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Looking to get more from your VM backup and replication implementation when used in conjunction with Pure Storage? When using the VM Universal storage plug-in, you get more than just backups and recovery at the speed of flash with Pure Storage. You can simplify how you back up your VMware environment by using Pure Storage FlashArray
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snapshots to offload the backup burden from your ESXi hosts. In this video, I'll show you how easy it is to install, configure, and put the VM Universal storage plug-in to work with Pure Storage. So let's get into it. And here we are in our VM lab environment that we're going to be using,
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or I'm going to be walking through how to install the Universal storage plug-in to leverage Flash Array with VM to offload those snapshots from your vSphere hosts when doing your backups. And the first thing I want to get out of the way is I did some of the more fiddly bits prior to recording this video to make sure everything was set up and ready to go. And what I mean by that is specifically I've already configured iSCSI on the Windows box,
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as well as by going to my Purity or my Flash Array. I've already added the VM server to the host groups that my ESXi hosts belong to. That way, the ESXi hosts and my VM server have access and see all the LUNs that we're going to be backing up or, you know, backing up the virtual machines from. And if you're using Fibre Channel, it'd be very similar.
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Obviously you're not dealing with iSCSI, but you need to make sure you're zoned through your Fibre Channel and you've got your VM server in the right host groups with your ESXi hosts. But with that PSA out of the way, first thing we're going to go ahead and do is look at the VM backup and replication console. And what we're going to do is, as you can see here, it's kind of,
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it's a clean environment, there's nothing installed, there's no backup jobs. And the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go down to storage infrastructure and we're going to click on add storage, and it's going to bring up this pop-up window and it's going to give you all the vendors that they support, but of course there's one that we care about which is us here at Pure Storage.
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So I'm going to scroll down, I'm going to click on Pure Storage and that's going to go ahead and bring me to the VM website. You're going to obviously need to log in with your VM credentials, username and password for the download page. But you want to get down to the storage plug-in areas here and then scroll down and download.
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The Pure Storage plug-in for VM. And I've already gone ahead and done that, you know, behind the scenes again, but one thing we want to make sure before you run the install from that download is you need to close this console or you'll get an error message. I'm gonna go ahead and close that.
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And then I'll bring up the download of the plug-in. We're just gonna go ahead and right click, run this as administrator, say yes, all the fun stuff that we do when we install software, of course, so I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna accept the license agreement. I'm gonna say next,
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go ahead and click install. And this will take a few, possibly a minute or two to install as it will stop and restart the V backup services. So I'm gonna go ahead and pause this right now because nobody wants to sit here and watch this. Um, so we'll be back in about 1 minute or so, so stay tuned.
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All right, the install has finished. I went ahead and launched the Veeam Backup and replication console because now we need to actually go in and configure or add our array or arrays to the system. So if you go into your inventory, go back down to storage infrastructure, add storage, we're gonna get the same pop-up as we did before,
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go and scroll down to Pure, but this time, since the plug-in is installed and it's aware of it, it's gonna be like, alright, let's configure some arrays or the array you want to talk to. So I'm just gonna go ahead and use the IP address for my array, uh, which is 271. I'll just call this Langer demo, and I'm gonna select this for vSphere,
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but I also know that it works for Microsoft Windows servers, but we're talking VMware here, so we'll go ahead and click next. I've got some credentials already in Veeam for my Pure array, so I'm gonna select this Pure user account to access the system. We're gonna say yes or next.
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It's gonna go ahead and verify the account, check the connection, makes everything look good. Protocol to use. I'm gonna leave these all default, but you could, you know, if you're only a Fiber Channel-only shop or iSCSI is the only whatever. It is, you could pick and choose these, but for ease of this walkthrough,
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I'm gonna leave them all for V volumes to scan again, if you go to choose, you can get a little bit more specific, like which ones do you want to accept or which ones do you want to only scan. For example, let's say I go into only the following volumes. And I click Add from my infrastructure and
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you know, I, let's say I want to select only this DS3 volume, right? So it already knows of the array I can see the different volumes that are created, so I'm gonna say yes, OK. Backup proxies, mount server, I'm gonna lose you default, but these are more V specific things.
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So obviously in your environment, these items may vary. Just go ahead and click Apply and it's gonna go and do this update process again, this is gonna take potentially 30 seconds or so, but actually looked like it finished pretty quick. Now, the longer part is going to be this infrastructure scan where it's gonna go and scan everything.
