Cloud Connect Subtenants have gone under the radar for the most but can play an important role in how Service Provider customers consume Cloud Connect services. In a previous post, I described how subtenants work in the context of Cloud Connect Backup.

Subtenants can be configured by either the VCSP or by the tenant consuming a Cloud Connect Backup service. Subtenants are used to carve up and assign a subset of the parent tenant storage quota. This allows individual agents to authenticate against the Cloud Connect service with a unique login allowing backups to Cloud Repositories that can be managed and monitored from the Backup & Replication console.

In this post I’m going to dive into how subtenants are created by the Veeam Availability Console and how they are then used by agents that are managed by VAC. For those that may not know what VAC does, head to this post for a primer.

Automatic Creation of Subtenant Users:

Veeam Availability Console automatically creates subtenant users if a backup policy that is configured to use a cloud repository as a backup target is chosen. When such a backup policy is assigned to an agent, VAC creates a subtenant account on the Cloud Connect Server for each backup agent.

Looking below you can see a list of the Backup Agents under the Discovery Menu.

Looking at the Backup Policy you can see that the Backup Target is a Cloud Repository, which results in the corresponding subtenant account being created.

The backup agents use these subtenant accounts to connect and send data to a Cloud Connect endpoint that are backed by a cloud repository. The name of each subtenant account is created according to the following naming convention:

companyname_computername

At the Cloud Provider end from within the Backup & Replication console under the Cloud Connect Menu and under tenants, clicking on Manage Subtenants will show you the corresponding list of subtenant accounts.

The view above is the same to that seen at the tenant end. A tenant can modify the quota details from the Veeam Backup & Replication console. This will result in a Custom Policy status as shown below. The original policy can be reapplied from VAC to bring it back into line.

The folder structure on the Cloud Repository maps what’s seen above. As you can also see, if you have Backup Protection enable you will also have _RecycleBin objects there.

NOTE: When a new policy is applied to an agent the old subtenant account and data is retained on the Cloud Connect repository. The new policy gets applied and a subtenant account with an _n gets created. Service Providers will need to purge old data manually.

Finally if we look at the endpoint where the agent is installed and managed by VAC you will see the subtenant account configured.

Conclusion:

So there is a deeper look at how subtenants are used as part of the Veeam Availability Console and how they are created, managed and used by the Agent for Windows.

References:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vac/provider_admin/create_subtenant_user.html?ver=20

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