It’s been exactly a year since VMware announced their partnership with AWS and it’s no surprise that at this year’s VMworld the solution is front and center and will feature heavily at Monday’s keynote. Earlier today Veeam was announced as an officially supported backup, recovery and replication platform for VMware Cloud on AWS. This is an exciting announcement for existing customers of Veeam who currently use vSphere and are interesting in consuming VMware Cloud on AWS.

In terms of what Veeam has been able to achieve, there is little noticeable difference in the process to configure and run backup or replication jobs from within Veeam Backup & Replication. The VMware Cloud on AWS resources are treated as just another cluster so most actions and features of the core platform work as if the cloud based cluster was local or otherwise.

Below you can see a screen shot of an VMC vCenter from the AWS based HTML5 Web Client. What you can see if the minimum spec for a VMC customer which includes four hosts with 36 cores and 512GB of RAM, plus vSAN and NSX.

In terms of Veeam making this work, there were a few limitations that VMware have placed on the solution which means that our NFS based features such as Instant VM Recovery, Virtual Labs or Surebackups won’t work at this stage. HotAdd mode is the only supported backup transport mode (which isn’t a bad thing as it’s my preferred transport mode) which talks to a new VDDK library that is part of the VMC platform.

With that the following features work out of the box:

  • Backup with In Guest Processing
  • Restores to original or new locations
  • Backup Copy Jobs
  • Replication
  • Cloud Connect Backup
  • Windows File Level Recovery
  • Veeam Explorers

With the above there are a lot of options for VMC customers to stick to the 3-2-1 rule of backups…remembering that just because the compute resources are in AWS, doesn’t mean that they are highly valuable from a workload and application availability standpoint. Customers can also take advantage of the fact that VMC is just another cluster from their on-premises deployments and use Veeam Backup & Replication to replicate VMs into the VMC vCenter to which end it could be used as a DR site.

For more information and the offical blog post from Veeam co-CEO Peter McKay click here.