Veeam BR and VSAN stretched clusters

[jacoboceanic]

Greetings all,

I'm embarking on a Veeam BR Enterprise 9.5 install for a 12 node VSAN 6.2 Stretched Cluster (6 hosts/siteA + 6 hosts/siteB). The stretched architecture gives way to some interesting discussions around backups and replication. I'm curious to know if anyone has experience in environmentss with Veeam and VSAN Streched Clustering. Please note this is not a technical question about VSAN or how Veeam backups integrate with VSAN. I'm trying to understand the best way to integrate Veeam in a distributed VSAN architecture (1 vCenter, 1 cluster, 2 sites, ESXi hosts split between two sites connected by WAN).

At present I have the following in place:

Site-A
ProxyVM1-A
ProxyVM2-A
VeeamBRSrvA (physical, UCS S3260 storage server)


Site-B
ProxyVM1-B
ProxyVM2-B
VeeamBRSrvB (physical, UCS S3260 storage server)

My main questions revolve around how to implement the two Veeam Backup Servers in a manner that will only backup VMs belonging to the same site. What I'm trying to avoid is having backups cross the WAN.

Each backup server is going to protect the VMs at the opposite site, and use the local storage server as the backup repository. And Vice-Versa for the opposite site. For lack of a better idea, I'm going to manually organize VMs in Folder corresponding to their physical site and configure the backup jobs to backup VMs by folder.

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello! You don't need multiple backup servers as our load balancer is VSAN aware, and will pick the proxy that is running on the host which has local access to most of backed up VM data. And to ensure that under no circumstances your proxies will start chatting with a backup repository from a different site, you can use Proxy Affinity setting on the backup repository. Thanks!

[dellock6]

I would say that the design here is not different than other stretch clusters, you need to have at least one Veeam repository per site, and be sure that proxies are mapped to local repos using as Anton suggested the proxy affinity. Still, with VSAN you may want to have in an ideal design one virtual proxy for each ESXi node, and disable drs for them so that they don't fail over to other nodes, or even worse to the other site. If a VM moves to the other site, it's picked by the proxies at the other site.

[jacoboceanic]

Thanks for the informative replies guys. Proxy Affinity is what I needed. Also rather than configuring backup jobs by Folder, I'm currently opting per-Host. Even though this will capture more VMs than desired, it's a much cleaner option with the VSAN stretched cluster (2 sites, 1 vCenter, 1 cluster).

Thanks again.

[Sean Hill Adv]

@dellock6: I realise this was a while ago, but out of curiosity, regarding your last comment where the VM moves to another site how will Veeam coup with that situation?