UI.

Firstly, the image can be found on the Google marketplace here or by searching for Veeam in the Marketplace home.

I actually created a new GCP Project for this deployment, which means that there are some services that need enabling against the project in order to deploy. If you try to deploy from the marketplace without the correct APIs in place you will get the error below

Backup GCP

Which has the link to get these enabled through the GCP Console to be able to continue the deployment.Backup GCP

Once the Launch button has been pressed you are taken to a configuration screen were we enter some basic details around Deployment Name the Zone and allow us to adjust the default sizes of the Machine storage. Once adjusted as required the Estimated monthly total is shown.

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For the Networking, I just selected all the defaults as part of the new Project. HTTPS is allowed by default, and though not recommended I allowed SSH traffic as well.. however this isn’t needed to access the cli of the appliance as i’ll show below

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Once deployed the Suggested Next Steps appears and a link is provided to access the Backup for GCP web interface to continue the setup.

Backup GCP

As with our other Public Cloud backup products, the first step once you get to the web interface is to enter in the Google Instance ID which can be found  in the VM Instance details section of the Compute Engine -> VM Instances menu.

 

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Next step is to set the new default administrator username and password.

Backup GCP

And from there we are taken to a new looking login screen (which will be shipped out to all Veeam products as new versions are released) and we can login to complete the initial setup steps.

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At first login, we are greeted with a What’s New walkthrough

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And from here we can start the initial configuration of the settings. As seen below, Workers and Repositories need to be added before Backup Policies can be created.

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Configuring Storage

To take advantage of the new Archive feature, two types of Backup Repository need to be configured. To be able to Backup we need to configure one repository with a Standard Storage Class, and to be able to Archive we need to configure one repository with an Archive Storage Class.

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Once that has been configured, when creating a Backup Policy, when setting the targets we can Enable Backups and check Enable Backup Archiving. For more details on this, check out the Veeam Online Help.

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Sorting Out Permissions

Before continuing, I needed to sort out a permissions issue that was being flagged by the Notification Bell. One take away that I had in going through this process for the fist time is that we have gone above and beyond to help end users make sure everything was set to be able to back up instances. In truth, this has come from the early experiences of our Veeam Backup for AWS product and the advantage of our release cycles for the cloud products means that every equal version release of Azure or GCP gets better than the last one because of lessons learnt.

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We have provided a set of commands that can be downloaded to properly configure permissions for the account and the easiest way to run that script is through the Cloud Shell.

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Once logged into the Cloud Shell Editor, paste in the script that is generated as show a couple of images below… that will execute the commands needed to configure the account with the right permissions.

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Once done, the Check Permissions action should return all passed.

Wrap Up

We have looked to quickly iterate on this initial v1 release we will look to support even more GCP services and features in future releases but for now, we continue to broaden our own in-house capabilities and extend the Veeam Backup Platform to cover even more workloads and make them portable as they land in our repositories and in our portable data format. Having the ability to backup and archive GCP Virtual Machines is an important part of the platform.

Links and Downloads: