Backup or Replication or both

[vanderfield]

Noob question,

What is the significance of performing a backup if you have replication or vice versa? Would a backup only or replication only be sufficient? Please educate me.

[Alexey D.]

Hello John,

These topics might be useful to answer your question: Backup vs. Replication Scheme? and Backup or Replicate. Hope this helps!

[slidek9]

Replication is to a DR site for DR. Backups are for restoring.

Crossing the two does not work well:
If you Backup the Backup server to the DR site you will get in trouble as the Incremental backups do not 'clean up' files that are deleted from the source servers. You will need to do a Full backup to get rid of obsolete files from the VKB file, this of course means that the backup of the backup machine will also be reset and crate lots of traffic of the DR link.

[Vitaliy S.]

Actually, I wouldn't recommend to backup the backup server at all, I would just use a remote SQL Server or backup SQL configurations DB only using SQL native methods for DR purposes.

[ToastedTech]

Hi All,

I'm new to Virtualization so please bear with me.

I'm trying to decide when to backup and when to replicate?

The company I work for has vSphere 5 and Veeam 6.5, I am currently running backups locally to two sites and replicating over the WAN. The replication has had to be significantly reduced due to (I think) slow storage (DAS) on each site. There was initially only one proxy server at the head office which I have now increased to three, two at the head office and one at the branch office.

The environment is mainly Microsoft with some Linux servers.

What I would really like to know is:

Do you backup or replicate a VMs?
Do you backup and replicate VMs?
Is backing up locally and replicating over the WAN the right way?
What is the best practice for the preferred method?

Thanks in advance.

[veremin]

Whenever the discussion about best backup practice arises, one should always keep the following 3-2-1-0 rule in mind:

3 Copies
2 Different Media
1 different location
0 error at restore checks

As to your questions, many of our customers successfully report having replication over WAN as the means of protecting the most crucial VMs, which also guarantees minimal RTO in DR situation, and having local backup for other generic machines.

In case of remote replication, it’s strongly recommended to have one Veeam proxy running in the production site (closer to the source host), and another one in the remote DR site (closer to the target host). With a proxy server set up on the target side, the data will cross the WAN compressed and will be uncompressed by the target proxy.

For more information it might be worth reviewing posts provided above along with the topics they’re referring to.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[ToastedTech]

Many thanks for the reply, this was exactly what I was looking for.

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

I'm just wondering. Do you really need backups if you're replicating? What are the pro's and con's?

[kjc3303]

Maximum restore points on replicas is 28 so not great for long term backup
Replicas are stored as full VM's so not great on storage
No Surebackup facility


Here is a quick summary from Mr Gostev

Replication = low RTO.
Comes at a price of lower performance, and high storage usage (uncompressed images).
Target can only be another ESX(i) server (standby or production).

Backup = high RTO.
Provides better performance, and low storage usage (up to 10x less than replication due to compression and dedupe).
Target is any storage device, including tape (D2D2T).

[mrmicp]

Hi,

If I have a VM that I only need to keep one months worth of backups for is there any reason why I would choose to backup rather than replicate once a day?

Many Thanks

[kjc3303]

Disk Space is one

[foggy]

Michael, please review the topic you've been merged into for considerations regarding backup and replication. If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.

[nefes]

You can also review this article from Veeam Blog: http://www.veeam.com/blog/replication-b ... -both.html

[mrmicp]

Hi,

Thanks for the links We have a windows storage server with about 10 TB of storage which we use for backup and we have a separate host running esxi that's used for our replicated VM's so storage space isn't really an issue for our small sized company.

I believe to do a granular restore of say an email on an exchange server I can only do that from a backup and that's a reason to do a backup as well as being able to keep months of backups. But for a basic application server that really only requires a month of restore points (maximum) and we are replicating once a day to a standby host anyway I can't see a reason to also backup..... The surebackup isn't really an issue as I can bring the replicas online in a segregated network to test.

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Michael,

I believe to do a granular restore of say an email on an exchange server I can only do that from a backup and that's a reason to do a backup as well as being able to keep months of backups.

Actually you can run our Exchange and SharePoint Explorers against any offline database, so it doesn't matter whether it's backup, replica or just database files.

Thank you!

[mrmicp]

You can tell I'm new to veeam I have a lot of reading ahead and appreciate the information given.

[veremin]

I believe to do a granular restore

Apart from application specific files, you can also restore whatever guest file you want to from replica VMs:

Go to the “Replicas” node -> Right-click required VM -> Restore Guest Files.

Thanks.