Remotely Merging Incrementals of Backup Copy

[gperolli@cistel.com]

I have a client that has 2 sites. I want to setup a Backup Copy job that moves a copy of the backups to the remote site. At the remote site I have a copy of Veeam installed on a server. When talking with support I was told that when the incremental is merged into the full backup at the remote site it is done by the Veeam running at the main site over the pipe. This seems to be a very inefficient way of doing this step and would make this step unnecessarily long. Why is it not possible to leverage the Veeam running at the remote site to merge the remote copy of the backup???

[foggy]

Hi George, could you please clarify your setup? Basically, you do not need a full-blown instance of Veeam B&R at the remote site, if your repository is a Windows/Linux server or you have a gateway server for it at the remote site, then all the synthetic activity (merge) is performed locally at the remote site. There could have been some sort of misunderstanding between you and the support rep.

[gperolli@cistel.com]

Here is the configuration:
1) All my Veeam servers are Windows 2016
2) All my VMs are Windows
3) My 2 Hyper-V hosts in High Availability
4) At the main site I am running a VM with Veeam to do my backups to a local iSCSI attached NAS
5) The client has a 100Mbps connection with a site-to-site VPN to a remote office
6) At the remote site I am running a VM with Veeam and it has an identical sized iSCSI attached NAS

What I want to be able to do is run the backups at the main site and then move the daily differential to the remote site. Then Veeam running at the main site and the remote site will take care of merging the differentials into their local copy of the full backup when it is required. An added bonus would be the possibility that the merging pattern is different at the remote site as compared to the main site. Meaning at the main site the file server backups daily and then merges weekly. Could I then dailies at the remote site that merge into weeklies that then merge to monthlies?

The second part would be an added bonus but I was told by support that the merging into the full backup at the remote site was run by the main site which seemed pretty silly if that was the case.

[foggy]

The thing is you seem to have two separate instances of Veeam B&R, which are unaware of each other. To implement GFS retention on remote side, you need a backup copy job created on the same Veeam B&R instance as the regular backup job that performs local backups in the main site. It doesn't mean that there will be additional traffic, in the case of the Windows repository, the merge process will be performed locally at the remote site (Veeam B&R server at the main site will just manage the process issuing the required commands to the components running remotely).