Getting started with Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO): Ensure business continuity and DR compliance

NerdyDad

• Introducing Aperature laboratories
○ VAO is oriented towards applications
○ Start with protecting one small application, gets it 100%, then continues.
○ This will help learning and help success

• Use cases & key terms
○ Disaster recovery
§ An outage occurs and you need to react
○ Planned migration
○ Patch and Test
§ Testing a patch
○ Security Audits
§ IT security evaluation
○ VM groups - Are the result of tagging and categorization
○ Plan steps
§ are the what happens in a failover plan for both verification and launch.
○ Virtual labs
§ The association of replication job to build a DR plan around is detected from the Veeam Availability Orchestrator agent, then enabled in Veeam Availability Orchestrator for plans
○ Template jobs
§ A critical function post-failover to back up the (now production) systems that have been managed in VAO for orchestrated DR failover.
○ Failover plans - Constructed of:
§ VM groups
§ A collection of steps and handling options
§ Assigned creds
§ Options to protect after failover
§ Document and report

• Vmware vsphere tags
○ Consideration
§ Set vsphere tags up before implementing VAO by identifying and tagging applications to protect
□ Use intuitive vpshere tag and category names
Good :DR-Tier1-AppName
Bad: SampleTag
§ Impact:
□ Makes the vm group ssignment easier and aligned to the applications before VAO configuration
□ Makes a consistent alignment between the production applications

• Architecture & components
○ VAO works by presenting a UI that allows you to design and document failover plans
○ Integrates w/ other Veeam components like B&R and ONE embedded or distributed
○ Site-based model
§ One DR site
§ Multiple production sites
○ Site roles
§ Site admins
§ Failover plan authors
○ Granular delegation
§ VM groups
§ Virtual labs
§ Other plan components
§ Site administrators - In VAO UI on the prod site server, it can performed
§ Failover plan authors - manage failover plans for any VAO site the prod failover plan author can manage failover plans for the prod sites only.
§ Built on Veeam Business View
□ VM groups are building blocks of plans
§ Dynamic group updates via
□ vCenter tags
□ Business view rules
§ Built on Veeam Virtual Labs
□ Veeam SureReplica tech
□ Delegate labs per site
□ Build custom lab environments
□ Scheduling engine
□ Granular testing & verification
□ Dashboards for failover plan readiness
§ DR template
□ Fully customizable in MS word
□ Multiple template per site
§ DR definition document
□ Built from template + plan definition
□ Automatically update as plan changes
□ Emailed to all stakeholders
□ Detailed change logs
§ Components
□ VAO
□ B&R
□ ONE
□ UI & SQL server DB
§ Even though VAO has embedded components, the sizing of BUR jobs must be accounted for:
□ Proxies
□ Repos
□ Frequencies
□ Sequencing: take a backup, do a replica, do a surereplica
□ You learn a lot about B&R jobs
§ Site design
□ Active / passive
Each VAO server defines a site
Only one DR site - VM replicas here with plans built and run here
Can be multiple prod sites with a VAO server at each
VM inventor is synced from prod sites to DR site
□ Active / active
Each site as have that defies a site
2 DR sites with 2 UI's not one
VM inventory is synced

• Documentation & testing
○ Plan definition report- contains the config of the plan and is automatically updated daily
○ Plan execution report - failover or failback and is automatically generated for every plan execution
○ Plan test report - automatically generated for every test run in a Veeam virtual lab
○ Plan readiness check report - the config check for a plan that is automatically checked daily.

Troubleshooting
- Reports are great troubleshooting resource
- Historical reports captures details of each steps ops, including script output
- Try and isolate the issue, could be Veeam or VMware
- Be aware of step order - make sure it works in test as you expect
- There is a UI option to gather all of the logs to produce one bundle, be sure to use it for support.
- When you add a script, by default it is executed on the Backup server, and only during a failover. Scripts can execute on VAO connected Backup server console, or inside the vm.
- Ask where and when you want the script to run, Use appropriate account
- Important to understand since some customers who already have manual DR will have scripts

Support
- Collect and Export logs
- Using Vm tags vs categorization
- VAO & domain infrastructure
- Initial installation and license
- Configuration assistance
- No B&R or ONE on the same server as VAO