acronis.com Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 5.
Table of contents Introduction 3 Hardware requirements for installations with Backup Gateway 4 Installing Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 5 Creating the storage cluster 6 Adding locations to Acronis Cyber Protect or Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud 7 Connecting to the local storage cluster via Backup Gateway 8 Connecting to external NFS shares via Backup Gateway 10 Connecting to public cloud storage via Backup Gateway 12 Adding nodes to Backup Gateway 17 Changing the redundancy scheme for Backup G
Introduction Acronis Cyber Infrastructure represents a new generation of hyperconverged infrastructures targeted at both service providers and end customers. It is a scale-out, cost-efficient, and multipurpose solution that combines universal storage and high-performance virtualization. Acronis Cyber Infrastructure works seamlessly with the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud suite of products, Acronis Cyber Protect.
Hardware requirements for installations with Backup Gateway Normally, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is installed on at least five nodes to fully utilize its built-in high availability and data redundancy capabilities. However, if you only want to use the Backup Gateway, you can deploy a very basic installation on a single virtual or physical node. Although in this case you may need to provide data redundancy by other means or risk losing user data.
Installing Acronis Cyber Infrastructure To install Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, do the following: 1. Obtain the distribution ISO image. To do that, visit the product page and submit a request for the trial version. You can also download the ISO from Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud: a. Go to the management portal and select SETTINGS > Locations in the left menu. b. Click Add backup storage and click the Download ISO button in the open window. 2.
Creating the storage cluster To create the storage cluster, do the following: 1. Open the Infrastructure > Nodes screen, and then click Create storage cluster. 2. In the Create storage cluster window, enter a name for the cluster. The cluster name may only contain Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens ("-"). It must start with a letter and end with a letter or number. 3. [Optional] Enable disk encryption for tiers. You can also enable it later. 4.
Adding locations to Acronis Cyber Protect or Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud Note Migration from Acronis Storage versions 1.5-1.7 is no longer supported. Use Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 4.0 to migrate backups, and then upgrade to the latest version. For details, refer to "Migrating backups from older Acronis solutions" (p. 22). Backup storage uses Backup Gateway as a storage access point.
l If you have enabled login control for the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud web interface, ensure that the public IP address of your backup storage cluster is specified among the allowed IP addresses, as instructed in the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud documentation. Connecting to the local storage cluster via Backup Gateway Limitations l Redundancy by replication is not supported for backup storage. Prerequisites l The storage cluster has at least one disk with the Storage role.
Important l Configure your DNS server according to the example suggested in the admin panel. l Each time you change the network configuration of nodes in the backup storage cluster, adjust the DNS records accordingly. Note For complex environments, HAProxy might be used to build a scalable and redundant load balancing platform, which can be easily moved or migrated and is independent from Acronis Cyber Infrastructure. For more information, refer to https://kb.acronis.com/content/64787. 7.
8. On the Summary step, review the configuration, and then click Create. Connecting to external NFS shares via Backup Gateway Limitations l Acronis Cyber Infrastructure does not provide data redundancy on top of NFS volumes. Depending on the implementation, NFS shares may use their own hardware or software redundancy. l Only one cluster node may store backups on an NFS share. l Each NFS export is used by only one gateway.
3. On the Backup destination step, select Network File System (NFS) share. 4. On the Nodes step, select one node to add to the backup storage cluster, and then click Next. 5. On the NFS share step, specify the hostname or IP address of the NFS share, the export name, and select the NFS version. Then, click Next. Note NFS version 4 is recommended, as it provides better scalability and performance compared to NFS version 3, which has limitations in the protocol. 6.
