[V13] Backup / Replicate V13 appliances

[kbr]

Hi,

Can somebody tell me if it is adviced / possible to backup and / or replicate the appliance based backup and appliance based proxy VM's that are new in V13. I know i previous versions replication a proxy would cause issues because of ID's. Is it adviced to do something to the Veeam appliance VM to another DataCenter? We can only make a config backup of the B&R appliance, we can't make backups of the other VM's or the networking config.

[Gostev]

Hi, Karl.

That is correct, we still do not recommend backing up or replicating actual appliances also with V13.

We recommend using configuration backup functionality for backing up software appliance, as provisioning a new software appliance from scratch takes 15 minutes done manually or 7 minutes using unattended installation.

If you require a lower RPO, we recommend deploying a High Availability cluster (new V13 functionality).

Thanks

[kbr]

Hi Gostev, but only a VBR appliance has a config backup. The actual appliance config (like networking settings, users, MFA settings, certificate) can not be backed up. So when one DC fails we would have to re-deploy the appliances (VBR and Proxy etc. appliances) and after a config restore would have to register new Proxy's , re-direct jobs etc. Would be a great (and i think simpel) addition to be able to do a appliance backup from the appliance GUI.

[Gostev]

For infrastructure appliances we recommend using an unattended installation script as these are disposable otherwise. This is something you'd want to do in any case even just for consistency of settings across multiple appliances. For example, you mention MFA above. Just imagine having a unique MFA record for every single infrastructure appliance of hundreds, which would be the case if you deploy every appliance separately and manually.

Anyhow, I really don't see us going "backup" route for infrastructure appliances. I do hope however to add auto provisioning that is based on a settings template down the road, so users don't have to deal with unattended installation scripts. While most enterprise customers actually prefer scripts because they're already running their infrastructure as code and have all the IaC tools and processes in place; smaller customers will benefit from UI-driven approach.

Although another question then becomes, do smaller customers even need to deploy infrastructure appliances considering V13 scalability, with all-in-one Veeam install on a single industry-standard server able to protect up to 20000 workloads directly to 2PB of internal immutable storage.