How to install vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal < ProVirtualzone

In this blog post, we will learn How to install vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal so that your organization admin/users can backup and restore their VMs with Veeam vCD Backup Portal using Veeam Enterprise Manager Server.

With this portal, we can manage or vCD backup infrastructure. Adding users that are allowed to backup or restore your vApp or VMs from your vCloud Director Organization.

Veeam vCD Backup portal is configured by organization using the url: https://<EnterpriseManagerServer>:9443/vcloud/<OrgName>

Previously HERE I have written a blog post about Veeam Enterprise Manager and how to add your domain users to Enterprise Manager Server to use the Self-Service Backup portal but for Veeam Backup & Replication. This is similar but now is for vCloud Director.

Using the vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup portal, users can perform the following operations:

On the Dashboard tab — view statistics on vCloud Director backups.
On the Jobs tab — examine and export job sessions data, search for jobs, create new jobs, and edit jobs.
On the VMs tab — search for and restore virtual machines and vApps with a single click to their original location (preserving or overwriting the production VM or vApp).
On the Files tab — search for the files on the VM guest file system and restore the necessary files to the original location or download it to the local machine.
On the Items tab — perform application item-level restore (currently, for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle)

How to install vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal

1 – Before you can use vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal, your vCloud Director needs to be added to your Veeam Backup Infrastructure.

2 – To enable vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal, we need to enable it in Veeam Enterprise Manager.

As we can see in the next image, if Self-Service Backup Portal is not enabled for your organization and you try to access the above Self-Service Backup Portal URL for your organization, you will get an error: “Access disabled by the service provider.”

By default, Self-Service Backup Portal is disabled for all organizations. We need to set permissions for our organization.

Note: If one vCloud Director Server is not added to the Veeam Server Backup Infrastructure, the vCloud TAB (2) is not visible.

How to enable Self-Service Backup Portal

To enable Self-Service Backup Portal to one vCloud Organization, click Add and select the options match the organization you are adding.

Options:

1. Organization – Select the vCD Organization that you want to enable.
2. Repository – Select the Veeam Server repository that will be used for this Organization. You can only use existing Repositories that were previous created in Veeam Server.
3. Quota – Select the quota that this Organization is allowed to use of your Backup Repository. If you are using a Backup Repository used in Veeam Server Jobs, be aware of the size of the quota you plan to authorize.
4. Job scheduling – In this option, you give the permissions on how users can create or use Backup Scheduling.
5. Show Advanced Job Settings: – If you plan to use Job Default Settings for this organization, you don’t need to use this option. If you plan to use the existing job settings in the Veeam Server, go to the next step.
6. Copy From – Select the Veeam Server Job Settings that you want to use for this Organization, and all the Jobs created will use the same settings.

After the above tasks, you can now login into the Self-Service Portal.

Important Note: Before login, consider the following:

To manage vCloud Director organization objects (VMs, vApps), users must have the following permissions assigned in VMware vCloud Director: General > Administrator, View General > Administrator, Control User > View Group/User.
To authenticate users, Self-Service Backup Portal uses LDAP and local user authentication. SAML authentication is not supported.
To log in to the web portal, vCloud Director organization administrators will need their vCloud Director credentials.

Note: Always remember that users need to have vCloud Director permissions on the Organization. Local or LDAP users.

Type you Veeam vCloud Self-Service Portal. The URL to my Veeam vCloud Self-Service Portal is: https://veeam-backup.vmwarehome.lab:9443/vCloud/vmwarehome/

Note: If you type your organization name wrong, Veeam will not recognize that it doesn’t exist, and you get the error that is disabled by the provider. Something that Veeam should fix.

In the next example, I use an LDAP user to login.

The Portal itself is very similar to the Veeam Backup & Replication for vSphere.

In the initial Dashboard, we see all the information about Jobs, Backups, and also important, our Storage Quota that we have and are using.

Create a Backup Job in the Portal.

How do we create a backup job in the Portal? Again process is very similar to the vSphere Portal. I will not go for all the steps since it is very straightforward.

We can now select VMs or just Backup the vApp and their VMs inside.

Has we can see in the next image, with the Organization VMwarehome, we can see all the Organizations VDCs.

Check Backup Job process Details while is running.

Click in the Working to get the Job Task and Details from the running Job.

If you click on Details in the Job task, you will get the Job full live processes.

Restore a vApp/VM in the Portal.

Has we can see in the next image, in the TAB VMs, we can check all the VMs that have been back up and the number of Restore Points for each VM.

We can also check if is a VM backup or a vApp Backup in the vApp name column.

When you select a VM, you can restore as a VM or Restore as vApp (in this case, will restore all VMs inside the vApp Backup Job).

For both, we have 2 options, one to Overwrite the existing VM/vApp or Keep the existing VM/vApp.

In the Keep option, you don’t have the option to select the location, the name, etc. Like we have if using Veeam Backup Server. Any vApp will be restored with the vAppName_restored+DateTime suffix. VMs names inside vApp will not change.

Important note: Be careful when you restore a Standalone VM and select keep. Since there is no name changed and is restored into the same location, you could have an issue. Not only with the restoration but also in your vCloud Director.

I did some tests with the above VM issue and could not restore while the original VM was still with the same name. Even if I change the original name

It is not supported to restore a vApp VM as a Standalone; you will get the following error.

For the last part, I show the Items TAB. Here you have your SQL or Oracle Databases if you have any in your Backup Infrastructure using Enable application-aware image-processing option in the Guest Processing job.

Any SQL and Oracle Backups will show here.

UPDATE 28/11/2021: Multi vCloud Directors in the Veeam Backup Infrastructure is not supported. If you add more than one vCloud Director to your Veeam Backup Infrastructure vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal stops work for your organization. You will not be able to login anymore, until you remove the extra vCloud Director.

I hope this information was useful, and you learn how to install vCloud Director Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal and how to use the backups and restores in this portal.

In the Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal, some options are not available like in Veeam Backup Server. If you need to use any of those options (like restore to a different location, use Guest Processing scripts, etc.), you need to use Veeam Backup & Replication Server.

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