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.

VeeamCC

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.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_13

Leave the defaults.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_12

Name the job.

Choose the protection group containing the Macs.

MacAgentCloudCO acnnect_10

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

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_9

Now choose Veeam Cloud Connect Repository as the destintion.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_8

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

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_7

Define the schedule.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_6

and done.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_5

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

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_4

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.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_3

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.

MacAgentCloudCOnnect_2

And on the iland side, we can see in the iland console that the backups are stored in the familiar Veeam backup file formats.MacAgentCloudCOnnect_1

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.

 

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2 Responses

  1. John Quinn says:

    Its unfortunate that we dont see any information on the cloud connect side when the job is running. No details like the vm, progress, how many files / objects, completion %. Also in the mac agent you have nothing more than what restore points that are available. No data about the job details, or if its running, etc. In VSPC, all we see is running, again nothing about the completion %. It would be nice to know if its half done, 80% done. Etc

    • Ian says:

      Completely agree, the Mac agent implementation is way less feature-rich than the Windows agent at this point. Hopefully, that will improve with time!

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