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yakamoneye18
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Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

Hello everyone,

We have the following situation:
We have two locations on different continents (Europe/Asia).
Location 1 is the main office, multiple virtual servers protected by Veeam B&R 9.5 U4a Enterprise Edition (so no WAN Accelerator on this side), perpetual license, active support contract. This location has a tape library for offline and offsite backup copies. The backup repository is a QNAP NAS connected by iSCSI via 10G ethernet.
Location 2 is a branche office, because of the long distance they have their own virtual servers. Protected by Veeam 9.5 U3 Enterprise Plus Edition - the support contract is expired, so we do not have the current version here. Next year we plan a bigger update of the IT systems (new hardware, new VMware version), we will then get a new Support contract for this office.

What we want to do now is to get the backups of the Location 2 copied to Location 1 once a week. We want to be able to use the network optimization features that come with Veeam, so we need to copy the backups between two windows servers with Transport Services installed. And we want to have an offline copy of the backups (at the moment we copy the backups to an external USB drive and change the disk once a month manually).

What would be the best way to achieve this goal?
Currently, my plan would be:
- Add the Veeam Server in Location 1 to the managed servers in Location 2.
- Create a Backup Copy Job for all backups from Location 2 to Location 1 - maybe running all the time, but with a network throttling rule so the copy job will not consume the whole bandwidth.
- Create a tape job for these new backup files.

My concerns:
- Is it possible to connect the two servers with different server versions? Will there be a problem with the transportation service? I am scared to just try, because once we accidentally added the Server in Location 2 into the Enterprise Manager in Location 1, which broke the license in Location 2...
- What would you prefer in this scenario: Backup or File Copy Job?
- How can I assure that the Copy Job is finished before I write to the tape? Since we only have a 10Mbit line in the branche office the copy job could take a while, and for this a direct backup to tape would not be a solution.

If I cannot connect the two backup servers directly because of the different version, I could find another machine in one of the locations to do the transport, but there would still be the problem to assure that copy and tape job would not get in each other's way.

Thanks for you help and tips!

Regards,

Tobias
Shestakov
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by Shestakov » 1 person likes this post

Hello Tobias,
I would not recommend to connect the two backup servers. Instead I would add repository located at Location 1 to VBR server from location 2 and create backup copy job on the location 2 VBR.
Since you need backups to be copied once a week, you don't need to run the job continuously.
How often the backups are made on the location 2? What's the size of backups to be sent to another location?
Thanks!
yakamoneye18
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

Hello Shestakov,

thanks for your quick reply.
The Backups on Location 2 are splitted into 2 Jobs - one runs daily (file and database server), the other one runs weekly (all other servers). The size of a vbk of the weekly backup is 90GB, the daily backup has 350GB.
When I see the numbers now, they do not look so big, so the copy job wouldn't even take so long...

To your suggestion: if I add the repository in Location 1 to the Backup Server in Location 2, I cannot use the network throtteling - is that correct? I remember having read something about some network optimization rules that will not work if the transportation service is not installed on both ends of the connection... I cannot remember what this was exactly.
foggy
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by foggy » 1 person likes this post

Hi Tobias, it is not possible to use the same servers running Veeam B&R components as part of different Veeam B&R installations that have different versions. The component with the older version will get automatically updated to the higher one and will not be able to work as a part of its original Veeam B&R instance. This is the first thing to keep in mind. Then, even in case of the same patch level, simply adding both Veeam B&R servers to Enterprise Manager is not enough to achieve what you are after. To be able to run backup copy for the backups created by another Veeam B&R instance, you would need a dummy backup job mapped to these backups and added as a source to a backup copy job. Not an ideal setup in other words, hence the question is whether you actually need two Veeam B&R instances, since both locations can be served by a single one.
yakamoneye18
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

Hi foggy,

now that you mention it, it would be a possibility to do all this from one Veeam instance.

The problem is that even if the IT is controlled from the main office, this location is more independent then our other locations. I would guess that my boss wants to be able to restore the location quickly without having access to the main office. And if I have a backup proxy in the remote location, would the existing backup job still work if the connection between main and branche office will go down?
foggy
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by foggy » 1 person likes this post

Ok, I understand your concern. Then you can do what Nikita has suggested - push backups from the second location. Just use some other server as repository on remote side, to avoid version conflicts. Network optimization will work if you have a repository server/gateway server there.
Shestakov
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by Shestakov » 1 person likes this post

Tobias,
Talking about single VBR server, which will make your life easier, you can have the backup server on one site and Backup & Replication Console on another, so you don't need the access to the main office for restores.
Thanks
yakamoneye18
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

So, I just tested Nikitas solution - I added the repository in location 1 to the server in location 2, and for now just created a backup copy job from location 2 to the repository on location 1. It is running now, but I throttled the repository to 3MB/s since we only have a 10Mbit line there. With these settings the copy job will run several hours - my concern now is, what will happen if the connection breaks for a few seconds? Will the copy job fail, and restart from the beginning? Or will it continue from where it started?
I just read about the WAN Accelerator, and it sound like that when using this, the job will continue after a connection break, but I am not sure what will happen without a WAN accelerator. Maybe we will have to upgrade our license in the main location to Enterprise Plus next year...
Shestakov
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by Shestakov » 2 people like this post

With these settings the copy job will run several hours - my concern now is, what will happen if the connection breaks for a few seconds? Will the copy job fail, and restart from the beginning? Or will it continue from where it started?
It will continue from where it started.
yakamoneye18
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

So, the copy process works, since I want to do it once a week it should have enough time to run.

Now my last problem is that my Veeam installation on the main site needs to copy the backups to tape - but this installation does not know it the backup copy process from the secondary site is completed. Does Veeam see this in the meta data of the backups? Or are there any ideas how I could do this?
Our current offline copy process in the secondary site broke a few weeks ago. Next year we will get either a complete backup infrastructure including tape library there, or we will work with one single Veeam instance like Alexander proposed. But I need a safe solution until then. For now we have an offsite backup, which is great, but still no offline backup.

If there are some ideas for this, I would realy appreciate it!

Thanks for your help so far!
Shestakov
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by Shestakov »

Could you describe what architecture you have finally chosen?
It's hard to say from your posts.
As for the monitoring, you can use Veeam ONE to have visibility over the whole backup infrastructure.
Thanks!
yakamoneye18
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by yakamoneye18 »

Hello Nikita,

my architecture is the following:
Remote Site has 2 copy jobs, one runs daily, the other one runs once a week. I added a NFS storage that is physically located at the main site as Backup Repository in the Remote Site, and created a backup copy job for all backups from the remote site to this repository.
Then I added the same repository in the Main Site installation and imported the backups. If I rescan the repository, I can actually see that the backups are processed at the moment. The tape library at the main site shall now transfer these backups to tape.

But I think it would not be good if the Tape job on the Main Site starts while the copy job on the Remote Site is still running, or if the Copy Job starts while the Tape Job is running. At the moment I am thinking about some kind of script - a post-job script on the remote server could trigger the tape job on the main server. The downside would be that I cannot include these backups to our default tape job, I would have to create one single job for this backup (and waste a 2.4TB tape with about 600-800GB backup data...).

And VeeamOne is already in use here, and it works great.

Thank you for any advice!
Shestakov
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Re: Copying backups from Site to Site

Post by Shestakov »

Thanks for the explanation, Tobias.
Both backup copy and backup to tape jobs don't lock the backup files. If you want to make sure that backup copy is finished before backup to tape job starts its backup I would recommend to split them using backup windows.
And yes, rescan script as backup copy post-job activity or pre-job activity for tape job is a good idea.
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