Automation and orchestration

The necessity for infrastructure orchestration and automation in the IT world is continuing to grow significantly within the last ten years. Repetitive, boring and mundane tasks are prime candidates for automation, and by automating them, companies can increase efficiency, while reducing costs and human mistakes.

The rise of public clouds and modern, cloud-native infrastructures also have meant that traditional IT operations experienced to check out new methods to deploy, configure and manage all certain specific areas of these infrastructure…including more traditional, out-of-the-box applications.

Time for an upgrade

Automation and the idea of DevOps mainstream have grown to be more, sufficient reason for Veeam having solutions for the automatic deployment even, setup and configuration of Veeam components through the Enterprise Manager RESTful API functionality, the necessity to continue creating improvements around those processes is becoming top of mind for this organizations.

It’s been Veeam Cloud &amp historically; Service Provider partners who’ve driven the intake of the prevailing Enterprise Manager based RESTful APIs and several Enterprise customers also leverage RESTful APIs for basic automation. In both cases our pre-existing PowerShell Snapin (which includes also had an upgrade in V11 and is currently consumed as a PowerShell Module) has been used to fill some functionality gaps.

While customers could actually manipulate both existing RESTful API and the PowerShell commandlets, it had been time and energy to look towards modernizing the true manner in which customers and partners consume Veeam Backup & Replication through APIs for orchestration and automation, allowing a far more consistent standardization which they are able to build their automation platforms.

New modern JSON-based RESTful API in V11

With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v11 , we’ve unleashed a fresh modern JSON-based API that’s independent from Enterprise Manager and is installed automagically with Veeam Backup & Replication. This new API uses and conforms to version 3.0 of the OpenAPI Specification  (OAS) and uses JSON because the data format for data interchange.

This REST API reference lists forms of Veeam Backup & Replication entities possesses a description of resources and their collections which are a symbol of these entities. Every resource is represented as a JSON object model, and every resource collection is represented being an selection of object models. The reference also contains methods that represent operations designed for an assortment or resource.

As a primary release because of this new API, we’ve chosen to include probably the most popular and requested group of endpoints with a whole set of methods. From the programmatical viewpoint, the initial group of capabilities offered allows our customers and partners seeking to build in repeatable actions to greatly help configure and manager their Veeam Backup & Replication environments.

Bulk import/export, mass deployment and migration

One new section worth a specific call may be the automation group of methods and endpoints out. With these, it is possible to import and export backup resources granularly, credentials and jobs which may be useful for the migration of the Veeam Backup & Replication Server to a fresh infrastructure or be utilized regarding a disaster as an instant way to recover.

Addititionally there is the potential here for customers and partners to leverage these procedures for the mass deployment of a Veeam infrastructure.

Swagger UI and online references

Interaction with modern RESTful APIs goes beyond the original programmatical CLI or Client-based methods. We’ve added a true amount of ways to view, interact and find out with the brand new endpoints and methods. Like other recent Veeam product releases, the new RESTful API can be acquired through a  Swagger UI that’s accessible with a specific URL and port as shown below:

     https://:/swagger/ui/index.html     

The Swagger UI presents API specification and lets you use resources visually. All methods and resources are expandable. Once you expand a method, you obtain a complete description of available parameters and an automatically-generated example. You can even send requests and see response messages in the Veeam Backup &amp directly; Replication server.

Furthermore, we likewise have an online RESTful API Reference Veeam Help Center site that allows for an offline solution to find out about methods and endpoints.

Conclusion

This new RESTful API in V11 has been much anticipated and you will be welcomed by our customers and partners already levering our existing APIs while also satisfying community components of the Veeam ecosystem who live and breathe automation and orchestration. We have to begin to see some amazing contributions in VeeamHUB (Veeam’s Community GitHub Page) as work begins to extract the worthiness of the new standalone API.

We’ve also empowered our partners and customers to accomplish more with Veeam in a far more efficient, safe and repeatable way, which only benefits them a lot more and makes the protection of these critical workloads and data a lot more assured when automating and orchestrating Veeam Backup & Replication.

To understand what method-implemented operations it is possible to perform with Veeam Backup & Replication entities, and how exactly to control and sort the info that the REST API returns, see the  REST API Reference .

Please leave the feedback on our R&D forums on which do you want to see covered close to help us prioritize!