VMware 6, Veeam 9, FAS2552 ( two each site) 8.3.1P1, 100 meg WAN.
Thank you to Crystal in Veeam support who helped with the missing piece.
All I can say is wow. I backed my live Exchange (250 users, 500 gig used) up from my DR site using a remote SAN snapshot (SnapMirror) created by Veeam. Exchange missed 1 or 2 pings making the snap shot and two or three pings with the deleting snap shot. They happen so fast I not sure which step the ping is lost. Veeam creates the storage snap shot and then starts the remote snap shot. This use to take a day now a fresh Exchange remote backup in 90 minutes.
Veeam can now do an instant VM recovery form the remote snapshot (snap mirror). This is huge. I don’t need the VMs to be replicated off site because the SAN already has them and with a click of a button in Veeam they are live. This saves so much space and my recovery time drops for all VM.s. Once Veeam brings the VM live then you just vmotion to the datastore you want. This is SAN to SAN which is very fast. I don’t need a SAN tech to clone and mount the remote snapshot, everything is from inside of Veeam.
Now all my remote data is sent over the WAN once by the SAN. Veeam can do all its stuff from the remote copy. If I have some type of issue and need to do a backup without CBT or a new VM it is still quick because it does not go over the WAN. With Veeam controlling the SAN snapshots my SAN snapshot data (local and remote) is application consistence and not crash consistence.
I now want to speed up the move to 9 as testing is going far better than I hoped for.
I will need to change most jobs around. The way the SAN snaphots a datastore I am better off backing up a datastore at a time. My VMs need to be moved to a datastore based on RPO. I do not need all the DR replicas because the VMs are all inside the remote SAN snapshot that Veeam has access to and RTO will be easily met. My offsite backup copy jobs will be moved to backup jobs to use the remote snapshot. I will need to re-think archive data.
Long post but too happy not to share.
