In order to create a SoftNAS Cloud® and Veeam Backup solution customized to your organization's individual needs, there is a fair bit of information you will need to gather, and a number of decisions that will need to be made. This primer is intended to help you identify the information needed to make informed decisions for your SoftNAS Cloud deployment with Veeam backups to the cloud. To guide you towards the solution that is right for you, the checklist below will help you record the key data required when you start your actual deployment of SoftNAS Cloud in Azure as a repository for Veeam backup data. 

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For each section of the checklist, additional information is provided in a linked section below. These informative articles can be used to help you make deployment decisions or create prerequisite resources that will be needed for your deployment.

Deployment Checklist:

The following document serves as a checklist, and as such is designed so that our users can copy and paste to a separate document (or export), and mark up as necessary. We recommend that the checklist be used to record all data to be used in your deployment for easy reference during both planning and your actual deployment. 

1. Deployment: Determine your deployment type. SoftNAS supports two different deployment types. Select one of the below:
   
   
   •  Premise to Azure Cloud
   •  Azure Cloud to Azure Cloud
     
     
2. Azure Account: Record your Azure account credentials (how to create an Azure account listed below)
   
   
   • Account ID or Alias:_____________________
   • User Name:_______________________
   • Password:____________________________
   
   
   
3. SoftNAS Cloud Offering: Determine what SoftNAS Cloud offering you use for your deployment. Select one of the below SoftNAS Cloud Offerings:
   
   
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials 1TB
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials 10TB
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials 20TB
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials 50TB
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials 1TB+MMS Consumption
   •  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials BYOL
   •  Other non-Essentials:___________________________
   
   
4. Networking: Understand the premise data center firewall or other network changes required to access SoftNAS Cloud in Azure as your Veeam repository:
   
   
   •  Data center networking and firewall changes requested and complete
     
     
5. Azure VM Size: Select the Azure VM size for your deployment. 
   Select one of the below:
   
   
   •  E4s_v3
   •  E8s_v3
   •  E16s_v3
   •  D32s_v3
   •  Other:______________________
     
     
     
6. Azure Storage Accounts: In order to add the desired storage, you will need to create a storage account. For each type of storage used, a separate storage account will be required. For information on creating your storage account, see Create Storage Account.
   •  Storage Account Name:____________
   •  Storage Account Name:____________
   •  Storage Account Name:____________
   
   
   
7. Azure Storage Selection: Select the type of Azure storage to use for your backup data in Azure.
   
   Select one of the below:
   •  Azure Cool Blob(Recommended for Veeam and SoftNAS Cloud Essentials)
   •  Azure Hot Blob
   •  Other:________________________
     
     
8. Add a self-signed certification to your SoftNAS Cloud and Veeam deployment:
   
   •  Add the certification: 
     
     
9. Azure VNet: Record the name of the VNet that you will use for your SoftNAS Cloud deployment
   
   
   •  VNet Name:____________________
   
   
   
10. Data Transfer Protocol and Azure Instance Security Group: You can select to use NFS or CIFs/SMB as the protocol to allow Veeam to transfer backup data to the SoftNAS Cloud repository.
    
    Select one of the below:
    •  NFS
    •  CIFs/SMB
      
      
11. Deploy Your SoftNAS Cloud Azure instance via WAN:
    
    
12. Connect Veeam to SoftNAS in Azure via WAN:
    

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AzureVeeamDeployment AzureVeeamDeployment

Deployment

There are two supported deployments of Veeam and SoftNAS Cloud to back up your data to the cloud.

Supported: Veeam Backup of On Premise Data to SoftNAS in the Cloud

If the data you want to backup is located on premise and you want to leverage SoftNAS Cloud on Azureto store backup data on Azurecloud storage, the deployment below is recommended and supported. 

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• Veeam and the data you want to backup will be located in you premise data center. 
• You will need a VPN or other secure network connection to Azureto secure the NFS or CIFs/SMB traffic to the cloud
• SoftNAS Cloud will be running in the Azurecloud and connected to AzureS3 storage for your backup files

Supported: Veeam Backup of Cloud Data to SoftNAS in the Cloud

If the data you want to backup is located in the Azure Cloud and you want to leverage SoftNAS Cloud on Azure to store backup data on Azurecloud storage, the deployment below is recommended and supported. 

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If the data you want to backup is located in the Azure cloud and you want to leverage SoftNAS Cloud on Azure to store backup data on Azure cloud storage, the deployment below is not recommended or supported.

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AzureVeeamAccount AzureVeeamAccount

Azure Account

If you plan on saving you backups to SoftNAS Cloud on Azure, you/your company will need an Azure account.   If you/your company does not have and Azure Account, you can create one here.

Once you have your Azure credentials (Account ID or alias, IAM username, Password), you will be able to log into the Azure Marketplace and select a SoftNAS Cloud Essentials offering here.

