WAN Replication and Backups

[jasonjm99]

Please advise on how you would setup veeam to achieve the objectives below.

There are 5 locations. One location being the main office.

Main Office: 30 VMs, Wan Bandwidth: 45Mbits
Branch Office 1: 5 VMs, Wan Bandwidth: 6Mbits, Average VM size 100-300GB
Branch Office 2: 5 VMs, Wan Bandwidth: 6Mbits Average VM size 100-300GB
Branch Office 3: 5 VMs, Wan Bandwidth: 6Mbits Average VM size 100-300GB
Branch Office 4: 5 VMs, Wan Bandwidth: 6Mbits Average VM size 100-300GB

All the branch office ESXi servers store the VMs on DAS.

Objectives:
* Replicate all branch office VMs over the MPLS WAN links to the esxi servers at the Main office as often as possible. Every hour would be preferable but if more time is needed that will be acceptable
* Backup snapshots of Branch office VMs via Veeam to a NAS device located at the Main Office. The traffic will go over the MPLS WAN link. Ideally we would like to do this once a day using Change block tracking to reduce the amount of data that would need to be sent.

Can anyone share their experience implementing a solution like this or have a better idea on how to achieve the objectives without using SAN replication. Has anyone found that replicating and backing up this amount of data using veeam over the WAN links listed above is not possible?

[Gostev]

Hello Jay, welcome to our forums. You did not mention ESXi version, but recommendations will vary significantly depending on that... are you on vSphere?

[jasonjm99]

Yes it would be ESXi 4

[Gostev]

Thanks, in that case I recommend putting Veeam Backup server close to target ESXi (in HQ site) for best performance. You should be able to do replication every 1-2 hours depending on how active those branch servers are as it comes to disk changes.

But unfortunately, you will not be able to leverage changed block tracking when backing up replicas (you should explicitly disable it), as changed block tracking does not track external modifications to VMDK files (which is what our replication is). So Veeam Backup will have to scan whole replica image for changes each time. Although still, only changes will be transferred to NAS via MPLS WAN link.

[jasonjm99]

Thanks, so just to be clear I would only lose CBT if I choose to backup the replicas. If I backed up the actuall VMs at the branch offices and shot them over the MLPS link to a NAS I would be able to use CBT? Would this work?

[Gostev]

Yes, absolutely correct.