New backup environment, advice needed

[Blue407]

Morning All

I'm currently evaluating this product under a 30 day license.

Currently we have been using Backup Exec 2015 and doing a full backup to LTO5 every night. We have just run out of capacity on a single tape so some new hardware has been ordered. We have ordered a new Dell server with 12TB of usable space plus a LTO7 backup drive. We plan on using LTO6 tapes for the moment as they have sufficient capacity for us.
We have a primary Hyper-V Server hosting all our VM's at the moment, but are planning a migration to our new Dell VRTX Hyper-V Cluster in the coming months.

What I would ideally like to achieve is:-

1. Nightly backup to disk and tape. Idealy full backups, however some sort of synthetic backup would be fine as that should be quicker. (These will be onto the new dedicated backup server and LTO tape)

2. Nightly off-site backup to a Windows Server 2012 R2 server at another office location. Idealy some sort of delta-copy to reduce bandwidth requirements.

3. Is it possible to run a backup of some kind to disk hourly? to ensure we have multiple points in time we can recover a VM or file from.

4.. Based on all my requirements, I'm not sure which Veeam edition/product best suits our requirement?

I am currently testing the Hyper-V replication features, to a test backup server here and off-site. It will be interesting to understand what benefits using Veeam's Replication would be vs the MS one?

Thanks in advance for help and advice given. There is quite a steep learning curve with this product along with understanding new terminology and features.

[PTide]

Hi,

1. Nightly backup to disk and tape. Idealy full backups, however some sort of synthetic backup would be fine as that should be quicker. (These will be onto the new dedicated backup server and LTO tape)

Nighlty backup to disk can be achieved with a regular Backup Job. It can be easily adjusted to your needs, depending on your RPO, RTO and type of the storage that you use. Please take a look at this article to learn more. Synthetic backups are also supported both for regular jobs and tape jobs.

2. Nightly off-site backup to a Windows Server 2012 R2 server at another office location. Idealy some sort of delta-copy to reduce bandwidth requirements.

That's exactly what Backup Copy Job was designed for. It synchronizes the original backup chain with its copy once in a predefined period of time, allowing you to pull only changes that has happend since the last synchronization. Please check this helpcenter article for more info.

3. Is it possible to run a backup of some kind to disk hourly? to ensure we have multiple points in time we can recover a VM or file from.

Yes it is possible. You can even run backup job or replica job continiously thus causing a new cycle to start as soon as the previous one is completed, or you can schedule it to run once in X minutes/hours/days/weeks/months. Here is more info on job scheduling.

4.. Based on all my requirements, I'm not sure which Veeam edition/product best suits our requirement?

Considering that you want to have your backups at tape device and leverage synthetic backup feature, I'd suggest you to stick with an Enterprise Edition. Although Standard Edition support File to Tape job, it's more convenient to use Backup to Tape job to manage backups, especially if you want to leverage synthetic to tape.

I am currently testing the Hyper-V replication features, to a test backup server here and off-site. It will be interesting to understand what benefits using Veeam's Replication would be vs the MS one?

Thanks in advance for help and advice given. There is quite a steep learning curve with this product along with understanding new terminology and features.

It's not that steep is it may seem Feel free to ask questions on this forum and don't forget to use "Search" and Helpcenter

Thank you.

[Blue407]

Thanks for the prompt and comprehensive response, I will check out those links.

Are there any guidelines/best practice documents about hourly backups to disk?

if I wanted to keep 4-6 weeks of daily synthetic backups on disk, how would I go about that?
Is there any way to run some sort of wizard to give me some clue as to how much storage I would need for this? (Some way to check how much additional data is being generate/changed each day)

[PTide]

Are there any guidelines/best practice documents about hourly backups to disk?

That depends on your environment, please use "Advanced Search" on the forum - there are many topics on the subject. You can also search on our website as there are plenty of videos that might be useful. Generally speaking, you should avoid running backups on the VM if it's under heavy load (Echange or MSSQL during office hours, for example). If you want to backup the VM that is hosting some transaction-heavy application then I'd recommend you to use Transaction Log backup as it won't cause taking a snapshot and thus is less heavy on your production storage.

if I wanted to keep 4-6 weeks of daily synthetic backups on disk, how would I go about that?

You can use a forever-forward mode for that. We recommend as best practice to keep long chains offsite(at least another repository) using backup copy jobs.

Is there any way to run some sort of wizard to give me some clue as to how much storage I would need for this? (Some way to check how much additional data is being generate/changed each day)

There are several ways: backup calculator, backup management suite report, veeam ONE report, or you can estimate it manually.

Thank you.