Catalogic DPX vPlus With Wasabi

How to use Catalogic DPX vPlus with Wasabi?

Catalogic DPX vPlus has been validated for use with Wasabi. DPX vPlus is an enterprise-ready, agentless backup and snapshot management solution for Microsoft 365 and virtual environments.  It allows you to reliably improve and automate backup performance, automate recovery tests, and significantly save resources, time, and money.  Microsoft 365 backups and virtual machines backups can be stored on-premises, on a local file system or share, or can be stored in the cloud using cloud storage.

1. Prerequisites

• Active Wasabi Cloud Storage Account

• Wasabi Bucket - See our Bucket Creation Guide

• Access & Secret Key Pair - See our Access Keys Guide

• Catalogic DPX vPlus version 5.0 or higher

2. Reference Architecture

3. DPX vPlus Configuration

3.1 Log into the DPX vPlus Web UI

3.2 Navigate to the Backup Destinations tab and click on "Object Storage". Click on "Create Backup Destination" and select "Amazon S3 / S3-compatible".

3.3 In the Create Backup Destination window, input the "Name" for your backup destination and choose the Node Configuration options as needed.

3.4 In Amazon S3 /S3-Compatible Settings provide the information for your Wasabi Bucket:

• API URL - Specify the Wasabi Data Center Service URL you wish to use. Please refer to Service URLs for various Wasabi regions.

• Backup Mode - Select your Option

• Bucket Name - Name of the Wasabi Bucket you pre-created

• Region - Wasabi Region where your bucket is stored

• Record backup time after store – This will record backup time after store is completed.  This may be requires for 3^rd party S3 API implementations, which record modification time of the objects after it was stored.

• Path style access enabled – This will enable path-style access.  This means that you can specify the endpoint hostname as either a FQDN or the IP of the S3 proxy or the load balancer.

• Resolve hostname to IP before connecting – This will use virtual-hosting access to use the hostname to differentiate between sites

• Parallel download enabled – Will allow for downloading files from S3 in parallel, which will generally increase downloading speeds

• Enable encryption – This will use S3 protocols for server-side encryption

  Note - Make sure the flags “Path style access enabled” and “Parallel Download enabled” are enabled.

Note: This config example discusses the use of Wasabi's us-east-1 storage region. To use other Wasabi storage regions, please use the appropriate Wasabi service URL as described in this article.

3.5 Input your Wasabi Access and Secret Keys and then click on "Save"

3.6 Test the connectivity by selecting the Wasabi Destination and click on "Test Connectivity"

3.7 The results can be viewed in the Task Console.

3.8 To create a Backup SLA to protect your environment perform the following:

• Click on "Virtual Environments" and then "Backup SLAs"

• Configure the settings under "General" tab

3.9 Configure Settings under the "Rule" tab.

• Name

• Select Primary Backup Destination - Wasabi Cloud Storage

• Retention (Days/Version) - Full and Incremental 

• Schedule - Assign the policy to a schedule

Note - If you have not yet created a schedule, you can assign this policy to a schedule at a later time.

3.10 If you do not assign the policy to Virtual Machines during creation or want to assign new VMs to an existing Backup Policy, you can do so by performing the following:

• Click on “Virtual Environments” and then “Instances".

• Select the instance and click “Assign policy”

• Then select the policy created above in Step 3.8. 

• Click on “Save” to save the policy assignment.

3.11 Start a backup by selecting the instance and clicking the backup icon.

3.12 The progress of the backup can be viewed on the task console.

4. Recovery of Virtual Machines

4.1 In the left hand menu click on "Virtual Environments" and then click on "Instances". Here you will see the list of virtual machines discovered. Scroll or use the Search bar to find the VM that you need to recover.

4.2 Click the second of the four buttons on the right hand side which is the Restore option. This will open the Restore job creation wizard.

4.3 In the "Restore Job" wizard, select the snapshot that you wish to recover.  You will notice the snapshot name ends with the destination where that data will be recovered from.  Choose a copy from your Wasabi object storage.