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So I'm gonna leave this checked and go and click Finish and I'm gonna let that run for a minute or so and like before I'll get back to you when it completes. OK, and we're back and as you can see here I've left this up on the screen for the success. It took less than a minute, but again, better to pause and come back to make you all watch that. But I went through it, scanned the lens,
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make sure that the configuration is right for which ones it can do the storage offloading for the backups, but everything looks good there, so we'll go ahead and click Close, and now we can kind of peruse the storage infrastructure and we can go into the Pure storage node, we see the array I've added. It sees the volume that I've added or I let it scan for,
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and then they can see all the existing Flash Array snapshots on that volume so we could snap off these or take a look at them, but that's something probably for another video here we're just talking about actual backups. So with that configured, we're actually ready to start talking about how Veeam can leverage this to offload the backups. So I'm gonna go to Home, I'll go to Jobs, let's go ahead and create a new job,
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create a virtual machine job. And we'll give this a really good name like Langer Demo. I'm gonna click next. Let's add some VMs. I do have a couple of VMs that I've set up for this lab environment just to kind of walk through this.
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So go through my vSphere infrastructure, I got this VM testing, and I'll add VM 1 and 2. I click add next. Now my backup proxy, some of this again going back to some of this is going to be different for you on your VM environment, how you've configured, but I'll leave it automatic.
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My backup repository. I've got a local repository to this VM server which I've selected from the drop down and now we finally get to really where the magic kind of happens is down here in the storage under these advanced settings. If you click the advanced button. There we go. And we go to integration, this integration tab.
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This is where we talk about the primary storage integration, or basically what the API, as we like to call it for short, brings to the table. And the first thing is by default we want to leave it as enable backup from storage snapshots. That's why we're here, that's what we're talking about. But there are a couple of other options to be
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aware of that you can leverage if you want to, they're not on by default, but one is limit process VM count per storage snapshot. The next one is spillover to a standard backup method for whatever reason, if you didn't want to use the array, if there's a challenge with it, for whatever reason, you can check this box and they would just use a regular normal vSphere
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backup to complete the job or failover to primary storage snapshot. So, and that has to do with the primary storage snapshot, has to do if you're actually replicating and backing up. From a secondary copy of the data, like from site B that's been replicated over from site A. But just know that these options do exist to give you a little bit more finer control of
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using storage snapshots with VAM. We'll just leave the default of enabled backup from storage snapshots. I'm gonna click OK. Say next, I'll leave the guest processing stuff off, but again, your mileage may vary if you want to do any of this.
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Um, for the schedule, I'll just say run the job automatically, we'll say 10 p.m. Every day. Click apply, and then we've got the backup job, right? So it's a Pure Langer demo; you can see, it's got two objects, and the status is stopped. So, does it actually work? Does it do what we said it would do?
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Well, let's find out. So if I go ahead and click start, I'm gonna go ahead and run the job. And then I'll bring up the details here. And you can see as it's processing, it's building the list of objects to process, gives me the VM size, change block tracking is enabled, and it says required backup infrastructure
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resources have been assigned. I remember the next one should be coming up for the storage snapshot, which we see here. And now if I go into vSphere, you'll see the snapshot from a vSphere perspective still gets created. But it almost instantly gets deleted,
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right? So on traditional VM snapshots or backups, snapshots, we know that the snapshot stays open until the backup job completes. In this case, we have the complete opposite. It basically gets created, and then it is removed because we're leveraging the storage array for the snapshotter to pull the data from.
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So if I actually go to the FlashArray device and I go into volumes, I know I'm using DS3 for my volumes for my VMs, so if I go in there and over here on the right, I hope you can see it, but you'll see that there's this new snapshot that's been created. And it says Veeam Backup Snap Langer demo. So it's got the name of the backup job that started or created that snapshot, and this is where that integration comes in.
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So Veeam has told the FlashArray to create the snapshot; it's gonna go ahead and start backing up the VMs from here, and then it'll ultimately delete or remove the FlashArray snapshot once the job is done. So let me go ahead and click back over to the VM replication. So you see these are full backups because it's the first time I've run it.
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It's starting to run. I'm gonna go ahead and for the third time, this is the time I'm gonna pause the video. Let this backup run, and then I'll kind of show you what the output looks like once it's completed. All right, and now we're back for a third time, and as you can see here, the Veeam backup job did complete; it took almost three minutes,
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two minutes and 53 seconds; not that speed is important. But just so you can kind of tell that I'm running this in order, you can see that the storage snapshot was created down here; it says deleting the storage snapshot. If I go back to the flash array, you can see over here now in the snapshots area,
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the V one, or the one that said linear demo, has now been removed. So Vam does kind of clean up after itself, which is really nice, uh, no fuss, no mess there. But as you can see, it's very easy, very simple to install the universal storage plug-in to make sure that VM and Pure work together to make your backup life a whole lot easier and a
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whole lot faster. Now this is just the basics, so stay tuned for more videos on Pure 360 as we get into more details of what else you can do with the universal storage plug-in as it relates to secondary copies of data or replicating, you know, data from, you know, one system to another. So stay tuned for that, but until next time, thank you for watching.
