Veeam Backup and Replication - Infinidat Integration

Starting with Update 3 (U3), Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) offers a built-in integration framework for storage systems called Universal Storage Integration API. Storage vendors can use the API to develop plugins and integrate their storage systems with VBR. This is a huge step into extending the ecosystem of storage vendors that offer advanced functionality with VBR.

As of the writing of this article,  the following storage systems are already supported:

• IBM Spectrum Virtualize (since December)
• INFINIDAT InfiniBox (since March)
• Pure Storage FlashArray (since April) 

(Later edit: first storage vendor supported via the API was IBM, but it is integrated in U3 release)

The following article presents the integration with Infinidat InfiniBox.

I will not go into the details of installation and configuration of InfiniBox. The post covers only Veeam part

First, download the Infinidat plugin from Veeam site. Login to VBR server, close VBR console, make sure processes/jobs are not running, extract the zipped file and run the installer. If you connect remotely to VBR, then run the installer on the machines from where you connect, too. It's a next, next, next process (as seen in the following series of pictures):

Now, getting to the fun part. Open VBR console, go to Storage Infrastructure > Add Storage - there it is, Infinidat Infinibox is available:

Add storage hostname (or IP address):

Add storage credentials:

Select the protocol to use (in lab I am using only iSCSI), the volumes to scan and the proxies to use (I have left everything on automatic):

Review the summary, press Finish and wait for the successful installation:

It is time to test the newly configured storage. First, let's create a job that uses Backup from Storage Snapshots. Since using integrated storage snapshots is active by default, there is no need to configure anything special for this job. Just select the VMs from InfiniBox datastore and run the job. Looking at the logs we see that "storage snapshot" is being used for backup:

Another type of job is to use only snapshots, although this is not a proper backup solution (since both the source VM and the backup reside on the same storage). To make a backup job snapshot only, you need to select as destination repository the InfiniBox storage (not a VBR repository):

This time when the job runs, it will create a snapshot directly on the storage:

The snapshots will appear under Home - Backups:

As well as under Storage Infrastructure:

Now, it's time for you to test the recovery :-)