Duplicate Catalogs for DR

[dannythake]

Hi,

After a bit of advise please! We are currently about to do our first DR failover test using Veeam and I have some questions on the best way to do it.

Currently at Head Office we have a physical Veeam B&R Server that does out nightly backup to disk, followed by an archive to tape using a Multiloader. All works well.

At the DR site, we have another Physical Veeam B&R Server mostly doing replication of 5 Business Critical Servers. However, the tape drive attached is only a single tape unit.

In the case of DR, we would bring the Replica's online pretty quickly, but we would then be tasked with manually restoring the less critical VM's from tape. As these VM's span multiple tapes, and we only have a single tape drive unit at the remote site I would to avoid having to Catalog each tape one at a time in order to start restoring VM's. I'm also not keen on having Backup Copy Jobs due to the volume of Data.

Can someone please advise on the best way to achieve the quickest restore time using Tape in a DR scenario?

Many Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello Danny,
Tape cataloging is a manual process as you need to let tape software know that tape was loaded into the library, and force it to identify the tape media data. Mainly, restore speed completely relies to the tape drive performance, the only suggestion I have - is to disable hardware compression on your tape drive, this would increase restore speed up to 10-15%.

If you have critical VM that needs to be restored on the first place, you can keep these VM’s backup on the separate tape media. Compare to ‘all VM’s on one tape’ such VM would be restored much faster.