How to setup Veeam replication with VMware vCloud Director

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update 4 has now finally been released (to the VCSP community first and the general public on the 22:nd of January). There are loads of really interesting updates and new features.

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update 4

To name a few of the enhancement/new features:

  • Capacity tier: Support for object based storage, gives you access to BLOB storage from Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and S3 compatible as well as IBM Cloud Object Storage. This is a new addition to Scale-Out backup repository users. You have your local “performance tier” as per usual but you can offload data based on age or space to object based storage.
  • Staged restore (GDPR compliance for instance, the right to be forgotten  or other use cases where you’d need to run a script on the VM before restoring it)
  • Secure restore where you can do a virus scan on the VM before restoring
  • Direct restore to Amazon EC2 – restoring to Azure has been available for a while but now you can also choose to restore your on-premises infrastructure VMs to Amazon EC2 – combined with the functionality of the backup vendor Veeam acquired a year ago called N2WS for backing up EC2 instances we now have a whole other level of portability of our data: backup everything, restore where it makes the most sense.
  • Self-service backup and restore portal using Enterprise manager
  • Enhancements to various Veeam explorers
  • Plugins for SAP HANA and Oracle RMAN
  • Platform support: vSphere 6.7 update 1, Windows Server 2019 and vCloud Director 9.5

But going back to the fact that update 4 now is available for VCSPs (or Veeam Cloud & Service Provider), there have been some updates for VMware environments as well (VMware calls their service provider program “VCPP”). Included in the VCPP program is a great product called vCloud Director that has been around for ages but is only available for service providers to use nowadays. VMware vCloud Director is an abstraction layer on top of vCenter so up until now there has been no support for vCloud Director for Veeam Cloud Connect usage when replicating VMs from a customer to the service provider environment. The solution previously was to replicate VMs to the service provider vCenter using Cloud Connect and then manually import VMs to the correct organization from vCloud Director. With update 4 that manual step has now been removed, and the process has in fact been improved since the customer can – using cloud connect and a single port mind you! (no VPN required) – replicate virtual machines from the onsite vSphere environment directly to their own Organization and Org vDC. The customer can also set up failover plans and run those if needed all using the same vCloud Director credentials they already received from the service provider.

It’s really easy to setup, below is a video where I show you how to configure the service provider bits such as adding vCloud Director, setting up tenants but also how the customer would configure their environment i.e. how to connect to a service provider using Cloud Connect and setting up replication jobs from a local environment and replicating VMs to the service provider vCloud Director and the customers org vDC within that environment.

(The video is in swedish but just turn off the sound if you don’t understand)

VMware vCloud Director not showing webpage

I was installing VMware vCloud Director 9.1 for Service Providers the other day and ran in to a problem that is “by design” if you will but if you are new to vCloud Director it still might be a show stopper for you.

In my case I was installing vCloud Director on a CentOS 7 VM.  The problem itself manifests itself when the installation is done and you try to access the webpage but all you get is an empty webpage like this:

First of all before installing vCloud Director make sure you have all the required linux packages installed on the VM:

alsa-lib    
bash
chkconfig
coreutils
findutils
glibc
grep
initscripts
krb5-libs
libgcc
libICE
libSM
libstdc++
libX11
libXau
libXdmcp
libXext
libXi
libXt
libXtst
module-init-tools
net-tools
pciutils
procps
redhat-lsb
sed
tar
wget
which

Since my environment is a demo/test environment I’m using self signed certificates but in a production environment you should use real signed certificates.

But going back to the problem, everything installed correctly during the install and I had no problem connecting to the database server (again since my environment is for demo, I’m using Microsoft SQL Server Express 2016 – not supported in a production environment).

I had no problem connecting to the vcd server (to both http and console interface) and database using either IP address or FQDN. But still a connection  problem to the webpage, smells a bit like a firewall issue?

First a look into the logs using the command

tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vmware-vcd-watchdog.log

A warning “Server status returned HTTP/1.1 503”. Verifying the active firewall rules using the command

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –list-services

Only the ssh and dhcpv6-client services are enabled. It seems we’re missing a few services so enabling them using:

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –add-service=http

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –add-service=https

And verifying the new firewall rules:

Looks like it just might work now, probably good thing to restart the services just to be safe:

service vmware-vcd stop

service vmware-vcd start

And after a successful restart, reopening the browser will get you the good old web page once again:

Now that looks promising, clicking “Continue to this website (not recommended) brings us to this screen below:

Now it’s time to continue configuring vCloud Director.