5 Best Practices for Managing Veeam

Are you looking to stage your backup implementations to fully comply with the best backup practices? Are you looking to identify the best practices that can help you tune your Backup Implementations with Veeam?

We have your back on this! The Expert Team here at ProVal Tech brings to you “5 Best Practices for managing Veeam”. We are sure this article can help you orchestrate your backup infrastructure to fully comply with your needs and optimal configuration.

5 best practices for Managing Veeam as a Backup Solution:

In this article, we are intending to provide you with five best practices you could use to optimize your Veeam Backup solution and use it effectively to meet your and the client’s requirements.

1. Environment Review – Track Requirements on SLA Definition

How to define RTO and RPO values for your applications:

A) RTO- Recovery Time Objective:

A recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network, or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.

When defining your business’s RTO, consider:

1. Estimation of cost per minute/hour/day of an outage.
2. The recovery SLAs are in place with customers.
3. Priority for which applications or systems need to be restored?
4. Is there a defined order in which critical applications need to be recovered?

B) RPO- Recovery Point Objective – The maximum amount of data the organization can tolerate losing.

When defining your business’s RPO, consider:

1. Amount of data you can afford to lose
2. Potential financial implications
3. Potential legal implications
4. The impact of the data loss for your organization

C. Tracking of Backup Compliance: Tracking backup failures and having healthy backups to meet RTO & RPO.

D. High-Speed Disk/Sufficient Resources: Disk I/O will be the first thing you need to consider if you want to meet the RPO since it will define how much time it will take to complete your Backups/Restore.

2. Build Structure – To Meet your SLA’s definition for RTO and RPO

3-2-1 Rule: The rule to meet your SLA’s definition for RTO and RPO – Should have 3 different copies of your data at 3 different places.

1. Three Different Copies:
   1.  Backups sets stored in your local network.
2. Different Media:
   1. Should have two copies of backups locally.
      1.  NAS/Drive
      2.  USB Copy
3. Copy Offsite – Different Location!
   1. Copy of backups sets stored at Cloud offsite Datacenter or using any third-party cloud providers like Wasabi, Azure, AWS, etc.

3. Plan – Use Capacity Planning and Storage Estimations

Be set up to scale your backup infrastructure as you grow. Below are the points which will help you to perform capacity planning:

• Calculate the amount of Source Data set and Daily data changes on the server.
• Define the standard Retention and Backup frequency.

We have a feature in Veeam ONE that gives you the report of the below points that helps you have storage in the future:

• Infrastructure Objects: Defines a list of backup repositories to analyze in the report.
• Space Utilization Threshold: Defines the maximum amount of used space measured as a percentage of total capacity on the available repositories.
• Free Space (min) Threshold: Defines the minimum total amount of free space on the repositories.
• Safety Interval: Defines the safety interval (that is, the required minimum number of days during which the specified space threshold should not be breached).
• Analyze Performance Data: Defines the time period to analyze in the report.

4. Involve a Protection Strategy to Safeguard your Critical Data & Backups

Ransomware Attacks Protection

• Linux Hardened Repository

1. Immutability: In the Linux hardened repository, we get an option to set the backup files not to delete for N number of days. During this period, backup files stored in this repository cannot be modified or deleted.
2. Single-Use Credentials: The Credentials used only once to deploy Veeam Data Mover, or transport service while adding the Linux server to the backup infrastructure.

These credentials are not stored in the backup infrastructure. If Veeam Backup & Replication server is compromised, the attackers still won’t be able to get the credentials and connect to the hardened repository.

• Cloud Connect Delete Protection.
  • In a cloud connect you have a feature to enable delete protection, this gives you the feature to recover the data if anything is deleted accidentally. It’s like a recycle bin feature which is not accessible from the Veeam Server.

If the backup chain is deleted from the Veeam Console, it will be in the Recycle bin for N number of days.

5. Create Readiness to avert a disaster with Disaster Recovery Planning

1. SureBackup Testing: Frequently testing your backups using SureBackup Virtual Lab feature in Veeam helps you to track the backup health.
2. Replication Jobs: Veeam Replication jobs should be configured at the Disaster Recovery site with defined RPO & RTO for critical servers which helps you to get the infrastructure back up within a click.
3. Sure Replica: Frequently test your Replica VMs to make sure your Replica is healthy and in a ready-to-go state.

ProVal’s Assessment

With the 5 best practices on managing Veeam we have listed above, we hope it helps you orchestrate your Veeam Environment, but there can be some more dependent factors when choosing what is best for you. These factors include:

1. What is the environment you’re looking at to backup with Veeam?
2. How would you like to scale or handle the hardware requirements, primarily storage devices OR would you like to eliminate handling or procurement of storage devices?
3. Would you like to consolidate the backup streaming through a localized channel to your datacenter or would you prefer a Cloud hosting provider?
4. Are you looking for more of Business Continuity where downtime isn’t affordable OR could leverage DraaS OR BaaS Services with more targeted towards retention of your backup data?
5. How would you like to handle the RTOs or RPOs?

If you need assistance in orchestrating the Veeam Solution per these best backup practices, feel free to contact our Team of Experts.  

We can also do an environment audit to help you develop your Custom practices when using Veeam.