Veeam Agent for Mac – Cloud Connect integration

Background

Following on from my previous blog post, getting started with Veeam agent for Mac, one of the items I wanted to explore further was the direct integration with Veeam Cloud Connect. For those of you reading this and wondering what Veeam Cloud Connect is, it’s the Veeam Backup and Replication services run by service providers that allow for things like an off-site backup (BaaS) or off-site replication (DRaaS) of physical or virtual workloads.

One of the main benefits of utilising a Veeam Cloud Connect partner is that the backup or replication data that is sent off-site, is not connected to the primary network where the production resource resides. Why is this important? Let’s assume that for some reason the primary workload domain is compromised or otherwise inaccessible. If the backups are also part of that primary workload domain then what do you have to recover from?

Let’s visualise that for a moment.

With the primary workload domain dead, then the backups are as good as dead too. This is a massive oversimplification but it demonstrates the point. The offsite backups in a Veeam Cloud Connect location are still accessible and ready to recover from. Veeam Insider Protection adds an additional layer of protection, you could even call it an air gap to those backups, but I digress for the purpose of this blog post.

Veeam Cloud Connect integration

As an employee at iland, a global provider of BaaS and DRaaS solutions, I am fortunate enough to have access to some Veeam Cloud Connect resources to test this out. The service provider needs to be running Veeam Backup and Replication V11 as a minimum on their backend for the Veeam Agent for Mac support to work. This is because Veeam Agent for Mac was introduced with Veeam V11.

Veeam job configuration

In the on-premises Veeam Backup and Replication server, create another Mac computer backup job.

Leave the defaults.

Name the job.

Choose the protection group containing the Macs.

Choose which files to backup. I covered this off in the original blog post how the Mac backup is not a bare-metal backup.

Now choose Veeam Cloud Connect Repository as the destintion.

Choose the cloud repository from the drop-down and the number of recovery points required.

Define the schedule.

and done.

We now have an additional Mac agent backup job created. The Mac agent does seem to support having multiple jobs associated with it.

And as before, Veeam Backup and Replication pushes the agent policy to the computers in the protection group, which is every 6 hours by default.

Recovery

As in my previous Mac agent blog post, we can recover data from the Mac agent on the endpoint. We can see both the backup jobs associated with this agent to recover from.

And on the iland side, we can see in the iland console that the backups are stored in the familiar Veeam backup file formats.

Final thoughts

This could be a great solution for those users who are rarely connected to the corporate network to store backups locally and instead can send them straight to the cloud. One thing I am not sure about at this point and requires testing is if the Veeam agent still has any reliance on the Veeam Backup and Replication server to establish the connection to the Cloud Connect repository. Looking at the job logs though it appears to make a direct connection to cloud connect.