The Veeam Certified Architect 2022 (VMCA2022)

The assumption that can be made for the conceptual design is that Veeam Agent backups of sale staff laptops should be managed by the backup server. This assumption is based on the best practice and recommendation for using Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Agent backups of sale staff laptops should be managed by the backup server to enable centralized management, monitoring, and reporting of all agent-based backups. This can also simplify the backup configuration, scheduling, and retention for the laptop agents.

The information related to sizing the NAS infrastructure that is missing and must be collected during the discovery are the size of the source data set and the recovery point objective (RPO). These information are important for designing and sizing the NAS backup jobs and repositories. For example, you can use the size of the source data set to estimate how much storage space and network bandwidth are required for backing up NAS devices. You can also use the RPO to determine how frequently you need to run NAS backup jobs and how many restore points you need to keep on the backup repositories.

The recommended method to replicate VMware virtual machines with a less than five-minute RPO is Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP). CDP is a feature that allows near-continuous replication of VMware virtual machines to a secondary site or cluster with minimal data loss and downtime. CDP uses VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) to capture every write operation from the source VMs and send them to the target VMs in near real-time. CDP can achieve RPOs as low as seconds and enable fast failover and failback in case of a disaster.

The backup repository design that would meet the security, throughput, and retention requirements is to use backup jobs to Hardened Linux XFS-based repositories at the same site as the source data and use Backup copy jobs to Hardened Linux XFS-based repositories at the secondary site. A Hardened Linux repository is a type of backup repository that provides immutability and ransomware protection for backup files by using XFS file system features and Linux access control mechanisms. A Backup copy job is a type of backup job that copies backups from one repository to another, either on-site or off-site, with different retention settings. By using these features, you can ensure that your backups are secure, efficient, and compliant with regulatory and business needs.

The steps that should be taken to correct the storage configuration based on the customer’s hardening requirements are to add hardened repositories to each Scale-out Backup Repository and evacuate the data from the CIFS extents. A hardened repository is a type of backup repository that provides immutability and ransomware protection for backup files by using Linux XFS file system features and Linux access control mechanisms. A Scale-out Backup Repository is a logical entity that groups several backup repositories into one pool of storage. A CIFS extent is a type of backup repository that uses a shared folder on a Windows or Linux server as a backup target. By adding hardened repositories to each Scale-out Backup Repository, you can ensure that your backups are secure, compliant, and efficient. By evacuating the data from the CIFS extents, you can remove the risk of ransomware infection or deletion of your backups.

The component that should be deployed based on the customer’s security requirements around restore capabilities is Enterprise Manager with granular RBAC policies defined. Enterprise Manager is a web-based interface that allows centralized management of multiple Veeam backup servers. It also provides granular RBAC policies that enable control over user permissions and access to restore data. For example, you can assign different roles to different users or groups based on their responsibilities and needs, such as backup administrator, restore operator, security officer, etc. You can also define custom scopes and rules for each role to limit their access to specific objects, jobs, or actions.

If the recovery point objective (RPO) of gold tier machines changes from one hour to three hours with daily retention set to seven days, the impact on the Veeam design is that proxies will require fewer resources. This is because the backup frequency and the number of restore points for gold tier machines will decrease, which means that less data will need to be processed and transferred by the proxies. Therefore, the proxies will have lower CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization and can handle more backup tasks with the same resources.

The recommended step that Veeam Life and Indemnity can take to improve the latency encountered during backup of the virtualized MSSQL Server database running on vSAN is to implement Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows on the virtualized MSSQL Server database servers. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows is a data protection solution that allows you to back up physical or virtual Windows machines at the guest OS level. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows can provide application-aware processing and transaction log backup for MSSQL servers, as well as support for vSAN storage snapshots. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows can also reduce the latency by performing backups without using VMware snapshots, which can cause stun issues on vSAN.