Disaster Recovery

[cdlane]

Hi Folks!

So, I have a conumdrum...We have Veeam, it all works swimmingly, everything is right in the world. When we first looked at this 2 years ago I said to the boss "We ought to use this opportunity to build in DR". I gave him all the usual Small Light Aircraft razing our office to the ground kind of reasons etc; "It's never happened/it'll never happen to us!" etc etc. Well, touch wood, it still hasn't.

Now he decides it might be a good idea after all so I have spoken to our Cloud Connect partners but they don't offer it and we have two years remaining of our three year contract.

Question 1: Has anybody out there built their own, home grown, DR solution around Veeam B&R i.e. rackspace servers or the like

-AND/OR-

Question 2: Does anybody know of a reseller who would happily have a DRaaS only solution with the backups residing on another resellers Cloud Connect infrastructure, is that even possible?

I await your responses with anticipation!

[veremin]

Has anybody out there built their own, home grown, DR solution around Veeam B&R i.e. rackspace servers or the like

Correct, a lot of our customers have a remote DR site to fail over to. Feel free to search these forums to see how other people address replication needs.

Does anybody know of a reseller who would happily have a DRaaS only solution with the backups residing on another resellers Cloud Connect infrastructure, is that even possible?

Replication from backups won't be possible in this case, since cloud host and cloud repository will belong to different SPs.

[cdlane]

OK, so could I engage another partner and use Backup Replication from my production environment to their DR platform (assuming some form of seed was completed first)?

As you can probably tell, this is an area outside of my experiance and it seems a bit of a minefield as nobody seems to use the same terminolgy etc For a home grown solution I suppose the most simple solution is rent some rack space. stick in a duplicate to the hardware (1 server with 2 x 10 core, 192GB RAM, 3.3GB storage, Server 2012 R2 Enterprise running 10 VM's inc. RDS) I have here and then get a coffee, hit the Veeam manuals and try and get my head around it all but the cost is unacceptable to the Gods here; hardware, space rental, licensing etc etc. If I don't get at least ten years out of a server (regardless of how much gaffer tape and bubble gum I use to keep it all running) then I'm asked why I need to spend money after all..."it's only ten years old!!!" - you get the picture.

It would be so much simpler if my current mob did DRaaS!

[veremin]

Basically, you have two options here - either find an SP that supports DRaaS (seeding might be needed indeed to speed up initial replication cycle) or buy a physical server with enough compute resources to host replicas of production VMs and use this server as replication target.

As to configuring replication jobs, it should be pretty trivial task. Install backup server at DR site (yes, we do recommend "pull" approach), add production Hyper-V server to it and configure replication jobs for selected VMs. Should production environment go down, you would be able to execute required procedures (failover, failback) from remote backup site without any issues.

Thanks.

[cdlane]

Many thanks Vladimir, unfortunately the Management won't sanction another £12K for a duplicate server. It will have to wait two years until our current arrangment expires and we can revisit providers and their services.

[veremin]

Then, I think you're left with the first option, which is finding an SP that supports both initial seeding and DRaaS. Our Service Provider lookup might help you with finding appropriate option.