Backup over WAN

[dennes]

Hi, i have a question about my current setup and synthetic fulls.
We have Veeam 8 Essentials deployed on a 2008R2 VM in our datacenter (192.168.21.0/24). Datacenter is connected to our LAN (192.168.31.0/24) over a 100Mbps IPSEC VPN.
On our LAN is the backup target, a NAS with an SMB share. I also have a 2008R2 server on our LAN.
I backup straight from the datacenter over the 100Mbps VPN to he NAS at our site. This works fine for incrementals, but a full takes too long and it interrups regular VPN usage.
Am i right in assuming that if i put Veeam on the 2008R2 server at our site too, and add that as a proxy to the Veeam setup at the Datacenter, it will become responsible for synthetic full generation and thus prevent this from happening straight over the VPN? If so, are there specific things i need to setup?
Id like to know what would be the best setup for this that requires the least data to be transferred over the VPN.

Thanks,
Dennes

[foggy]

Dennes, your understanding is generally correct, you need to specify this Windows server as a gateway server for your repository.

[veremin]

Though, I'd not say that backuping data to an SMB share over such a link is the best idea performance-wise.

Don't you happen to have some local disks or decommissioned storage device at your datastore that you can use as a local repository and transfer the data to the said NAS with the use of backup copy job afterwards?

Thanks.

[dennes]

Thanks for the replies. I found out about the gateway option yesterday and figured as much. Thanks for confirming this.
Currently the NAS is the only storage i have thats big enough to safely contain all backup data. An option cloud be to present the NAS as an iSCSI target to the Windows machine. Would that speed up the backup?
At any rate.. Only the first backup took 2 days to finish.. The incrementals only take about an hour/max 2 hours i have noticed, so this might not be much of an issue. I just want to prevent any new (synthetic) full backups from being generated/sent over the line again.

[foggy]

Presenting it via iSCSI could also give some performance gain.

[dennes]

One question.. Does the gateway have to be a full Veeam install? Or can this just be a Windows/Linux server added to Veeam with the agents (auto)installed?

[foggy]

It can be any Windows server added to Veeam B&R console.

[dennes]

Thx. all clear now

[veremin]

Just to be sure - you were talking about presenting a given device via ISCSI to 2008R2 server, not to a machine located in a datacenter, right? I'm wondering because the latter is not considered to be the best practice and is likely to result in unstable and degraded performance. Thanks.

[dennes]

Right.. I would not want to run iSCSI over a WAN connection
The NAS would indeed be presented as an iSCSI device to the 2008R2 server on the local site, not the datacenter site.
I also realise by doing that i need to change the repository of the backup job to the repo on that specific server and not use the SMB share anymore.
Dont know if i want to go that route though.. It seems to work fine as it is now..