VBR at primary site, VAO at DR site

[Cullan]

Hi there,
I understand that the best practice is to have VBR running at the DR site to control backups and replication.
I was told that if a client already has VBR installed at the primary site then it's possible to just install VAO at the DR site to control replica failover etc.
Is this true? or does VAO require the primary VBR server to be at the DR site?
Are there any limitations by running them at separate sites? i.e. Limited functionality if the main VBR server cant be contacted? or does it have a copy of all backup/replica details stored in it's own local VBR install?

Thanks!

[haslund]

Actually, the reference design is to have a VBR server at production handling backups and a VBR server at DR for replication. This is because of mainly 2 reasons, most customers already have VBR for backups at production but secondly in case the connection between production and DR is offline backups can still be produced.

So why a VBR at the DR site? This is to handle replica failovers.

Connecting VAO to production VBR is very easy, simply just from inside VAO connect to it (VAO agent gets installed): https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vao/u ... tml?ver=20

The only disadvantage I see of using a VBR server for backups in the production site is that you have some additional manual work to make VAO handle restores from backups to the DR site.

[Cullan]

Great thanks for that.

I suppose it could make seeding replicas from backup files more difficult if the backups and replicas are managed by a separate VBR. There could also be some overlap with backup and replica jobs running at the same time if jobs aren't scheduled correctly.

It would be good if it was possible for the Prod backup VBR server and the DR VBR server to talk to each other and check for running job conflicts etc but that might get quite complicated.

[haslund]

Correct, however, if this is greenfield you could consider simply using a single backup server located in the DR site and avoid these issues. Just make sure you have a stable connection between the production and DR sites.