The Veeam Cookbook Series

A simple step by step no frills approach to achieving your goal

Recipe: Creating GCP VM Backup Policies

Expected deliverables:

A new policy to create image-level backups of Google Cloud VMs.

Time to complete: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• Google Cloud Storage Account configured as Backup Repository to protect Google Cloud VMs.
• A Service Account with required privileges for Data Protection tasks.
• A Worker Configuration in the same region and availability zone where the protected VMs reside.

Before you start: One backup policy can be used to process multiple VM instances within different regions, but you can back up each VM instance with one backup policy at a time The Review Estimated Cost will be available only if you have created a schedule for the backup policy at the Schedule step.

Assumptions: You have an existing Veeam Backup for Google Cloud deployment.

Method:

1. Login the Veeam Backup for Google Cloud web interface. Navigate to Policies > VM and Click in Add
2. At the Policy Info step, enter a Name and Description for the new backup policy.
3. At the Sources step, choose a project that manages resources that you want to protect, and specify a service account that will be used to access the project.
4. At the Resources step,
   • In the Regions section, click Choose regions to select the regions in which VM instances that you want to protect reside.
   • In the Resources section, click Choose resources to protect to select VM instances that Veeam Backup for Google Cloud will back up. You can choose to protect all VMs, or specific VMs.
5. At the Targets step:
   • Choose a location to store the snapshots created by the policy, either Regional or Multi-regional
   • To create image-level backups, set the Enable backups toggle to On. Then click Choose repository to select a standard or nearline backup repository where the created image-level backups will be stored. Click Apply.
   • To store long-term backups into a low-cost archive storage, select the Enable backup archiving check box. Then click Choose repository to select an archive backup repository where the archived data will be stored. Click Apply.
6. At the Schedule step you can instruct Veeam to start the backup policy automatically (Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly) according to a specific backup schedule or leave the default for manual backup. Combining multiple schedule types together allows you to use the archive backup option.
7. At the Labels step, you can assign labels to cloud-native snapshots created by the backup policy. Click Next
8. At the Settings step, you can enable automatic retries, schedule health checks and specify notification settings for the backup policy, otherwise leave the default and click Next
9. At the Cost Estimation step, review the approximate monthly cost of Google Cloud services that Veeam will require to protect the VM instances added to the backup policy. Click Next
10. At the Permissions step, verify whether the specified service account has all the necessary permissions required to perform data protection tasks.
11. At the Summary step, review configuration information and click Finish.

Links to Resources:

• Veeam Guides and Helpcenter
• Veeam Community Forums

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