Disk to Remote Disk to Remote Tape

[mschlott]

I am building out my Veeam 7 environment and have a single backup job writing to a windows repository at my data center. I have a copy job that copies backups to a linux repository at a remote site. So far that all works as expected.

I created a Tape Job to copy backups to tape and set my linux repository as the source of the backup. Veeam indicates that a Full is 1.1 TB and an incremental is 91.3 GB. When I run the job, I get the message there is nothing to back up.

So I changed the Tape Job to copy the backup job rather than the repository. Now it says Full backup is 1.8 TB and an incremental is 206.7 GB. When I run the job, the job begins and starts transfering data. The problem is that it is transfering data over the WAN instead of copying the backup that is already on the same network.

Veeam support suggested I use file backups to tape of my remote backups, but if I do that I will have to recover from tape, import the backups then recover from the imported backups.

Is there a way for me to have backups on local disks, remote disks and remote tapes while only transfering the backups over the WAN once and still being able to recover backups directly from tape?

[Gostev]

VM to Tape jobs do not currently support backups produced by the Backup Copy jobs as a source, this should be added in the next minor release. For now, you have to use File to Tape jobs to accommodate this scenario. Thanks!

[mschlott]

Thanks Gostev. I am still in the testing phase with veeam 7 so this is not a problem for me. Do you have a rough estimate of when this will be available?

mike

[Gostev]

Q2 next year, unless plans change.

[veremin]

As a potential workaround, you can create a “dummy” job, map it to the files produced by backup copy job and, then, us it as a source for a backup to tape job. Thanks.

[mschlott]

Thanks Vladimir. That's what I ended up doing, but there was a bug that caused the backup to say "nothing to backup". Fortunately this bug was fixed in patch 1 so I was able to get it to run.

[jonathanstorey]

Hi,
We're just trying to do the exact same thing with our 9, update 1 environment - care to share the steps? I've tried to create a dummy job in the remote location where the copy backups are copied to (also the location where the tape library is), but I'm getting no joy. Any pointers?

Regards,

Jonathan

[veremin]

Can you provide more details on what you're trying to achieve, as I believe that with the enhancements introduced since version 7 that usage of dummy job is not needed any longer. Thanks.

[jonathanstorey]

Hi,

So we have 2 sites, each site has 3par with physical veeam 9.x fibre attached HP dl360 g9 & DAS HP d6000 70TB shelf wired to the veeam machine(running backups, wan accel, proxy etc.).
Veeam proxies backup to local DAS per site through VMware & san integrate snapshots - works like a dream.

Our requirements are to have the local DAS disk backup, a copy of that data in the remote site & every month end carry out a full tape job (we have HP MSL 2400 / 4800 & multiple drives attached per site to the Veeam proxies) consisting of the local eom (from local DAS) & the remote sites copy of it's local DAS backup data - essentially we run active - active sites and either site needs to be able to carry out month end to tape with both sites backups on it...

so basically:
site A to local.
site b to local.

Site a copy to sit b
Site b copy to site a

EOM -
site a & site b copy to Tape @ site a
site b & site a copy to Tape @ site b

Is this possible without using nasty backup to file with mask to only pickup full backup jobs in the repository folder on the EOM jobs?

Jonathan

[veremin]

Hmm, in this case it seems that usage of dummy job is inevitable here.

However, just so you know - you might achieve everything you're currently doing with a single backup console (instead of multiple ones). And I don't see any crucial obstacles preventing you from doing that.

Thanks.

[pkelly_sts]

@jonathanstorey It looks like you're trying to achieve something similar to me, just on a bigger scale (more data/storage)

You can now create a tape copy job whose source is a backup copy job, however, I've run into an issue *IF* that copy job sits on a Scale-out repository (it worked fine prior to moving to SOBR). [Edit: I'm currently testing a hotfix that should hopefully fix this SOBR issue]
However, a very large caveat is that all of the infrastructure (repositories, tape libraries etc.) must be "owned" by a single Veeam Backup instance for two reasons:
1) A tape library can only be "owned" by a single tape server, so a tape library can't exist in two instances of Veeam (would be great if they could get two Veeam instances talking to each other to allow this to be possible!)
2) A second instance of Veeam knows nothing about the backup jobs/data owned by the other instance so there's no way of running an actual "backup copy to tape" using the same veeam server.

I want:
Local backup to local repository (primary backup)
Local backup copy to local tape (protection against losing local backup repository, also potentially retain archived monthlys locally)
Copy of local backup to remote repository (protection against losing local site & ALL backups on it, both disk and tape)
Copy of remote repository backup to remote tape (protection against local site repository/tape failure AND protection of losing ALL of the archived tapes at the local site if building burns down)

THEN, I want ALL of the above, but in reverse as the remote site is another standalone portion of the business.

I achieved almost all of the above except for copying the remote site to the remote tape library (so effectively local tape backups for that site) which isn't possible yet as I also have a Veeam server on that local site, which I can't add the tape library to because it's already owned by site A.

My plan is to migrate all of the remote site backup jobs to the primary site Veeam server, then replicate that server to the remote site using the remote Veeam server probably so that will be the ONLY job that remote Veeam server does after migration is complete.

[jonathanstorey]

Hmm, in this case it seems that usage of dummy job is inevitable here.

However, just so you know - you might achieve everything you're currently doing with a single backup console (instead of multiple ones). And I don't see any crucial obstacles preventing you from doing that.

Thanks.

So I would migrate all command and control to one veeam server. This would have ownership of all backup resources, jobs, repositories, tape devices etc.

How would I protect this server, jobs, schedules and ability to restore in the event of a site failure?

Jonathan

[pkelly_sts]

Firstly with config backups - you can restore a config backup of Veeam to a freshly-built server pretty quickly
Secondly, and my preferred (and additional) method, by replicating the Veeam server (this is why I recently migrated from physical to VM Veeam *management* server - Repositories & tape server etc. are still physical in my config.

For extra simple protection, you can use an instance of Veeam at your remote site to "pull" the replica of your Veeam server to it, thus making it relatively easy to recover if your primary site goes down.

[jonathanstorey]

Firstly with config backups - you can restore a config backup of Veeam to a freshly-built server pretty quickly
Secondly, and my preferred (and additional) method, by replicating the Veeam server (this is why I recently migrated from physical to VM Veeam *management* server - Repositories & tape server etc. are still physical in my config.

For extra simple protection, you can use an instance of Veeam at your remote site to "pull" the replica of your Veeam server to it, thus making it relatively easy to recover if your primary site goes down.

Looks like this will be our solution - we've not paid the consultants that put the solution in yet on a fixed cost, looks like they have some more work to do before they get paid...

Kind regards All,

Jonathan.