Backing up VEEAM to Azure

[LeMarchand]

Is anyone doing this? If so, how are you setting it up and what are the costs like?

 

Is it just a question of setting a copy job to Azure, or more complicated than that?

[LeMarchand]

Gonna try a and also ask how people are Veeaming their SIMS servers. Just doing a replication, or unmounting/remounting the SQL database?

[zag]

Just a replication, veeam sorts out the rest for you. No need to unmount any databases.

 

Azure should work fine too. Personally I just backup to our local storage on the backup server (which is in another building)

[LeMarchand]

Thanks for the info. Will try to work out MS's labyrinthine pricing.

 

Personally I just backup to our local storage on the backup server (which is in another building)

 

Both sites that are interested only have one building (well one has a secondary building, but it's so close that it would likely be a goner if there was a disaster).

[Steve21]

Be interesting to hear what you find out too as been looking at this recently, but seems any of the cloud options we were looking at work out silly month per month for a proper site backup Couple of grand a year (which is a lot for our current budgets )

 

Steve

[ticker]

I've been looking in to this as well and a local company are offering to back up 7 servers, with data not totaling more than 1TB into the cloud. They then say they can restore your virtual servers and present them in the cloud for users to access in any location in the event of a disaster. Though as above the price tag for this is just short of the 2 grand mark. Edited March 17, 2015 by ticker

[LeMarchand]

Be interesting to hear what you find out too as been looking at this recently, but seems any of the cloud options we were looking at work out silly month per month for a proper site backup Couple of grand a year (which is a lot for our current budgets )

 

Steve

 

The head at one of my schools was at a MS shindig and they were pushing Azure as a lot cheaper than previously (I think he said £5/month/0.5 Terabyte) but the various options are totally confusing: Pricing Calculator – Quickly Estimate your Bill | Microsoft Azure . Depending on what you pick, the price for what seems to be the same capacity can vary greatly!

 

I've been looking in to this as well and a local company are offering to back up 7 servers, with data not totaling more than 1TB into the cloud. They then say they can restore your virtual servers and present them in the cloud for users to access in any location in the event of a disaster. Though as above the price tag for this is just short of the 2 grand mark.

 

You can definitely do that, though what does that 2K cover? Just a one-time backup, or ongoing?

[Steve21]

The head at one of my schools was at a MS shindig and they were pushing Azure as a lot cheaper than previously (I think he said £5/month/0.5 Terabyte) but the various options are totally confusing: Pricing Calculator – Quickly Estimate your Bill | Microsoft Azure . Depending on what you pick, the price for what seems to be the same capacity can vary greatly!

 

Unless you're talking about backing up VMs that are already in the cloud I thought they only have the one option "BackUp" on that list?

 

Azure Backup is a reliable, inexpensive and scalable data protection solution for backing up on-premises data to the cloud. Safeguard your critical business data with zero capital investment and minimal operational expense.

 

Which for 5TB (not even half our data) works out £610.29 a month or £7k~ a year :s Unless I'm missing the obvious on this one?

 

Steve

[zag]

Unless you're talking about backing up VMs that are already in the cloud I thought they only have the one option "BackUp" on that list?

 

 

 

Which for 5TB (not even half our data) works out £610.29 a month or £7k~ a year :s Unless I'm missing the obvious on this one?

 

Steve

 

For that amount of data you might as well buy a server, some 6tb hard disks and co locate it somewhere.

[Steve21]

For that amount of data you might as well buy a server, some 6tb hard disks and co locate it somewhere.

 

Aye was originally looking at trying to get a nice NAS into a local school but none seem to want to from the few we poked, so currently using external drives just for multiple offsite backups, but not exactly "snazzy" process

 

Steve

[LeMarchand]

Unless you're talking about backing up VMs that are already in the cloud I thought they only have the one option "BackUp" on that list?

 

 

There's only one "backup" but I don't know what 1/2 those other options are! Isn't a backup just a file or a collection of files?

 

For that amount of data you might as well buy a server, some 6tb hard disks and co locate it somewhere.

 

We probably only need 1 or 2TB, and the LEA make it nigh-impossible to co-locate - so it MAY be worth further investigation. Can't see how it's £5/500GB though!

[Steve21]

 

There's only one "backup" but I don't know what 1/2 those other options are! Isn't a backup just a file or a collection of files?

 

We probably only need 1 or 2TB, and the LEA make it nigh-impossible to co-locate - so it MAY be worth further investigation. Can't see how it's £5/500GB though!

 

Aye the backup bit is what I'm assuming we'd want for Veeam as it's obviously just the backup files that need uploading etc.

 

But yeah no idea how they work that pricing out :/ Unless they just picked the first option and was like that's nearish £5 without reading it.