4.4 Select “Restore to Hypervisor” and chose the hypervisor host that you want to recover the Virtual Machine to.

4.5 Complete the rest of the restore wizard, working through a slightly different process depending on the hypervisor, including some options for deleting the existing VM, changing the name of the new VM, etc.

4.6 After clicking Restore, the task will begin.  This can be monitored by clicking on the “Workflow Executions Console” at the very bottom of the screen.

5. Recovery of Microsoft 365 Resources

5.1 In the left hand menu, click on "Cloud" and then click on "Instances".  Here you will see the list of Microsoft 365 resources that have been discovered. You will see several tabs for Users, Groups, Sites, and Teams specifically.  Scroll or use the Search bar to find the owner of the resource that you need to recover.

5.2 Similarly to Ad-hoc restores for VMs, you can click the “Restore” button on the right side, but this will only allow you to recover the entire Mailbox, OneDrive, Sharepoint Site, etc. This is not how you recover individual emails, files, chats, etc.

5.3 Instead, click on the name of the owner of the resource that you need to recover. 

5.4 In the new window, scroll down until you see a section with four tabs: Backup History, Restore History, Schedules, and Protected Data.  Open the “Protected Data” tab.

5.5 On the left you will now see tabs for each MS application that is protected for that User, Group, Team, or Site.  In this example, you see Exchange, OneDrive and Chats for the User.

5.6 Browse through OneDrive, Mailbox, etc. to find the individual resource that needs to be recovered.  Select the item.  Now you have two “Restore” options.

To “Restore” the item back to a location within MS 365 cloud, click the “Restore” button in the top-right corner.  This will open a short Restore wizard, where you will specify things like alternate restoration paths, and overwrite existing files.  You also have the ability to restore this item to an alternate User, Group, Team, or Site.

To “Restore” the item to your local machine, click the “Download” button in the top-right corner. This will prepare the item to be pulled out of the cloud and downloaded to your local machine.  Once the download prep is complete, the item will be available for download in the “Download” section under the “Cloud” tab in the left-hand menu.

6. Scheduled Recovery using Recovery Plans

A Scheduled Recovery Plan can be created for those recuring jobs where data needs to be restored on a regular basis.  I will be using a Virtual Machine recovery as the example, but this can be done for Microsoft 365 as well.

6.1 In the left hand menu, click on "Virtual Environments" and then click on "Recovery Plans".  Click the “Create” button on the right hand side, to create a new Recovery Plan.

6.2 Give the new Recovery Plan a name and click “Save”. Rules can be added to this policy once it is created.

6.3 Once saved, a new window will appear.  We will now add a rule to this plan to schedule a recurring restore of a virtual machine. Scroll down a bit and click “Add Rule”.

6.4 In the Rule Creation window, give the rule a name. Click “Next”.

6.5 Select the Virtualization Platform and the VM(s) that you want included in this plan. Click “Next”.

6.6 Select or Create the Schedule that you want this Recovery Plan to use.  Click “Next”.

6.7 Finally, proceed through the “Restore Parameters” section to define things like which backup to use for recovery, recovery destination, storage, name for new VM, etc.  Click “Save”

7. Logs

5.1 Logs for each mechanism in DPX vPlus can be downloaded from the vPlus GUI by clicking on "Logs" in the top right menu and then downloading all logs.  This will download logs for api, appserver, cloudserver, cloudagent and one additional log directory for each node.

8. Immutability/ Object Lock Support

As of vPlus version 6.2 Object Lock for S3 storage is now supported by Catalogic.

In order to utilize an Object Lock bucket you will need to create a Wasabi bucket first with Object Lock settings applied to the bucket beforehand as described in our Object Lock KB.

Once the bucket is created you can follow the steps starting in 3.2.

For any support or setup questions, please get in touch with Catalogic Technical Support at dpsupport@catalogicsoftware.com.