Disaster Recovery - External HD & No existing DR site

[s.hulsberg]

With the recent natural disasters that have occurred I am trying to wrap my head around how to create a recoverable situation with the tools at hand. I have scanned through the forums and most have some sort of DR site already established or similar. What if you do not?

Scenario A:
Evacuation required
Only have access to physical Veeam proxy box and/or readyNAS (backups are on this) box


Scenario B:
Building total loss
Only have access to USB 3.0 backup drive (drive has backups, Veeam installer, license file and Veeam config backup)


What would be required to bring the VMs online somewhere else for each of these?


The problem I see is that the restore needs to have a host to connect to. I gather at the very least wherever the other site is, ESXi would need to be installed first and then Veeam on another system so that the import can occur?

What if it came from a vCenter environment?

Can instant VM be utilized?

How would the changed data (after disaster) be merged or restored to new hardware?

How would you get through this overall scenario?

Thank you

[PTide]

Hi,

What would be required to bring the VMs online somewhere else for each of these? The problem I see is that the restore needs to have a host to connect to. I gather at the very least wherever the other site is, ESXi would need to be installed first and then Veeam on another system so that the import can occur?

You can import backups to Veeam without any ESXi, however you'll need ESXi to restore the VMs to. You can have a spare ESXi + idle VBR server VM just sitting there. Also I'd suggest to go with replication between Prod and DR.

Can instant VM be utilized?

Yes.

How would the changed data (after disaster) be merged or restored to new hardware?

There is no CBT ID for the restored VMs. A full VM scan will be required to continue the chain.

Thanks

[s.hulsberg]

You can import backups to Veeam without any ESXi, however you'll need ESXi to restore the VMs to. You can have a spare ESXi + idle VBR server VM just sitting there. Also I'd suggest to go with replication between Prod and DR.

This can be a fresh install of ESXi without vCenter for the DR?

Utilizing hardware inside the same network off-site would be ideal but when working with about 14TB of data, what would you suggest for DR that is off-site/off network? I have not explored having a DR in the cloud with AWS or similar. I know that Veeam can sync over the WAN to the cloud but the connection from local instance to cloud for the sync and user access upon DR activation is what I am not versed in. Any suggestions with this would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you

[PTide]

Yes, you can just add ESXi directly to the fresh VBR as a standalone host and perform instant recovery directly to it.

What would you suggest for DR that is off-site/off network?

First of all, I'd recommend to use seeding (can be used for backup copy as well) to avoid transferring the whole backup across the WAN. Next, there are several options to proceed with:

- Use Veeam Cloud Connect
- Establish a VPN connection between sites, you might want to use VeeamPN in this case

Thank you