Nakivo released the new Nakivo Backup & Replication v10.5 introducing the new VMware Monitoring and Hardened Virtual Appliance features.
While VMware Monitoring provides the capability of showing performance and health of the infrastructure, the Hardened Virtual Appliance allows the administrators to store backups on-premises by making such backups immutable.
This solution can be used as a valid strategy to protect backups against ransomware attacks since backup data can't be deleted, overwritten or modified.
VMware Monitoring
This new feature allows you to have a complete overview about performance and health of your VMware environment. From a single pane of glass, you can see real-time and historical data useful to understand performance trends and investigate issues.
Through the Monitoring area, you can see and analyze vSphere resources demanding:
- vCPU Load/usage
- RAM Load/usage
- Disk Usage (vSphere and Datastores)
Configuration
From Nakivo dashboard, access the Monitoring area.
Click Add Monitored Items to add items you wish to monitor.
Select items to monitor then click Save.
Nakivo starts gathering information about the selected items. Leave the system running for at least one hour before checking collected data.
After some times, the system displays the gathered information.
You can analyze in details ESXi resources by selecting the desired host.
You can analyze also at the machine level.
Hardened Virtual Appliance
Hardened Virtual Appliance (VA) is a pre-configured VM Linux-based (Ubuntu) that allows administrators to protect backups from deletion and ransomware attacks. Stored backups are made immutable for a specific period of time set by the retention configured during the Backup Job creation. Stored backups cannot be altered, not even a superuser can do it.
Configuration
Make sure you are running latest Nakivo Backup & Replication v10.5 to leverage the Hardened Virtual Appliance Immutability capability.
From Nakivo dashboard, select from main menu Create > VMware vSphere backup job.
Select VMs to backup then click Next.
Select Onboard repository to take benefit of the Immutability feature. Click Next.
Configure the desired Schedule and click Next.
Configure the Retention Settings for the current Backup Job as well as the Immutability with a correct value. For best protection, it is recommended to keep Backup and Immutability with the same retention value. Immutability should not be greater than backup retention to avoid errors since incremental backups cannot be injected into the full backup due to write protection given by the Immutability. Click Next.
Enter a Job name and click Finish & Run to start the backup immediately.
Select Run for all VMs option then click Run.
The backup is being executed.
After few minutes the backup completes successfully.
Test Immutability
Once the backup has been completed, to test the Immutability, go to Settings > Repositories and click the Onboard repository link.
A backup configured without Immutability leaves the option Delete enabled.
If you try deleting the backup processed with Immutability, the delete option is greyed out and not available instead.
The VMware Monitoring and the Hardened Virtual Appliance features provided by version 10.5 are extremely useful to prevent performance issues and to protect backup data from deletion, overwriting and ransomware attacks.
Nakivo Backup & Replication v10.5 can be downloaded as 30-day trial.
