Veeam Cloud Backup Recommendations

[bauclair]

I am in the process of evaluating Veeam B&R Cloud Edition for use in our production environment. We are currently backing up 48 VMware ESXi 4.1U2 virtual machines with B&R Standard edition, most of them Windows 2008 or 2008/R2. We have configured individual reverse incremental network backup jobs for each VM (we are using Windows 2012 iSCSI for the ESXi 4.1 servers' shared back-end storage, and are lucky if we get 15MB/sec on initial full backups, so we kick off multiple jobs concurrently to more efficiently utilize iSCSI bandwidth).

All of these backups generate about 3.9 TB of .vbk, .vrb and other files. We keep 10 nightly restore points on the local backup server for convenience, but once a month we back up everything to tape, which we then ship to an off-site data storage facility.

I would very much like to eliminate the entire tape backup subsystem in favor of doing cloud backups using Veeam Cloud Edition and Amazon Glacier, but even backing up just the .vbk files would result in over 1.7 TB of data, which would take over 40 hours to transfer to the cloud using our maximum 100Mbps bandwidth. Our goal for the offsite backups is to maintain monthly full backup snapshots for disaster recovery and regulatory purposes. Depending on policy, some server snapshots would need to be maintained for up to 4 years, but most could be "round-robin" deleted after 6 months.

My question to the experts is, what combination of backup configuration and other methods can I use to achieve my cloud data retention goals, without (1) a 40+ hour backup window that depletes my company's network bandwidth or (2) putting a huge amount of data in the cloud, all while still maintaining the convenience of quick local restores over the previous 10 days? And no, network bandwidth increase and/or getting a "real" SAN are not options

Bill A.

[dkvello]

I've moved away from tape the last 15 years, but the introduction of LTFS for LTO5/6/7/8 etc drives has made it a good option for tier 3/4 backup storage.

If you have 1.7 tb of change every night, it pretty much excludes public clouds as a storage target at the moment.
But, I'm experimenting with Cinder (private cloud storage), Storwize Unified (or SONAS) and LTFS Library edition.
I'm using 8 GB FC/10 GB Ethernet over short distance 6-8 km.
LTFS has the + of being transportable and high capacity/speed and you can put a library "close" by. But it requires physical logistics when going long distance.
+ is that it works as a normal file system which makes it easier to recover,

[dellock6]

Well, if your goal is to store monthly backups, you need 40 hrs only once per month, so you can do a two-step process. I think I explained it already but happy to repeat here too: since the main problem is 40 hrs is more than the daily schedule, so you cannot replicate the vbk to Glacier before it is modified again, you acn
- add a simple windows server with at least 2Tb on board to hold the full vbk file
- once per month, replicate the last vbk file here, on a local lan it would take way less than 24 hours
- on this server, install and run Veeam Cloud Backup (I used different software in the past, but is the same...)
- even if this takes 40 hours, the VBK file in the primary repository is free to be used by the next execution of the backup

Already configured it at a couple of customers, runs well even when internet connection is much less than 100 mbits.

Luca.

[bauclair]

dellock6,

Sounds like a great idea. Do you have any recommendations for a good block-level file synchronization/replication utility that can be run under Windows 2008 R2? I'd like to sync to another set of folders on the source server so I can't use Windows DFS, which requires at least 2 systems.

Bill A.

[dellock6]

Well, you can use the Cloud Edition itself, it has an option to replicate backups to local SMB shares.

Luca.