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AzureVeeamSoftNASCloudOffering AzureVeeamSoftNASCloudOffering

SoftNAS Cloud Offering

SoftNAS recommends use of SoftNAS Cloud Essentials and AzureS3 Object storage for use with Veeam for backups.   SoftNAS Cloud Essentials is our base offering which only supports Object storage.  Object storage is less expensive than Block storage and is a good option for use as storage for Veeam backups. 

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• SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials BYOL: If you require greater than 50TB of storage capacity for your Veeam backups, you can contact SoftNAS Sales for a BYOL license for the capacity of storage that meets your needs up to 16PB.

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AzureVeeamNetworking AzureVeeamNetworking

Networking

If you are deploying Veeam and SoftNAS Cloud to back up data from your premise data center to the cloud, you will likely need to make some network security changes to your data center’s network/firewall to allow Veeam running in the data center to be able to connect to the SoftNAS Cloud in Azure.    The information below is provided to help you make or request changes to your network team to ensure the network changes are ready when you are ready to deploy SoftNAS.

NFS

If you will be using the NFS protocol to transmit data from Veeam on premise to SoftNAS Cloud in Azure, you will need to allow the following ports to traverse from your datacenter to the SoftNAS Cloud instance in Azure.  Firewall changes may be required.

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CIFs/SMB

If you will be using CIFs/SMB to transmit data from Veeam on-premise to SoftNAS Cloud in Azure, you will need to allow the following ports to traverse from your datacenter to the SoftNAS Cloud instance in Azure.  Firewall changes may be required.

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AzureVeeamInstanceSize AzureVeeamInstanceSize

Azure VM Size

A list of SoftNAS Cloud Essentials recommended VM sized for use with Veeam can be found here.  You can learn more about how the resources of an Azure instance can impact performance below.

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If you are new to SoftNAS and Azure, you may want to start your deployment with one of the SoftNAS recommended instances here and use Azure Monitor or a similar tool to monitor you resource utilization and adjust accordingly.

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AzureVeeamStorageAccounts AzureVeeamStorageAccounts

Azure Storage Accounts

There are two general types of storage accounts for Azure:

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If deciding to add Azure object storage (otherwise known as Blob storage), you will need to have at least one Blob storage account set up, or you will not be able to call upon the storage within the SoftNAS UI. For more information on creating a storage account, see Create Storage Account.

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AzureVeeamStorageSelection AzureVeeamStorageSelection

Azure Storage Selection

When creating your Blob Storage account, you will also have another decision to make - whether you will leverage hot or cool storage for Azure. SoftNAS offers full support for both options:

• Azure Cool Storage - Object storage that allows economical safe-keeping of less frequently accessed file data.
• Azure Hot Storage - Object storage that optimizes frequently accessed stored data to enable continuous IO.

Note: You cannot mix hot and cool storage disks in a RAID configured pool. A decision must be made on storage type for each pool. As storage type is determined at the blob storage account level, you must be aware of the type of account created. SoftNAS recommends labelling them with Hot or Cool in the names to avoid confusion.

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Never mix blob storage accounts within the same pool. SoftNAS will alert you should this occur accidentally.

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VeeamAzureVnet VeeamAzureVnet

Azure VNet

Your SoftNAS Cloud instance will need to run in a virtual network (or VNet) in Azure.   Creating a VNet is simple, and can be configured either during instance creation, or separately.   You can get more input on creating your VNet for use with SoftNAS Cloud with Veeam here. For more information on Azure Virtual Networks, see Azure's documentation, here.

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AzureVeeamDTPandSecGroup AzureVeeamDTPandSecGroup

Data Transfer Protocol and Azure Instance Network Security Group

An Azure Network Security Group is a set of firewall rules on the Azure network side that controls the network traffic for your instance. You can create new Security Group in the Azure portal in advance or as part of the instance creation process.

SoftNAS Cloud supports use of either NFS or CIFs/SMB to transfer your data with Veeam to SoftNAS in the cloud.   Depending on the protocol you are using, you will need to configure your firewall (see the Networking section above) as well as your Azure Instance Network Security Group for the protocol you select.  The below provides example Azure Network Security Group information for what SoftNAS recommends for use of Veeam with NFS and CIFs/SMB.  You will need this information when you launch your SoftNAS Azure Instance.

NFS

(You will need to change Source value of “<Inbound IP>/CIDR” to the IP address and CIDR or IP Address Range and CIDR for your configuration.  You can read more information on how to set the “Source” values here.)

CIFs/SMB

(You will need to change Source value of “<Inbound IP>/CIDR” to the IP address and CIDR or IP Address Range and CIDR for your configuration.  You can read more information on how to set the “Source” values here.)

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AzureVeeamDeploySolution AzureVeeamDeploySolution

Deploy Your Solution

Once you have made your deployment decision listed above and satisfied prerequisites such as firewall configuration, you are ready to start your SoftNAS Cloud deployment with Veeam.   SoftNAS recommends following the below steps to deploy your solution:

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