Advice on best method of moving Repositry

[homerjnick]

Hi folks...no issues...jut looking for some advice as to how best to achieve something.

We recently migrated off a Netapp SAN + IBM BladeCenter H running an ESXi cluster. We now run a IBM Storwize V5000 unit with a Cisco USC Mini BladeCenter with Cisco blades.

Everything is fine in the system, runs VDI like a dream.

Veeam B&R is physical server...attached to a 1 gig switch where the Storwize and Cisco UCS are also attached to...we have no need for 10 gig networking given the size of our company.

Veeam's B&R server runs on a physical HP server that attaches via ISCSI to our old Netapp SAN and that is where all our backup data resides. Naturally we use Veeam proxies that run on our ESXi servers in our Cisco UCS BldeCenter. Veeam is running on Server 2012 where it utilizes Storage Pools and virtual disks to aggregate LUN's into one disk thus I'm not sure I can present that to another server.

Now then...that is our setup...this is what I want to achieve.

One of our Cisco Blades is an external rack-mountable one that runs a nVidia card for a great desktop experience for certain VDI users. We had the opportunity to fill this with internal disks at low cost which we have done giving us 25TB of storage, the same as our backup Netapp SAN has.

Therefore, I want to move Veeam B&R server to a VM that runs on this external Cisco Blade with the disks and present the disks to the new Veeam B&R VM and backup to it.

I'm looking at the best way to achieve this.

Now I'm confident in building the VM, installing Veeam and restoring the config...that is no problem.

The problem I forsee is to get 20 odd TB of data copied from old SAN to new area is going to take a long time over a 1 gig switch...too much time to NOT take any backups or do any replication to our DR site.

So what would the best solution in this instance?

Can I run two Veeam B&R servers in tandem without buying any more licenses? As I could then copy backup data job by job to new server and slowly decommission the old one.

[foggy]

Can I run two Veeam B&R servers in tandem without buying any more licenses? As I could then copy backup data job by job to new server and slowly decommission the old one.

That's what I was going to suggest. Yes, you can have two backup servers running side by side under the same license provided they both back up/replicate VMs residing on the same hosts. Here's the procedure for switching repositories for the job. Another approach would be to just switch to a clean repository and have the old one standby until the last backup on it falls out of the retention.

[homerjnick]

Yes I thought of that option too...alas I'm very keen to reclaim the rack space from an IBM BladeCenter H and a Netapp SAN with multiple extensions!

Thank you for the link! I can carry out my plan of attack.

[foggy]

Then the first approach should work for you. Good luck and feel free to ask any questions arising during the migration process.