WAN Replication for Cold Site?

[Zew]

Hey all,

I watched the video on WAN replication and it was really good, too bad there wasn't a nice little demo to show it in action. However when I watched it seemed was for a hot site, with the instant failovers and everything.

I setup a firewall at my Cold site, and configured a very secure IPsec tunnel between them, and am now working on setting up my hypervisor and Veeam server for it. Would I be able to use WAN replication to keep an up-to-date replication of my backup at the cold site. Meaning only the backup data is up-to-date, and failover would require manual spinning up of VM's and go to moving over public IP's address to public hosts names manually as well.

Or is this something I use a normal replication job for? I was also informed that I could run a Veeam instance at the cold site with my existing Enterprise License as long as it is just for Disaster recovery, which is my plan.

Thanks for your time in answering my questions. I love Veeam to no end, and suggest it to anyone looking for a backup solution! Keep up the great work!

[foggy]

Hello, just to ensure we're on the same page - are you talking about replicating backup data offsite with backup copy jobs with WAN acceleration enabled (as opposed to WAN accelerated replication jobs, where you have a ready-to-start replica VMs on the target host)?

Btw, what kind of link do you have between sites?

[Zew]

Hey Foggy!

Ohhh soo that's how I should be doing it, still using back up copy job with WAN acceleration. That def sounds exactly what I'm trying to do.

We currently have backup copy jobs enable on rotated USB drives, which are placed in a bank vault. Looking to replace this offsite step with a cold site where we at least have space, hardware, and connectivity already available to reduce RTO. Where is right now if anything were to happen to the primary DC we'd have to get a place and hardware before we could even start to think about recovering VM's or anything.

Here's the sad part Foggy. I already configured the connection to our Cold site with our firewalls (IPsec using sha256 and AES256) over a 5mbps connection. It's a slow connection with a decent amount of encap overhead on it... so I don't expect it to be fast, but it should have a good window where that connection isn't used by production traffic (A single web site we host for external users to submit reports).

So my guess is have to do the following.

1) Since its a cold site, I figured setup a single host ESXi server (DL380 G6, dual CPU, 72 gigs of RAM) with (8 x 500 gig, RAID 5+ hot spare =~ 3 TB) (Total production space is about 1.3 TB) Install one VM (Veeam on Win 2008 R2, Or do I only need storage VM that provides either iSCSI, or NFS, or SMB over to this storage?)

2) Seed the Cold site storage, I'm assuming at this point create the backup Repo and seed by creating the actual backup copy job, and run them locally? (I couldn't find a good Veeam video that described exactly how one seeds)

3) Configure the http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... ators.html (Since this requires a WAN accelerator at both sites, I assume I do need a Veeam server at my cold site? Looking at the topology under how WAN Acceleration works I see only one Veeam sever and a WAN Accelerator at both Source n target locations. Am I to assume these Linux based servers of some kind?)

I really applicate your time in answering my questions. I just couldn't seem to find documentation or demos that show exactly how WAN acceleration works, and by that I mean set up with examples of actual servers, moving actual data and seeing it all work inside an actual lab of some sort. I could only find theoretical webinars.

[foggy]

You do not need full Veeam B&R installation at the target location, just WAN accelerator and repository. You can do the initial seed onsite using backup copy direct mode, then configure WAN accelerators and pre-populate the target WAN accelerator cache, finally move the server to the target location.