Google Cloud Backup and DR - VMware vSphere Backup Overview

Key Takeaways

Google Cloud backup and Dr is able to backup and recover VMware VMS running in Google Cloud VMware engine we do this by activating the Google Cloud backup and Dr service which will give us our Management console and a backup and Recovery Appliance we then configure our backup and Recovery clients with either a sufficiently sized snapshot pool or an on-vault pool to hold the backups of the VMS we then attach to the gcve environment by talking to the vcenter and the esxi host to discover the VMS apply backup plans to them and then beginning the process of backing those VMS up either the entire VM or specific vmdks in each VM the backups themselves are always done in a four-step format we request the ESX server name from the vcenter to learn where the VM is running today we then request a VMware snapshot be created we then copy the change blocks from the snapshot clearly the first time we do a backup it will be a full after that it will be incremental the backup blocks are stored in either the snapshot pool or the backup and Recovery Appliance or the envelope pool or both we do have the option to put the backups directly into the envelope pool we call this direct to unvault we have three ways of accessing our backups the most common method is to do what we call a mount amount effectively creates a virtual copy of an existing backup it then presents that virtual copy to the esxi host over NFS generating a brand new VM we can also Mount backups to existing VMS to access them in addition to mount we can also do a clone where a mount creates a virtual copy and can be accessed very fast a clone will copy the blocks of the backup directly into the data store of the esxi host and then start the new VM so a clone generates a completely independent VM and is very similar to what you would consider a traditional restore talking about restore we can clearly do restores as well where we restore the source VM back to a previous point in time and we do this by replacing the old vmdks with new ones that we copy from backup either out of the snapshot pool or out of the onvot pool in terms of setup there is two halves to this first we do some setup in the Google Cloud console we activate the backup and Dr service and create a Google cloud storage bucket we attach our backup project where the backup and Dr Appliance is running to the Google Cloud VMware engine network via private Services access connect we then configure a solution user in Google Cloud VMware engine and we use that solution user as part of authentication finally we validate our firewall rules the first two firewalls or rules are given for information and really need to be set unless you've created Ingress firewall rules for your gcve environment however the third firewall rule is commonly needed because we need to have Ingress from the GCV environment into the backup and Recovery Appliance to access an NFS data store when we're doing NFS based mounts once we've done that setup we then turn to our Google Cloud backup and Dr Console where we add the cloud storage bucket as a non-volt pool create our backup plan templates and profiles add our vcenter host with solution user validate that the ESX host names can be resolved by the backup and Recovery Appliance and then onboard our VMware VMS and apply backup plans to them obviously once we've got our backups we can then consider using those backups to either do mounts clones or restores as needed and we'll show you how to do all of these things in upcoming videos