Backup solution for branch offices

[crichardson]

We have Veeam B&R running at our Head Office backing up our entire virtual infrastructure as well as replicating to our DR site. It works great.

However we have 30 branch office locations with slow connections. The average branch connection is only 3mbps. Each branch has a single ESXi server with a single virtual machine. The virtual machine is used for printing services and local shared network drives.

Since backing up over the WAN is impossible, I currently I have cheap NAS devices in each branch location. The NAS device is added to the ESXi host as an NFS datastore. I use ghettoVCB to backup the virtual machine to the NAS device every weekend.

This has become a massive headache. For one, the cheap NAS devices are failing. I'm slowly replacing them with Buffalo NAS devices which seem to be much better. But the ghettoVCB script constantly fails with the error "Unable to backup VM due to error in VMDK backup!". The real issue is the stability of the script itself. It's not an ideal solution for backing up my branch servers.

I was hoping there was a way to leverage Veeam to backup my branch server's virtual machines to their local NAS devices. Can I turn my branch server VM's into proxies which backup themselves to network storage such as the NAS or NFS datastore?

[nielsengelen]

You can configure the branch office Windows servers as a proxy and use them to backup to the NAS share via CIFS/NFS.

You will have to add those backup targets to the Veeam server in the central place as well as those proxy servers. Furthermore you'll have to license all the ESXi hosts in the remote branches with Veeam.

Do keep in mind that you'll need to have a secure connection between the branches (ideally something like a VPN) because you'll have to open up ports to create the connection.

Another option is to deploy an extra VM in all the additional branches and install Veeam Backup & Replication on those servers for local backups.

You can then add these remote Veeam Backup & Replication servers to the central Veeam server using the Enterprise Manager so you can easily manage them.

[Shestakov]

Hello Corey,

Can I turn my branch server VM's into proxies which backup themselves to network storage such as the NAS or NFS datastore?

Absolutely. In fact all backups work this way: VMs` backups go to backup repository through Backup Proxy server.
You can set VMs in your branches as backup proxies and use virtual appliance mode.

Thank you.