In April 2018, Veeam released the Universal Storage API which enabled storage vendors like Pure Storage to create integrations for Veeam with their storage system. At a high level, this functionality allows Veeam to leverage storage system snapshots when performing backups as well as take snapshots of volumes for instant restore of VMs or granular file restoration.

In the initial release of the Pure Storage FlashArray plugin, the ability for Veeam to see and utilize existing snapshots on the FlashArray is unavailable. Additionally, it’s not currently possible for Veeam to take snapshots of all the volumes associated with a Protection Group. Joint customers have expressed the desire for this functionality but development takes time.

In the mean time, I created a script that gives customers the ability for Veeam to create snapshots of all the volumes in a FlashArray Protection Group. This script is designed to be run automatically using Windows Task Scheduler; however, you can run it from a PowerShell command prompt for a quick, one time use.

The most significant use case I created this for was recovering file shares faster if it was encrypted by a malware attack. It’s totally possible to immediately remediate the most extreme case where the whole file share is encrypted by overwriting the volume from a storage snapshot but what if it’s just a user’s home directory or a small subset of the file share?

In the following example, I have snapshots on the FlashArray that were taken by Veeam:

From Veeam’s view:

When selecting a snapshot, you can see each VM protected by that snapshot:

This integration is extremely powerful as it provides instant VM, guest file, and application item recovery from FlashArray snapshots instead of backup.

In a sample test, I recovered a single Windows Server 2016 VM in just over a minute:

Veeam performs this operation similar to how it operates when restoring from a backup, with the exception that it creates a volume on the FlashArray from the snapshot,  presents it to the applicable host, rescans the hosts’s HBA, mounts the volume, and adds the VM to vCenter.

Known Limitations

Currently the first version of this script only supports volume-based Protection Groups. If your Protection Group’s members are hosts or host groups, the script will not work. I anticipate fixing this in an upcoming release as well as adding the ability to specify a volume instead of a Protection Group. Additionally, this script doesn’t limit the number of snapshots taken so please monitor your usage. A future version will address this issue as well.

If you have questions about installing and configuring the Pure Storage FlashArray plugin for Veeam, check out Stephen Owens’ blog posts:

• Part One – Installing Pure Storage Plugin for Veeam
• Part Two – Configuring Pure Storage Plugin for Veeam
• Part Three – Configuring Veeam Backups to use Pure Storage Snapshots

To download the script, head over to the script’s repository on my GitHub page.