Organizations managing large environments with multiple Veeam Backup components typically require a centralized access control from a single location. This is exactly what the Backup Enterprise Manager, Veeam BEM v10 provides. A single location to access and manage backup and restore jobs, concentrate in a single location all backup indexes for a swift recovery from separate locations, self-service requests and a lot more. In this article the steps for a first time configuration as a follow up from the Enterprise Manager install.
Veeam BEM v10 does not require any extra license and is built-in the Veeam Backup & Replication offering. Typically the Enterprise Manager is used to federate multiple Veeam Backup & Replication deployments. From a configuration perspective the Enterprise Manager connects to the VMware vCenter environment and retrieves the necessary information about the Virtual Infrastructure, including roles, tags and permissions. These can also be used to create dedicated configurations with specific scopes.
Veeam BEM v10: First time setup
Upon install and first login the Veeam BEM v10 presents the main dashboard. This is the place with the essential information about the infrastructure with a quick view on the job status and other performance information about the connected Veeam Backup & Replication servers.
To proceed with the Veeam BEM v10 setup, the configuration button brings to the main setup page. The most important bit is to add first the Veeam Backup & Replication servers to manage. When adding multiple VBR servers the Enterprise Manager console will show data per each server. Data is collected automatically and can also be manually forced and even on schedules. This allows to have separate schedules for separate servers.
In a similar fashion the next important part is adding the VMware vCenter environment info. Also in this case multiple VCSA servers can be added and managed from a single Veeam BEM v10 console.
Large IT Organizations and service providers have the ability to provide self-service capabilities directly from the Enterprise Manager console. This also includes the ability to assign a storage quota on predefined backup repositories. This allows power users or tenants for example to:
- Create and manage backup jobs that process vSphere VMs.
- View VM backup statistics.
- Restore vSphere VMs to the original location.
- Restore files from indexed and non-indexed guest OS file systems of vSphere VMs.
- Perform item-level restore for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.
In addition the Enterprise Manager can restrict access to specific objects in the VMware vSphere environment based on the delegation mode. Delegation can use vSphere Tags, vSphere Roles and even custom VM privileges for a complete flexibility.
The Sessions page shows a quick view of the jobs executed by the Enterprise Manager.
The Roles page allows to manage the separate roles and which Users and or Groups should be associated to these. There are 3 roles predefined in the Enterprise Manager: Portal Administrator, Portal User and Restore Operator. The official user guide offer more details about these.
The interesting part about configuring roles is that selected users and groups might have restoring capabilities only for specific objects. In the case of large organizations it makes easier the separation between different scopes based on teams, location and other criteria.
The settings page offer interesting configurations about the catalogs indexing, key management, SAML Auth, Active Directory Account integration and more. Directory Account integration is required for additional Role configuration.
Another important aspect is also the licensing. The great news is the Veeam BEM v10 will automatically detect and manage the licenses for the Veeam servers. In addition it also shows which workloads are consuming the license and the option to grant or revoke these individually.
Last but not least is the notification page with access to several areas like server settings, job summary, lab requests and more. The next article will offer a quick tour on how to use the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.
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