For a long time Veeam has lead the way in regard to the protection of workloads running in vCloud Director. Veeam first released deep integration into vCD back in version 7 of Backup & Replication that talked directly to the vCD APIs to facilitate the backup and recovery of vCD workloads and their constructs. More recently in version 9.5, the vCD Self Service Portal was released which also taps into vCD for tenant authentication.

This portal leverages Enterprise Manager and allows service providers to grant their tenants self-service management of their vCD workloads. It’s possible that some providers don’t even know that this portal exists let alone the value it offers. I’ve covered the basics of the portal here…but in this post, I want to talk about how to use the Veeam APIs and PowerShell SnapIn to automatically enable a tenant, create a default backup jobs based on policies, tie backup copy jobs to default job for longer retention and finally import the jobs into the vCD Self Service Portal ready for use.

Having worked with a service provider recently, they requested to have previously defined service definitions for tenant backups ported to Veeam and the vCD Self Service Portal. Part of this requirement was to have tenants apply backup policies to their VMs…this included short term retention and longer term GFS based backup.

One of the current caveats with the Veeam vCD Self Service Portal is that backup copy jobs are not configurable via the web based portal. The reason for this is that It’s our belief that service providers should be in control of longer term restore operations, however some providers and their tenants still request this feature.

Translated to a working solution, the PowerShell script combines a previously released set of code by Markus Kraus that uses the Enterprise Manager API to setup a new tenant in the vCD Self Service portal and a set of new functions that create default backup and backup copy jobs for vCD and then imports them into the portal ready for use. The variables are controlled by a JSON file making the script portable for Veeam Cloud and Service Providers to use as a base and build upon.

The end result is that when a tenant first logs into the vCD Self Service Portal they have jobs, dictated by the desired polices ready for use. The backup jobs are set to disabled without a schedule set. The scope of the default jobs is the tenant’s Virtual Datacenter. If there is a corresponding backup copy job, this is tied to the backup job and is ready to do its thing.

From here, the tenant can choose which policy that want to apply to their workloads and edit the desired job, change or leave the scope and add a schedule. The job name in the Backup and Replication console is modified to indicate which policy the tenant selected.

Again, if the tenant chooses a policy that requires longer term retention, the corresponding backup copy job is enabled in the Backup & Replication console…though not managed by the tenant.

Self service recovery is possible by the tenant for through the portal as per usual, including full VM recovery, file and application item level recovery. For recovery of the longer term workloads and/or items, this is done by the Service Provider.

This is a great example of the power of the Veeam API and PowerShell SnapIn providing a solution to offer more than what is out of the box and enhance the offering around the backup of vCloud Director workloads with Veeam’s integration. Feel free to use as is, or modify and integrate into your service offerings.

GitHub Page: https://github.com/anthonyspiteri/powershell/tree/master/vCD-Create-SelfServiceTenantandPolicyJobs

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