2 separate backup servers - 1 for on-site, 1 for off-site

[JoshRountree]

This might be a dumb question, but here goes. I've been using VMware and Veeam for the past 4-5 years and have recently switched to Hyper-V and Veeam. All new hardware, new cluster, etc. Everything was working well until Friday night, my backups are not doing well, out of 18 VMs, 9 are warning, 3 fail, and 3 succeed.

I'm wondering if I have created the problem. When I used Veeam with VMware I had a backup server for on-site and backup server for off-site, configured identically but neither server knew about other but used the same proxies. I have configured my Hyper-V backup servers similarly. I have 2, both on-site currently so I can seed the backups and prevent a full backup across the WAN. Is this creating a problem? Will a second backup server that does an on-host backup conflict or interfere with another backup server that did a backup 4-5 hours previously?

Sounds like there might be a better way to get those backups off-site, but my thinking when creating this configuration is that the backup server in the off-site location wouldn't have the on-site backup server to rely on in a DR situation. I also had much success in restoring virtual machines to my VMware cluster in the off-site location from the off-site backup server.

Josh

[veremin]

What particular error those jobs failed with? Two backup servers didn't try to reach the same VM at the same time, did they?

Also, are we talking here about cross-site backup/replication or the remote backup server is used mostly as means to orchestrate offsite replication/backup copy? In the latter case, why not to make it responsible for backups, as well?

Thanks.

[JoshRountree]

The error on those jobs are:

Code: Select all

Failed to create snapshot (Microsoft CSV Shadow Copy Provider) (mode: Veeam application-aware processing) Details: Failed to prepare guests for volume snapshot.

I think it might be related to how I migrated those VMs and want to try something different during tonight's backup window.


Regarding my 2 server backup configuration I hope can explain it clearly.

I have 2 sites each with a Hyper-V cluster and a physical backup server running Veeam.

Site A:
-18 VMs
-Physical backup server backs up all VMs at site A and all VMs at site B, starts at 8:30PM and finishes by midnight

Site B:
-2 VMs
-Physical backup server backs up all VMs at site A and all VMs at site B, starts at 2:00AM and finishes by 4 AM


Will the backup at site B interfere and/or corrupt the CBT at site A and vice versa? In the case of DR I plan that Site A will completely gone so that site B will have to function/restore without site A

[foggy]

Provided both backups servers are at the same patch level and jobs from different backup servers do not overlap, the setup should in theory work fine, however this was not specifically tested.

[JoshRountree]

It worked for 4+ years on VMware - can you tell me a better way to accomplish my goal or point me to some documentation that I can read?

If there is a reference design for something similar, can you point me to that as well?

[foggy]

You could use backup copy jobs created on each Veeam B&R instance to sync backups across sites, instead of backing up VMs residing in another site. In case of DR you'd just need to import backups into the local instance and restore. Or use just a single backup server for everything.

[JoshRountree]

I might keep it the way I have it unless you think I could potentially corrupt backups. The way it's currently configured I wouldn't have to import anything and I can test DR restores completely independent of production.

[foggy]

I can just restate what I've mentioned above, this setup might work fine but was not specifically tested.