7. On the Acronis account step, specify the following information for your Acronis product: l The URL of the cloud management portal (for example, https://cloud.acronis.com/) or the hostname/IP address and port of the local management server (for example, http://192.168.1.2:9877) l The credentials of a partner account in the cloud or of an organization administrator on the local management server 8. On the Summary step, review the configuration, and then click Create.
l Amazon S3 l IBM Cloud l Alibaba Cloud l IIJ l Cleversafe l Cloudian l Microsoft Azure l Swift object storage l Softlayer (Swift) l Google Cloud Platform l Wasabi l Other solutions using S3 However, compared to the local storage cluster, storing backup data in a public cloud increases the latency of all I/O requests to backups and reduces performance. For this reason, it is recommended to use the local storage cluster as the storage backend.
l If you plan to store backups in an Amazon S3 cloud, keep in mind that Backup Gateway may sometimes block access to such backups due to the eventual consistency of Amazon S3. It means that Amazon S3 may occasionally return stale data as it needs time to render the most recent version of the data accessible. Backup Gateway detects such delays and protects backup integrity by blocking access until the cloud updates. l Make sure the local storage cluster has plenty of logical space for staging.
6. On the Storage policy step, select the desired tier, failure domain, and data redundancy mode. Redundancy by replication is not supported for Backup Gateway. For more information, refer to "Storage policies" in the Administrator Guide. Then, click Next. 7. On the DNS step, specify a registration name and an external DNS name for backup storage (for example, backupstorage.example.com). Backup agents will use this DNS name and the TCP port 44445 to upload backup data. Then, click Next.
Note For complex environments, HAProxy might be used to build a scalable and redundant load balancing platform, which can be easily moved or migrated and is independent from Acronis Cyber Infrastructure. For more information, refer to https://kb.acronis.com/content/64787. 8. On the Acronis account step, specify the following information for your Acronis product: l The URL of the cloud management portal (for example, https://cloud.acronis.
Adding nodes to Backup Gateway You can add more nodes that will serve as targets for backups from Acronis Cyber Protect and/or Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud for high availability and scalability of your backup storage. To add nodes to backup storage 1. Go to the Storage services > Backup storage > Nodes screen. 2. Click Add node. 3. Select nodes to join the backup storage cluster and click Add. The nodes will be added to your backup storage and will run Backup Gateway.
Changing the redundancy scheme for Backup Gateway You can update the redundancy scheme used for backup storage by changing the storage policy. Such a configurable redundancy scheme ensures high scalability and maximum efficiency of backup storage. During the re-encoding process, data is partially stored with a new redundancy scheme, and the other part is stored with an old scheme. However, the system uses the storage policy with the least redundancy.
Managing registrations for Backup Gateway After deploying backup storage, you can use it as a centralized remote storage for backups by adding multiple registrations in different Acronis Cyber Protect or Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud instances. Adding registrations Prerequisites l Ensure that two-factor authentication (2FA) is disabled for your partner account.
l The URL of the cloud management portal (for example, https://cloud.acronis.com/) or the hostname/IP address and port of the local management server (for example, http://192.168.1.2:9877) l The credentials of a partner account in the cloud or of an organization administrator on the local management server 4. Click Add to create the registration.
4. Click Update. The backup storage service will be automatically restarted and the new certificate will be loaded in five minutes. Deleting registrations You can unregister backup storage from your Acronis backup software by deleting its registrations. When you delete a registration, backup data remains in backup storage. You can delete your backup data in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. If you want to delete the backup data in Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, destroy the backup storage cluster.
Migrating backups from older Acronis solutions Migration from Acronis Storage versions 1.5-1.7 is no longer supported. You can use Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 4.0 to migrate backups, and then upgrade to the latest version. To migrate backups from Acronis Storage 1.5-1.7 1. Install Acronis Cyber Infrastructure version 4.0. To obtain the distribution ISO image, refer to https://kb.acronis.com/content/63431. 2. Migrate your backups from Acronis Storage 1.5-1.7 to version 4.
Monitoring Backup Gateway After you create backup storage, you can monitor it on the Storage services > Backup storage > Overview screen. The charts show the following information: l Nodes. The chart shows the number and availability of nodes in the backup storage cluster. l Performance. The chart shows the read and write activity of backup storage services over time. l Geo-replication. The chart shows the geo-replication speed and backlog, which is the amount of data waiting to be replicated.
Releasing nodes from Backup Gateway Backup storage is connected to one specific backup destination. If you need to switch the destination, for example, from a public cloud to a local storage cluster or one public cloud bucket to another, you need to delete the backup storage by releasing all of its nodes from the backup storage cluster and create a new one. Keep in mind that by destroying backup storage you also delete all backup data on the storage cluster and cannot restore it later.
