5 min RPO with 150+ DB's with Veam ?

[nblazincic]

Hi 2 all !

We have a DR project in near future and we are currently thinking how we will achieve RPO of 5 minutes for about 150+ SQL DB's. We have 1 GBps WAN link that should be enough since this DB's aren't very write intensive (but there are many of them).

This DB's will be mirrored locally on-site (using synchronous DB mirroring or Basic Always-ON) for local HA. SQL Enterprise is not an option (cost). So how to achieve an RPO of 5 minutes to a secondary site ? I am considering following options;

1. VM replication using Veeam (snapshotting considerations), maybe with Refs and 9.5 this will not be an issue ?
2. Server 2016 storage replica + veeam (how and will this work in 9.5, will Veeam be integrating new OS capabilities ? )
3. Third party replication software with CDP that does not use snapshotting ?
4. Storage based async replication (vendor lock-in considerations, application consistency issues ?)

Any advice, additional info (especially regarding new Veeam version and 2016 integration) and experiences will be much helpful.

Tnx,
Nikola

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Nikola,

If you want to protect your databases with 5 min RPO, why not to try and use SQL Server database transaction log backup job? All the options above might not be feasible, since the amount of time required to prepare a VM for backup/replication heavily depends on how this VM is provisioned in terms of resources and how quick VSS writers inside the guest can prepare all applications for a backup/replication job.

Thanks!

[nblazincic]

Tnx for reply.

I don't think that this is an option since 15-minute backup log frequency is not enough for 5 min RPO, or am I missing something ?

Oh, I forgot I could set it to lower than 15 minute window Well that could be done If backup directly to off-site.

[Vitaliy S.]

You can try to use file copy jobs for that as a workaround, but in this case the solution becomes a bit hard to manage. Anyway, even when using Windows Server 2016 the time to prepare your VM for backup (application consistent) might vary from VM to a VM, so if you have an opportunity I would suggest to give it a try and then share your results with the community.

[nmdange]

You can use the native VM Replication that comes with Hyper-V which can have a replication interval of 15 minutes, 5 minutes or 30 seconds.

[nblazincic]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Regarding the 2016 combination and Veeam, I will post my results to you when I am done with testing. I don't think that VM resources will be a problem (it will be a new HW with v5 and flash storage), but just this VSS part.

I will keep you up to date and provide more details of my findings to this thread.