Configuring Backup and Replication jobs on identical servers?

[VeeBR]

Hello,

We have purchased two identical servers for our Veeam backup and replication infrastructure: HP Proliant DL380 with 36.3 TB, 64GB RAM, 1 socket running Xeon Silver 4110 @ 2.10 8-cores.

First one is to reside in our primary data center. It is running Windows Server 2016 and have installed Veeam B&R server, added the data drive to the Backup Infrastructure. Added our vCenter server running 33 VMs that consume about 15 TB of data.

Second one is to reside at a DR site and yet to be configured. We are planning to use it for replication and secondary destination for backup jobs.

I have a couple of question to create backup jobs and replication configuration:

1. How can I setup: Backup incremental on weekdays. Create full backup on Saturday and keep for 4 weeks. Keep a full backup created at the first weekend of a month for a year, and keep the backup created at the end of the year for five years.
2. Should we plan to keep VM replicas on the first server as well or does it makes sense to send the replicas to the DR site only? Does it make sense to configure the Second server as secondary destination for backups and VM replication as well?


As always, thank you for your input in advance.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

1. How can I setup: Backup incremental on weekdays. Create full backup on Saturday and keep for 4 weeks. Keep a full backup created at the first weekend of a month for a year, and keep the backup created at the end of the year for five years.

You can use regular backup job with 7 restore points retention policy and synthetic/active full backups scheduled to be run on Saturdays. To keep full backups long-term, please use backup copy jobs with the desired GFS retention policy : set 4 against the weekly option, 1 for monthly and 5 for the yearly one.

Also, please note that retention of the simple chain and GFS work independently.

2. Should we plan to keep VM replicas on the first server as well or does it makes sense to send the replicas to the DR site only? Does it make sense to configure the Second server as secondary destination for backups and VM replication as well?

There are different approaches on how to configure it, but you can use your secondary backup server to manage your replication jobs. This would allow you to fail them over when the main (production) site goes down, including the backup server running all backup jobs.

Please take a look at these similar threads for more info > Replication, but what about the Veeam server? and Question about failover with replication

Finally, to have a single pane of glass view across your two backup servers, please use Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager (free of charge) or Veeam ONE (a tool for monitoring and reporting on your Veeam backup servers).

Let me know if that helps!