 

Steve

[LeMarchand]

Aye the backup bit is what I'm assuming we'd want for Veeam as it's obviously just the backup files that need uploading etc.

 

Looking at that screenshot, uploading 2TB of "files" is £53, but if you call it a "backup" it's 5 times the price!

[Steve21]

Looking at that screenshot, uploading 2TB of "files" is £53, but if you call it a "backup" it's 5 times the price!

 

From my understanding (and I may be 100% wrong so no assumptions) but isn't the "top" storage only for Azure hosted services? Thought the blobs etc were linked to a VM within Azure.

 

Example:

 

High level summary:

 

Provision Azure VM with sufficient CPU cores, memory, and disk space.

Configure Azure Storage account, and disk space on the VM for use as a Backup Repository and Global Deduplication Cache.

Configure an End Point to allow Cloud Connect tenants access to the VM

Install Veeam Backup and Replication 8 on the VM with additional Cloud Connect License

Configure Veeam on the VM to act as Cloud Connect Gateway, WAN Accelerator, and house a Backup Repository in Azure blob storage.

On the tenant side, add and configure a Service Provider, setup and run a backup copy job using the Cloud Repository as backup target.

 

Where as the BackUp is just storage which can be linked (Like remote NAS drive)

 

That's how I understood it anyway :s Again disclaimer may be miles off!

 

Steve

[LeMarchand]

Where as the BackUp is just storage which can be linked (Like remote NAS drive)

 

That's how I understood it anyway :s Again disclaimer may be miles off!

 

Steve

 

That would explain the discrepancy!

[dhicks]

The head at one of my schools was at a MS shindig and they were pushing Azure as a lot cheaper than previously (I think he said £5/month/0.5 Terabyte) but the various options are totally confusing

 

There's another similar thread here:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/150488-azure-ad-other-services.html

 

I had a look at that pricing calculator too, and I got a figure of around £500 per month for backing up half a dozen VMs and a chunk of backup file storage. If you keep each VM's image under 100GB you can back up the whole VM to a ready-to-run image in Azure for £40 (including VAT) per month - that's not a backup that you have to restore to your local hardware if there's a problem, that's a disk image that you can start up right there and then as soon as contact is lost with your on-site VM.

[LeMarchand]

There's another similar thread here:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/150488-azure-ad-other-services.html

 

I had a look at that pricing calculator too, and I got a figure of around £500 per month for backing up half a dozen VMs and a chunk of backup file storage. If you keep each VM's image under 100GB you can back up the whole VM to a ready-to-run image in Azure for £40 (including VAT) per month - that's not a backup that you have to restore to your local hardware if there's a problem, that's a disk image that you can start up right there and then as soon as contact is lost with your on-site VM.

 

I think I'm going to have to do a lot more reading...

[Steve21]

that's a disk image that you can start up right there and then as soon as contact is lost with your on-site VM.

 

Dumb question, but how would that actually work? :s As in you have your entire network now running on Azure, but how could anyone access it? As surely they wouldn't be able to find the servers etc without redirecting from local DC etc? Or am I being a spas

 

Steve

[dhicks]

Dumb question, but how would that actually work? :s As in you have your entire network now running on Azure, but how could anyone access it? As surely they wouldn't be able to find the servers etc without redirecting from local DC etc?

 

No, it's an excellent question - I assume the solution is going to be something VPN-related, e.g. run an OpenVPN client on a gateway machine in AWS that gives access to your other VMs. It's the sort of thing that we need to try out and see how well it all works in practice.

[Dave_O]

OK. So lets say we start with a single server eg SIMS server, backup to Veeam and send that file to Azure (block blobs I think they call them - none of this "instance" rubbish), probably no more than 250Gb. What would be the cost? 250Gb x £0.0147 per month ie £3.68 per month or £44.10 pa? or do you need to factor in some ingress/egress bandwidth stuff or some express connections blah, blah. Clear as mud. If it was that much for something like SIMS it might be worth it. Is there a dumbass calculator that allows people like me to get a clear view of the total cost.

 

is there anyone who's actually doing this?

[dhicks]

do you need to factor in some ingress/egress bandwidth stuff or some express connections

 

Ingress (i.e. data from you to Azure, which is the direction most of your backup data should be heading) is free. I figure it's not worth costing up what you pay if you have to actually run a VM in the cloud or restore one from backup - on-site diasters should, hopefully, be rare. Azure's pricing calculator can be found here:

 

Azure Pricing Calculator - Estimate your bill | Microsoft Azure

[Dave_O]

. Azure's pricing calculator can be found here:

 

Azure Pricing Calculator - Estimate your bill | Microsoft Azure

Yes, looked at that, still can't figure it out.

 

Will do some more digging next week.