Acronis Cyber Infrastructure represents a new generation of the so-called Hyper-Converged Infrastructure targeted at both managed service providers and end customers. It represents a sophisticated platform bringing various heterogeneous hardware and software components together to create a homogeneous software-defined hyper-converged system.

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is integrated with both Acronis Backup and Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. This step-by-step guide explains how to set up a storage for storing and managing your customers' backups in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud (steps for Acronis Backup are similar).

Video guide

Prerequisites

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure setup

• Acronis Cyber Infrastructure should be installed on a bare-metal machine, internal interface is configured with local static IP, external interface is available on the machine to be used for backup/recovery traffic.
• Storage cluster is created.
• "Backup (ABGW) public" traffic type should be configured on infrastructure network assigned to network interface with public IP on node(s) which will be used for Gateway (ABGW-public role). NAT can be used if needed.
• Ports 44445 and 40440 are open for inbound/outbound connections on intermediate firewall device if used.
• Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud service provider administrator account is created and activated.

DNS recommendations

In any scenario Acronis data center should be also able to access service provider’s Acronis Cyber Infrastructure installation for proper usage calculation.

Before enabling backup storage it’s required to prepare external DNS, which will resolve public IP / NATted IP of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure interface with ABGW-public role.

DNS name is used by backup agents to connect to cloud storage and then perform write (backup) / read (recovery) operations. There are 3 scenarios:

1. Client machines and Acronis Cyber Infrastructure are located in different data centers.
   This case is most common.
   • Use any public DNS service. For example, Azure DNS for Azure, Amazon Route 53 for Amazon, and Google Cloud DNS for Google. We strongly recommend configuring the DNS name in one of those DNS services. Public DNS should resolve public IP/IPs of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure port with ABGW public role.
   • Another option is to go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc of  the Windows device you are backing up and edit the hosts file with a .txt editor like Notepad. Enter there the IP address of your cluster and relate it to the DNS name of your Acronis Backup Gateway cluster. Similar process can be followed for other OS’s. See example below:
     
2. Client machines and Acronis Cyber Infrastructure are located in the same data center.
   In this case you can use local DNS instead of public DNS to speed up backup.
   Please note that local DNS can work only with local IP address, so we recommend to use NAT in this case.
3. Mix of 1 and 2.
   Remote clients connect via public DNS (resolving public IP), local clients connect via local DNS (resolving local IP).

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure: connect to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud via Backup Gateway

1. In Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, navigate to Storage Services -> Backup:
   
2. Select the nodes you would like to use as backup destinations.
3. Click Create gateway:
   
4. In the newly opened screen, select This Acronis Cyber Infrastructure cluster. Other options are NFS shares and S3 solutions, see administrator's guide for more details.
5. On the Configure network tab, select a network interface for each node and click Next:
   
6. On the Volume parameters tab, select the highest redundancy mode possible on your cluster, and a failure domain.

   Configuration example 1: 5 servers, each with 4 disks for storage – failure domain Host, Encoding 3+2
   Configuratio example 2: 1 server with 6 storage disks – failure domain Disk, Encoding 3+1

7. On the DNS configuration tab, provide DNS name that will be used to register the cluster in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. For example:
   
8. On the Register in backup software screen, enter the address of your Acronis backup software (cloud.acronis.com for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud; IP address for Acronis Backup local management server) and enter login credentials of an administrator.

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud: check newly registered cluster

1. Log in to the Management portal by using you Service Provider account.
2. Navigate to Settings -> Locations:
   
   You will be able to use the newly added storage as a backup destination for newly added clients only.

   

3. Navigate to Clients and click New, then Customer:
   
4. Create a new Customer, enable and configure services. At step 3, under the Backup tab select the newly added storage from the Cloud resources dropdown menu. After creating the customer and assigning an administrator (in step 4), you can log in to the Cyber Protection console with the newly created user at https://cloud.acronis.com.
5. Install Acronis Cyber Protect agent by following the agent installation steps.
6. After Acronis Cyber Protect installation completes, click Register the machine and confirm the registration in the newly opened Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud tab.
   
   To run backups using ABGW, you need to expose the DNS name (in this case aci-test-guide.com) to the internet. To achieve this, the DNS name could be configured in an appropriate DNS service. See the 'DNS recommendations' section above.

   

9. In Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, click Enable Backup for the newly added device. Under Where to back up, select Cloud storage. After confirming, click Run now and the device will be backed up to the Acronis Cyber Infrastructure cluster.
10. You can track the backup process on the Monitoring page of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure or using the advance Grafana dashboards or under the All Devices page of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.