The ability to perform backups on NAS devices and File shares made its way into Veeam Backup and Replication in version 10 and they are now starting to build out on that foundation in v11 which is currently in closed beta testing.
One of these new features extends Veeam's "instant" capabilities further such as Instant Disk Recovery or even Instant VM Recovery which is... you guessed it... Instant NAS Recovery
Earlier in the year I had a lot of fun playing about with Data Integration API which allows for you to present virtual machine disks out of a backup restore point over the network and do something with them.
What is Instant NAS Recovery
Instant NAS Recovery works in a similar fashion to other instant functionality by presenting data from any of your restore points to a "target".
As an example, for virtual machines this would be taking the latest VM restore point and actually bringing the server online into the hypervisor (the target) but not having to transit all of the data, effectively running it from your backup repository so the recovery time is very low. By the way, they enhanced this further by allowing you to do an instant disk recovery in v10, taking a single disk from a VM and presenting that to another live/running VM.
So with that in mind, Instant NAS Recovery mounts the restore point from your NAS or File Server (nfs, smb etc) and makes it available to a target server. For my demo here I will be presenting it to the backup server itself but this does not have to be the case.
Once it spins up you will be able to browse the file system and do what you need such as copy files or in our case actually do something with your data. The demo is a little bit of fun but you could see how by reusing your data you can do this in a way that is not going to impact production and you can also retrospectively perform these actions on historic points not just new data opening up a world of possibilities.
Demo
I already had a .NET web API that utilises ML.NET and allow files to be passed and perform actions on those files such as Object Detection (using YoLo) or to run a multi malware engine scan. Check the first project i used this on out the quick video if you are interested.
I have since then version adapted with with some signalR allowing for data to be pushed to a dashboard in real time and make it look a bit more presentable since this was used at a Gartner Symposium Veeam were sponsoring/presenting at. So you will see various widgets/tables fill with data in real time, no refreshes or multiple HTTP requests hammering the server asking for new data.
Adapting a demo Powershell Script I had for mounting the Data Integration API restore points was easy and I am now passing the Instant NAS Recovery mount points to a remote processing server where the web services are hosted to perform some magic.
Now onto the video!
