replication across a wan???

[sidwin]

I read over the faq about replication and I was wondering if someone could explain it more detail for me. I'm thinking of purchasing Veeam to be used to replicate my Vshpere Essential environment. I have two esx host. One in chicago and one in New York. I want to be to use Veeam Backup to backup from one ESXi host in chicago and the target will be another ESXi host in New York. I see that Veeam also does replication. I plan on using veeam to perform the backup after hour for my exchange server that is currently 20 gig VM and I'm connected via a 50mb pipe. Does Veeam Replication offer any soft of data compression? What port number will the replication run on and do you all recommend using a wan accelerator? After the first initial full backup is done, all the other backup/replication will be differentials from what I've read. Veeam has always been known for it's backup of VMware, I'm more concerned about the replication component.

Thanks,
Sid
CCIE, VCP, GCIH, PMP

[Alexey D.]

Hello Sid,

1) ESXi is supported as replica target, and not supported as backup target, as per system requirements.
2) Your 50M link is quite wide, however you may also want to use existing WAN optimizers, for example: HyperIP.
3) Compression is not used for replication because an original, unchanged .vmdk should be presented to target host. However, you can take advantage of CBT (incremental job runs), after initial full replication, which would save a lot of time and bandwidth.
4) To get info on ports used by B&R, please refer to User Guide, page 29.

Hope this helps!

[nickf]

You should be fine with a single 20GB VM to replicate over a 50Mb connection, unless there's a massive rate of change on the VM. For comparison we're struggling a bit with our replication bandwidth currently but we're replicating 18 VMs (20-200GB in size) over a 10Mb link, even with that (and no WAN acceleration) we're managing to get them done every 5 hours. I was surprised at just how much data changes on what I thought were relatively static Windows VMs though, even just event logs etc. can mean 50MB has changed in 5 hours on a VM not doing much else (static content IIS server for example).

[sidwin]

Thanks I didn't want to have to buy a third party product like double take to replicsteall the data but I wasn't sure how well of a job the veeam replication application would be able to keep up with the syste. Utilization and bandwidth requirements.

Sid