Abiquo Backup Plugins

Introduction

This document provides a description of the Abiquo backup plugins. For a description of the complete feature, please see also:

• Manage backup policies in Infrastructure view: Backup
• Allow tenants to work with backup policies: Manage Enterprises in the Allowed datacenters section
• Configure backups on VMs: VM backups
• To create your own backup plugin, see Backup Plugin Archetype

Integrated backup plugins

Abiquo backup plugins support the following backup systems:

• Veeam
• Avamar

The Abiquo integration with both of these systems supports Complete backups only.

Configure backup plugins

There are two new properties to configure the backup plugin and load the configuration files for each backup system.

See Abiquo Configuration Properties#backup

abiquo.backup.avamar.config.path=/opt/abiquo/config/avamar.properties
abiquo.backup.veeam.config.path=/opt/abiquo/config/veeam.properties

For details of these configuration files, see Configure Abiquo Avamar Plugin and Configure Abiquo Veeam Backup Plugin properties 

Changes to configuring backups in infrastructure

You can edit backup properties as before. The Backup now option is only available in the UI when you are working with Avamar, not Veeam.

To use a backup system, you should first create a backup manager for the datacenter. The backup manager configures the connection to the backup system including the endpoint and optional credentials. Here you should specify the type of the backup plugin. Abiquo does not validate the connection details. In this initial version, a connection will be made to the backup system when a user requests a backup operation. Tip: When adding a Veeam backup manager, don't forget to add the slash "/" at the end of the URL. Abiquo does not display the credentials. The administrator can edit all values except the backup type. If you change the backup manager, future requests to the backup system will use the new values. 

As before, in each datacenter, create backup policies that contain the available configurations. 

Abiquo now supports setting the Avamar replication option.

Tenants

Abiquo will automatically allow access to backup policies for the enterprise of the administrator who creates the backup policies. For other enterprises, you must select the allowed backup policies for each datacenter.  

VMs

After the user creates a backup, it displays in the list on the Backup results tab, which now combines the previous Latest backups and Restore results tabs.

While the backup system is performing a backup, Abiquo now locks the VM. To open a list of restore details, which is now in the lower section of the same tab, the user clicks on the backup. 

Abiquo now displays events from the backup system on the Events tab. 

To see full details, the user double-clicks a backup event.  

Users can only restore a backup for a deployed VM. If you undeploy a VM and then deploy it again, you can restore backups for this VM.

Technical details

When the user deploys, reconfigures or undeploys a VM, Abiquo will include a new job called BACKUP_SCHEDULE in that task. If the job fails because Abiquo cannot schedule the backup, then the VM operation will roll back. As before events from the backup system are incorporated into Abiquo and streamed by the outbound API. 

The backup plugins work with the API (for backup management), and remote services: virtual factory and cloud provider proxy. The backup plugins are configured using:

• Abiquo property on Remote Services: configuration file location
• Backup system configuration files in the same folder as the Abiquo properties file on the remote services

Configurations and constraints

In the initial version, the supported configurations for the plugins are as follows.

The constraints for the backup actions are as follows.