Free Veeam VMCA2022 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 3

Database administrators and operations team are the most relevant stakeholders to talk to in order to collect business and technical requirements related to virtual infrastructure. Database administrators can provide information about the performance, availability, and recovery needs of the SQL and Oracle servers, as well as the custom financial application on AIX servers. Operations team can provide information about the network bandwidth, firewall rules, storage capacity, and backup windows for the virtual machines and NAS devices. The other stakeholders are less relevant, as they are either not directly involved with the virtual infrastructure (web design team, sales staff) or have minimal requirements (laptop users). References: Veeam Certified Architect 2022 Exam Guide, page 8; Veeam Backup & Replication v11: Architecture and Design course, module 2.

The retention requirement for this project is 12 weekly backups, six monthly backups and seven yearly backups. This is stated in the business requirements section of the scenario, where it says “To meet regulatory requirements, backups must be retained for four years.” This implies that the backup data must be archived for long-term retention, and the Veeam solution supports the 3-2-1 rule, which means having three copies of data, on two different types of media, with one copy off-site1. The other options are not retention requirements, but rather technical requirements or design choices, such as having on-premises backups on hardened repositories, having at least one copy of data on-premises, or having 14 daily backups on-site. References: Veeam Certified Architect 2022 Exam Guide, page 9; Veeam Backup & Replication v11: Architecture and Design course, module 4.

If the repositories are able to accomplish much higher throughput, a new issue that might come up is that the bandwidth between sites might not be sufficient to support the backup copy jobs that need to run daily between Fresno and Carson City. This could cause the backup copy jobs to fail, take longer than expected, or consume too much network resources. Therefore, it is important to measure the available bandwidth between the sites and compare it with the backup copy data size and window. If the bandwidth is not sufficient, some possible solutions are to use compression, deduplication, or WAN acceleration to reduce the backup copy traffic.

The recommended method to replicate VMware virtual machines with a less than five-minute RPO is Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP). CDP is a feature that allows near-continuous replication of VMware virtual machines to a secondary site or cluster with minimal data loss and downtime. CDP uses VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) to capture every write operation from the source VMs and send them to the target VMs in near real-time. CDP can achieve RPOs as low as seconds and enable fast failover and failback in case of a disaster.

The recommended step that Veeam Life and Indemnity can take to improve the latency encountered during backup of the virtualized MSSQL Server database running on vSAN is to implement Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows on the virtualized MSSQL Server database servers. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows is a data protection solution that allows you to back up physical or virtual Windows machines at the guest OS level. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows can provide application-aware processing and transaction log backup for MSSQL servers, as well as support for vSAN storage snapshots. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows can also reduce the latency by performing backups without using VMware snapshots, which can cause stun issues on vSAN.

The action that Veeam Life and Indemnity should take to improve the likelihood that a ransomware attack on the Veeam infrastructure will not be successful is to protect the Veeam components on the production Active Directory Forest with multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security mechanism that requires users to provide two or more pieces of evidence to prove their identity before accessing a system or resource. MFA can prevent unauthorized access to the Veeam components even if the user credentials are compromised by ransomware or other means.

The retention requirement for gold tier virtual machines is that they must have 14 daily, eight weekly, three monthly and seven yearly backups. This requirement can be derived from the technical requirement of having eight weekly backups, three monthly backups, and seven yearly backups for regulatory purposes, as well as the business requirement of having daily backups for gold tier virtual machines.

The reason that justifies the decision to separate out proxies for gold tier and silver/bronze tier is that gold tier virtual machines run frequently and should not share resources with lower priority virtual machines. This is because gold tier virtual machines have a high RPO of one hour or less, which means that they need to run backup jobs more often than silver/bronze tier virtual machines. Therefore, they should have dedicated proxies that can process their data without competing with other backup jobs for proxy resources. This can improve backup performance, reliability, and scalability for gold tier virtual machines.

The types of jobs that do not support using immutability from S3 Object Lock or hardened repositories are NAS backups and Agent for Mac backups. These types of jobs do not have the option to enable immutability in their settings, unlike VMware, Hyper-V, Linux Agent, or Windows Agent backup jobs. Therefore, they cannot leverage the immutability feature of S3 Object Lock or hardened repositories to protect their backups from ransomware or malicious deletion.

References: [S3 Object Lock Immutability], [Hardened Linux Repository], [NAS Backup], [Agent for Mac]