Disaster Recovery for physical servers?

[mgoncas]

Hi,

I am looking around the documentation and although it´s somewhere stated that DR backups cover physical servers, I get the impression that DR pack only covers virtual machines DR backup.

I have several ESXi hosts and a few other physical servers and I want to make sure that I have a DR backup for those.

If physical servers DR backup is possible how is it achieved? Using a network boot manager? A DR DVD?

Also, I have an Oracle DB extremely important so I would like to have as much as possible a continous backup (every hour or less). Any documentation about that?

Thanks again,

Miguel

[Mildur]

Hi Miguel

Please see the answer of my colleague Alec.
Currently, Agent backups are not integrated into VAO.
But you can use custom scripts to restore Agent Backups as VMs (Instant Recovery), but not back to a physical server.

Automatic recovery of an Agent backup to a physical machine seems to be really difficult to do. In my best knowledge, our Veeam recovery media cannot be scripted. This will always be a manual task for now.

Thanks
Fabian

[mgoncas]

Thanks for the quick reply. I thought DR pack superseeded VAO.

I think I haven´t stated correctly what I need. Currently we have a Backup & Replication server with a LTO library. We have a network with several physical servers, some of them are ESXi and some others are Windows standalone servers.

I need to know:

- If I can backup with Backup & Replication physical servers.
- If I can create a DR backup for those standalone physical servers and the ESXi hosts themselves.

Thanks again,

Miguel

[Mildur]

Hi Miguel

Your welcome. So the question wasn't about VAO, it was about physical server backup with Veeam Backup & Replication?
I moved your topic to the appropriate subforum.

First, DR Pack is an Add-On license for your VBR licenses which allows you to use Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator (VDRO) for the VMs. It doesn't allow you to backup physical servers.

https://www.veeam.com/disaster-recovery ... r-faq.html

Via DR Pack, which is a packaging option where Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator can be added on top of a new or previous purchase of either Veeam Availability Suite or Veeam Backup & Replication to ensure business continuity for all your VMs (not just the most-critical ones)!

Now to the questions:

- If I can backup with Backup & Replication physical servers.

Yes. Please see our quick start guide. What sort of license do you have currently?
If you have a socket license, you have complimentary licenses per socket to use for Veeam Agent Backups.
Each licensed socket (max 6) gives you a free license for Agent Backups.
- 3 Workstations = 1 License
- 1 Server = 1 License
If you have more physical machines to backup, then you need VUL licensing for the Agents. Please contact your reseller, partner or Veeam sales representative to get an offer.

- If I can create a DR backup for those standalone physical servers and the ESXi hosts themselves.

- Yes for physical server. See the link I provided a few lines up.
- No, ESXI hosts cannot be backed up. I never saw a software solution which can backup an ESXI host.
This are deployed really fast and with vCenter and host profiles, they are configured really fast.

Thanks
Fabian

[mgoncas]

Thanks for quick start guide.

The issue with the ESXi hosts is that they have been secured following a security guideline, so It´s not the standard ESXi installation.

[mgoncas]

For other people reference, I have found this guide for backing up ESXi host configuration:

https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to ... figuration

there are other blogs from Vmware itself but I found this guide the most complete

[Mildur]

Thanks for sharing the link

[mgoncas]

Sorry to retake this thread again, but I am still looking for an answer the part of the best approach for backing up the VM running Oracle Standard DB.

What I would need is a snapshot every hour of my DB, so I can roll back up easily. I am thinking of a schedule that retains last four hours snapshots and maybe retain some of those snapshots (maybe retain the snapshot of the DB every 6-8 hours)

That way, We´d have the nightly full backup of the VM (LTO and disk) and a way to restore the Oracle DB (presumably from Disk Storage since a quick restore is expected).

Since It´s an standard Oracle DB, maybe we will use a cold replication tool from Oracle to replicate in a second VM, not sure yet.

I had a look here https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-backu ... tices.html

but I still haven´t figured out how to perform incremental backups every X hour

[PetrM]

Hi Miguel,

You can use the option "Periodically every" in this step of the backup job creation wizard to run a backup every X hours. Also, don't forget about archived logs backup if your database works in ARCHIVELOG mode.

Thanks!

[mgoncas]

Thanks PetrM. Is it possible to run that backup against a file server or local disk?

[PetrM]

Hi Miguel,

Yes, it's possible. The image-level backup for virtual and physical workloads enables the protection of the entire server including all its local disks regardless of the specific role in your infrastructure whether it is a file server or not. By the way, we also have NAS backup functionality that can be very efficient for the file servers as well.

Thanks!

[mgoncas]

Thanks PetrM. Maybe I didn´t explain myself right. I mean if those Oracle backups can be sent to disk instead of LTO Tape.

[PetrM]

Hi Miguel,

Yes, of course: the both image-level and RMAN plug-in backups can be stored on a repository and this repository can reside on a local disk of Linux or Windows server. Just add to Backup Infrastructure the server whose disk you're going to use as a repository.

Thanks!