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mrstorey
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Copy Jobs Between Multiple B&R Servers?

Post by mrstorey »

Am I right in thinking that backup copy jobs which make use of wan accelerators must be managed by a single B&R server?

I have deployed B&R servers at each of our international locations, each managed by a single Enterprise Manager instance from here in the UK.

I'd like to setup accelerated backup jobs between each of these locations, but I'm wondering if this design would require me to setup additional accelerator servers at each site, so that each site and server would have it's own source and targets within it's configuration.

Which I guess brings me to a general design question - when is it right to deploy additional backup servers? Even though we have sites around the world, all of them are managed by a single vCenter server in the UK. I'm starting to think I should consolidate and just manage the entire Veeam environment from a single B&R server, since all venter operations triggered by Veeam will traverse the WAN links anyway, perhaps removing any benefit of having local backup job schedulers.

Sorry - that was two questions! Hope that makes sense....

Thanks!
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Copy Jobs Between Multiple B&R Servers?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hi Alex,
mrstorey wrote:Am I right in thinking that backup copy jobs which make use of wan accelerators must be managed by a single B&R server?
Yes, backup copy job should belong to a single B&R server, not sure how you have share jobs between two B&R servers.
mrstorey wrote:I'd like to setup accelerated backup jobs between each of these locations, but I'm wondering if this design would require me to setup additional accelerator servers at each site, so that each site and server would have it's own source and targets within it's configuration.
In this case, the secondary backup server is not required. You will need to deploy two WAN accelerators, one on each site and then configure backup copy jobs to use these accelerators. These accelerators will be both sources and targets for your backup copy jobs.
mrstorey wrote:Which I guess brings me to a general design question - when is it right to deploy additional backup servers? Even though we have sites around the world, all of them are managed by a single vCenter server in the UK. I'm starting to think I should consolidate and just manage the entire Veeam environment from a single B&R server, since all venter operations triggered by Veeam will traverse the WAN links anyway, perhaps removing any benefit of having local backup job schedulers.
You can manage all your locations with a single Veeam B&R server, but use multiple proxy and WAN accelerator servers across your environment. A secondary Veeam B&R server will come handy if you plan to replicate VMs offsite. In this case we recommend to use a separate Veeam B&R installed on the DR site to manage replica failover operations when the primary site with the main Veeam B&R server will go offline.

Hope this helps!
mrstorey
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Re: Copy Jobs Between Multiple B&R Servers?

Post by mrstorey »

This does help thank you!

…it's also led me to lots of other threads re: backup and replication design…! Apologies if this jumps off thread - feel free to create merge this or create a new topic:

For example….

We have at least two sites in each continent, and I'd like these sites in each continent to act as DR / BC sites for each other. For example:

UK Site 1
- Daily reverse incremental backups to a local repository
- Accelerated backup copy jobs to UK site 2
- Critical VMs replicated to UK site 2

UK Site 2
- Daily reverse incremental backups to local repository
- Accelerated backup copy jobs to UK site 1
- Critical VMs replicated to UK site 1

I understand that it's best to run replication jobs from the target site, to provide failover / failback functionality when the source site goes down. I would imagine therefore, that it'd also be best to run the backup jobs from the same B&R server in the remote / target site too, using proxies and repositories local to where the backed up VMs live. i.e, configure site 2's B&R server to backup site 1's VMs to a repository in site 1, and configure replication jobs to replicate VMs from site 1 to site 2.

I assume this is best because the B&R server will be able to schedule the backup and replication jobs much better? Otherwise, I suppose if backup and replication jobs were running on different servers, we'd have to configure the timing of the jobs so that they didn't clash, since two B&R servers won't have knowledge of each others jobs? Have I understood this correctly?

Lastly, I understand that WAN accelerators can be both source and targets for backup copy jobs, but presumably this is only when they are managed from the same B&R server. If I wanted our offices to act as DR sites for each other, and therefore require multiple B&R servers to allow for failover operations to work during a business continuity event, then would I need to configure source and target accelerators for each B&R server? Or, is it possible to deploy accelerators from different B&R servers onto a single server? I would imagine not - but wanted to check since this would reduce the required server count.

Apologies for the long message! Thanks for all your help and advice, Alex
foggy
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Re: Copy Jobs Between Multiple B&R Servers?

Post by foggy »

mrstorey wrote:I would imagine therefore, that it'd also be best to run the backup jobs from the same B&R server in the remote / target site too, using proxies and repositories local to where the backed up VMs live. i.e, configure site 2's B&R server to backup site 1's VMs to a repository in site 1, and configure replication jobs to replicate VMs from site 1 to site 2.
Your setup looks good to me.
mrstorey wrote:Lastly, I understand that WAN accelerators can be both source and targets for backup copy jobs, but presumably this is only when they are managed from the same B&R server. If I wanted our offices to act as DR sites for each other, and therefore require multiple B&R servers to allow for failover operations to work during a business continuity event, then would I need to configure source and target accelerators for each B&R server? Or, is it possible to deploy accelerators from different B&R servers onto a single server? I would imagine not - but wanted to check since this would reduce the required server count.
Actually, this is possible. You would need to configure a pair of WAN accelerators for each backup server, however a single server can serve as a source WAN accelerator for one backup server and as target WAN accelerator for another. Consider this as a role, similar to backup proxy server. Here is a good topic regarding WAN accelerators, worth reviewing.
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