I wanted to share some cool stuff that is available over at Cisco, it’s to do with the dCloud offerings they have over there. Custom environments with a huge catalogue of demonstrations, training and sandbox environments for every Cisco product and architecture. The one that I want to bring to your attention is the Cisco HyperFlex and Veeam Availability Suite demo environment.

Yes, it brings the HCI platform from Cisco but also the Veeam Availability Suite, allowing you to run through backup and restore scenarios for either full virtual machine recoveries or application item level recovery. Replication between multiple sites including the failover and failback of those workloads. It also highlights, and you are able to look at the storage integration that Veeam have with the HyperFlex HCI platform.

Below you will see the overview of the lab and topology included in this 5-part lab.





Scenarios



Installing Veeam Backup & Replication



This first scenario is to walkthrough the steps to install the Availability suite. This also will run through the basic configuration you require when installing Veeam, adding a VMware virtual centre to see your production workloads is also included.

Add Cisco HyperFlex Storage to Veeam Backup & Replication



The purpose of this scenario is to add the HyperFlex storage platform to Veeam Backup & Replication, which will allow the HyperFlex native snapshot integration for faster backups.

Perform a Backup



The purpose of this scenario is to import backups, and then walk through the Veeam backup wizard to take a comprehensive look

at the capabilities available for backups.

Perform a Restore



There are many ways of restoring data from Veeam backups. The purpose of this scenario is to explore the three most popular

recovery scenarios:

Instant VM Recovery

• File level Recovery

Application Item Recovery (using SQL Server and Active Directory)

VM Replication



The purpose of this scenario is to create a replication job, replicate important VMs to a recovery site, create a failover plan, and test out the failover process.

Veeam Replication is a VM based replication that replicates VMs that require higher availability (low RTO/RPO criteria). Veeam replication jobs have the ability to replicate one or more VMs from a source host to a destination host (either local or at a remote location). These replicated VMs will be available in VM format at the replicated site for quick power up in the event of a primary site failure. For remote replication, Veeam does use compression, and optional WAN accelerators, to minimize the traffic over long distance, high latency connections.

This scenario replicates VMs from one HyperFlex cluster to a second HyperFlex cluster, simulating a local replication scenario. Both the source and target proxy server will be on the Veeam Backup Server.

There are some more deep dive detail going into Veeam Replication here.

How do we gain access to this lab?



The biggest question I have been getting is I am a customer and I don’t believe I can access the lab. This is not correct everyone is capable of launching any of the dCloud lab sessions and scenarios. However it is down to the Cisco Account teams to support you as a customer with access to these labs.

Once the above administration has been done though, customers are able to access and run sessions on their own.

To get started you do need to register, simply register for a Cisco.com account and then use that account to log in.

If you register as a Customer, the initial account defines them as an L2 user. This level of access provides:

Direct and full access to dCloud content enabled for L2 access

Full access to any dCloud session shared with them by a Cisco employee or partner

If you register as a Guest, their initial account defines them as an L1 user. This level of access provides full access to any dCloud session shared with them by a Cisco employee or partner.

I would love to hear more from people that have tried this out and have some feedback around what to do next?



