Fitting Veeam into new Infrastructure

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Hi there - I'm working on a project to deploy new storage arrays and Hyper-V platforms at two sites (Prod/DR) and one factor to consider obviously is backup and recovery. Like everybody I want seamless and slick as possible and Veeam looks like a great product (never used it before) but I'm struggling to see how to fit it into my architecture design and wanted some advice.

There will be two 3PAR 7400 arrays with lots of tiered capacity at both sites and Hyper-V 2012 clusters at both sites with their respective CSVs on each array. There is a requirement for long retention to tape held offsite and a key driver for this project is that the existing NetBackup D2T process was putting lots of IO strain on the existing EVA SANs.

My plan was to effectively offload the tape backup process to the DR site and use SAN snapshots as much as possible for short RTO/RPO at the prod site (7 days worth) and to replicate at the SAN level to the DR array from where there would be more snapshots (retained for longer) and the backup to tape from the snapshots can occur. The production array can be left for it's production duties unaffected by the backup processes.

It's all very well having a replicated or snapshot copy of the VMs on a storage array but when it comes to recovering an entire VM or individual files from within the VHDX files it's a manual process of presenting snapshots to hosts, copying files etc. and this is what got me looking at something like Veeam to put a nice GUI interface onto managing the recovery process but from what I understand, I really need to be backing up the VMs using Veeam to do this. So this then brings me to the question of where do I backup the VMs? Do I back them up at the prod site and replicate them down to the DR site? If so, that puts some backup duties back into the production array and I'm trying to avoid that. Do I just replicate the VMs down to the DR site and then back them up with Veeam from there? That seems like a good option but I'm not using SAN based replication which I believe is going to be more flexible.

I suppose my question is how do I slot in Veeam into this 2 SAN setup while still using SAN based replication and avoiding any backups being taken from the primary production SAN and making the recovery process as simple as possible? Also, can I leverage 3PAR snapshots to backup to tape with Veeam?

Any advice gratefully received.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

Do I back them up at the prod site and replicate them down to the DR site? If so, that puts some backup duties back into the production array and I'm trying to avoid that. Do I just replicate the VMs down to the DR site and then back them up with Veeam from there? That seems like a good option but I'm not using SAN based replication which I believe is going to be more flexible.

Actually if you're going to use off-hos proxy server, then the volume snapshot will be mounted to your off-host proxy and there will be no load on the production hosts. If you want to use SAN replication, that would indeed give you some benefits in the DR strategy, and at the same time I don't see any issues with backing up VMs from the DR site.

I suppose my question is how do I slot in Veeam into this 2 SAN setup while still using SAN based replication and avoiding any backups being taken from the primary production SAN and making the recovery process as simple as possible?

Do you have any hyper-v hosts at the DR site or you just have a SAN storage? If you have Hyper-V hosts and use SAN based replication and all VMs are registered within the DR hyper-v hosts, you can easily back up those VMs with Veeam.

]Also, can I leverage 3PAR snapshots to backup to tape with Veeam?

Can you please elaborate on this? Not sure I fully understand what you're after.

Thank you!

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Actually if you're going to use off-hos proxy server, then the volume snapshot will be mounted to your off-host proxy and there will be no load on the production hosts.

I'm talking about taking load of the production array, not the hosts. There's pretty much 24x7 intensive IO happening on the production array so there is no good time to be doing backups from it, hence why I wanted to replicate and do everything from the DR array.

If you have Hyper-V hosts and use SAN based replication and all VMs are registered within the DR hyper-v hosts, you can easily back up those VMs with Veeam.

Well this is the problem. How can they be registered in the hosts? My understanding is that I would replicate the CSVs at the SAN level so I would end up with a copy of the data down at the DR site but in the event of a failover the VMs would need to be imported into the DR hosts at that point, a manual process (or more likely PowerShell). Am I mistaken here? If not, this is the situation I was trying to avoid and figured Veeam would give the GUI required for a quicker recovery in this situation or for a simpler recovery process for files contained within a VM. SAN based replication appears to require a more convoluted process to manipulate the replicated data for something useful.

]Also, can I leverage 3PAR snapshots to backup to tape with Veeam?
Can you please elaborate on this? Not sure I fully understand what you're after.

I don't want to backup to tape from the production data, I want to backup from a storage snapshot. I believe Veeam offers that functionality for D2D backup so was wondering if it could be done for D2T as well.

[veremin]

I'm talking about taking load of the production array, not the hosts. There's pretty much 24x7 intensive IO happening on the production array so there is no good time to be doing backups from it, hence why I wanted to replicate and do everything from the DR array.

Both backup and replication jobs put some load on production array, because in either case the snapshot should be taken. Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

I'm talking about taking load of the production array, not the hosts. There's pretty much 24x7 intensive IO happening on the production array so there is no good time to be doing backups from it, hence why I wanted to replicate and do everything from the DR array.

In this case you should have a DR Hyper-V host to failover to and use that host with a secondary SAN to backup your VMs.

Well this is the problem. How can they be registered in the hosts? My understanding is that I would replicate the CSVs at the SAN level so I would end up with a copy of the data down at the DR site but in the event of a failover the VMs would need to be imported into the DR hosts at that point, a manual process (or more likely PowerShell). Am I mistaken here? If not, this is the situation I was trying to avoid and figured Veeam would give the GUI required for a quicker recovery in this situation or for a simpler recovery process for files contained within a VM. SAN based replication appears to require a more convoluted process to manipulate the replicated data for something useful.

I'm afraid that scripts is the only option, if you want to backup these VMs with any image-based solution.

I don't want to backup to tape from the production data, I want to backup from a storage snapshot. I believe Veeam offers that functionality for D2D backup so was wondering if it could be done for D2T as well.

Veeam offers this functionality (backup and restore from SAN snapshots) for VMware infrastructures, however with Hyper-V we are already leveraging this functionality via VSS snapshots of the SAN volume and off-host proxy servers.