This article provides information about Dell EMC Data Protection Extension (Avamar 19.1) support for VMware vCloud Director. 
The Dell EMC Data Protection Extension is the first certificated data protection solution for VMware vCloud Director, which is also a native data protection solution.  It extends the vCloud Director HTML 5 UI and REST API providing tenants a single management end-point for their virtual datacenters. Tenants can manage image level backups of VMs and vApps, restore to a new VM or in-place, by policy or adhoc, even file level restore. 


Figure 1 - Dashboard page    


Figure 2 - Restore Wizard

Solution Description
Dell EMC vCloud Data Protection Extension brings data protection services into VMware vCloud environments. The extension is targeted at Service Providers that offer data protection services to tenants with applications running in the cloud.

vCloud Data Protection Extension enables tenant administrators to manage self-service data protection including backup, restore, and replication operations. The cloud administrators are responsible for defining data protection services and provide these services to their tenants.

vCloud Data Protection Extension embeds backup services right into vCloud Director. These services are managed resources within vCloud Director and are shared and distributed in a multi-tenant model.

Highlights:

• Best User Experience
  • Integration directly into the vCloud Director Tenant Portal UI and REST API providing a seamless User experience
  • Self-service data protection as a service in multi-tenant environments
• Cost Effective
  • Industry leading deduplication minimizes backup storage costs for service provider
  • 55:1 average dedupe
• Superior Performance & Scale
  • A scale-out architecture combined with Avamar’s quick and efficient backups provide unparalleled levels of service performance
  • vCloud Director Data Protection infrastructure can be easily scaled out by adding new IDPA, Avamar and/or Data Domain system
• Flexible Baas
  • Flexible backup options enable backups to be run through policies and/or on-demand
  • BaaS controls through a single interface including ad-hoc backup, policy-based backup, and self-service restore options
  • End-user can restore instances (VMs or vApps) or files through self-service portal

VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware Cloud Director for Service Provider 9.5.x
VMware Cloud Director for Service Provider 9.7.x
VMware Cloud Director for Service Provider 9.0.x

Below is a summary of target use cases, solution architecture, solution components, and support information.
Target Use Cases:
Use cases that are supported on VMware vCloud Director


As a Cloud Admin

• Define backup policy template, publish to tenant catalogs
• Configure granular quotas on protected capacity
• Tenant repository assignment
• Configure backup replication
• Access chargeback reporting

As a Tenant Admin

• Apply Policies from catalog to vApps/VMs
• In-place restore of vApps or VMs
• Re-directed restore of vApps or VMs
• Self-service file-level recovery
• Monitor Backups

As a vApp User

• Self-service file-level recovery.

Solution Architecture

Dell EMC Data Protection Extension for VMware vCloud Director

This solution allows image-based data protection for the workloads running in VMware vCloud Director such as vApps and VMs
.
Dell EMC Data Protection solution in VMware vCloud Director requires the following appliances:

• Dell EMC Avamar Server or as an Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE) 19.1 or later,
• Data Domain server or as a DD Virtual Edition (DDVE) version 6.0.x, 6.1.x, 6.2.x (Optional),
• Dell EMC vCloud Director Data Protection Extension 19.1 or later

Topology 1:

Dell EMC vCloud Director Data Protection Extension running in vSphere as several critical instances. The Topology 1 figure above shows 2 major instances:

• Cell is responsible for handing all data protection requests from vCD on behalf of the vCD users. 
• Backup-Gateway will contact the back-end Avamar server to process the backup/restore work.

To perform data protection and advanced management tasks for VMware vCloud Director, consider the following recommendations and requirements on the backup infrastructure deployment:

Avamar Server: it is recommended to deploy Dell EMC Avamar server or its virtual edition (AVE).
vCloud Director Data Protection Extension: it is recommended to deploy the components of Dell EMC vCloud Director Data Protection Extension on the virtualization environment.
Data Domain: it is recommended to have your backups stored on the Data Domain, which provides improved storage capacity.
It is also recommended to replicate your backup data to another Avamar server
This type of deployment allows backup copies to be stored for longer retention, and ensures the ability of recovering from disaster.

Dell EMC Data Protection Extension Deployment
The vCloud Director Data Protection Extension (vCD DPE) requires deployment of multiple VMs in the cloud infrastructure where a VM or a group of VMs are configured with a specific application payload (cell, backup gateway, utility node (RabbitMQ and PostgreSQL), UI server, reporting server, and FLR UI server). The number of Avamar servers under management by the vCD DPE determines the scale of the number of VMs to deploy, based on the customer environment. Since the vCD DPE is targeted for the service provider market, the installation process supports a wide-scale scripted and automated deployment and configuration of the vCD DPE VMs.

Virtual Provisioning Appliance (vPA)
Instead of delivering specific OVAs for each application, the vCD DPE comes as a single OVA (the vPA) which acts as a deployment manager. With the vPA, all components of the vCD DPE will be deployed automatically with a single click.

The following assumptions about the installation apply:

• All inter-component connections use SSL.
• The default installation is not configured for centralized logging. This topic is covered in the vCloud Director Data Protection Extension Administration and User Guide as a separate post-installation procedure.

Support Information
Deployment Guides:
Installation and Upgrade
Release Notes:
Release Notes
User Guides:
Administration and User Guide
REST API Reference Guide
Architecture/Design Guides:
Message Bus Specification

Tags
VMware vCloud Director, Dell EMC Data Protection, Avamar, Dell EMC