Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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ashman70
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Replicas instead of backups

Post by ashman70 »

I know replicas are not the same as backups, but my situation is this:

I have a vm running exchange that failed to complete its full backup this weekend, it retried it tonight and was at 31% when forcibly stopped it. I've disabled the job now because I can't have it run a full backup during the week as there is too much going on with other jobs and it takes 16hrs, I don't want it running during the day. Now I have replicas of this exchange server running every hour, so I should be relatively protected with those, correct? I realize in a worse cases scenario, some exchange silent database corruption happens and replicates to the replicas and I'd have to go back to the oldest database backup which was an incremental from Thursday last week. But otherwise I should be ok until Friday when I can run a full exchange backup. Is there something else I can do until then to protect this exchange server via backups? Create a new always incremental job until Friday?
nielsengelen
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by nielsengelen »

Which type of production storage are you running? Can you tell a bit more about the size of the VM as it takes so long? In regards to the job which is stated as the bottleneck in the statistics?

The process for making a replica is the same as a backup by default, we create a snapshot and transfer the data.
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ashman70
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by ashman70 »

The Veeam server is a physical host with local storage that acts as the data store for backups. The VM in question is just over 250GB. From what I can tell it says primary bottleneck is network. The production host and replica host are on the same gigabit lan.
nielsengelen
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by nielsengelen »

And your VMware production storage is running on which type? If the network is the bottleneck it may be a good thing to have the job looked into via support. It could be that you are backing up via the ESXi kernel (NBD) in your job statistics which causes the slow backup.
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ashman70
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by ashman70 »

Vmware production storage is local RAID 10 volume. How could I tell if I was backing up via the Esxi kernel (NBD)?
nielsengelen
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by nielsengelen »

If you look in the job and select the specific VM it will say something like this:
Using backup proxy VMware Backup Proxy for disk Hard disk 1 [NBD]
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ashman70
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by ashman70 »

I don't see that. I am using enterprise edition.
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by nielsengelen »

Have a look at https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... stics.html where you can see where to find it. Please contact support as well to have them assist you with this issue and leave the support case number here.
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ashman70
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by ashman70 »

Thanks, does this also hold true for V8?
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Re: Replicas instead of backups

Post by nielsengelen »

Yes, this applies to version 8 as well.
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