Architectural Review

[pgfitzgerald]

Hey all! I've been lurking for a bit while playing around with the trial. This is my first post!

We're in the process of moving from VMware to Hyper-V and we're in the planning phases of replacing our existing backup product. We're leaning very heavily toward Veeam at the moment, so I've started trying to work out the architectural design as well as the backup and copy schedules to meet our various business needs. Through this process, I hope to be able to determine the amount of on-prem storage as well as cloud storage we'll need... ultimately allowing me to put together a proposal with all the relevant details as well as budgeting numbers.

Our corporate HQ will have a larger cluster and more storage than our remote offices. Those remote offices are located all over the world. We're thinking each site will have their own backup infrastructure and Veeam Enterprise Manager will be located centrally at HQ. We're also thinking about using Microsoft Azure to host off site backups. The other option we're considering for off site backups is copying the backups to the closest sister site. Both remote storage options would utilize Veeam WAN Acceleration to streamline the process.

Here's a rough drawing of what I'm thinking right now. I'm interested in your opinion on the Veeam architecture. I'm a total noob with Veeam, so any insight you have would be wonderful!

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Hello Paul and welcome to the community!

You are on the right rails. Indeed, the best practices includes 3 copies of media, on 2 different media and 1 of those offsite.

So in your case, you can use basic backup jobs to backup VMs onsite and backup copy job with WAN acceleration to copy created backups either to the sister office or to cloud(Azure). Thanks!

[pgfitzgerald]

I should note that I'm concerned about the off site options. There are Veeam cloud providers available in only 4 of the 11 countries we have computing infrastructure. We're not a huge company -- we're just spread out -- so something like StorSimple would very likely not be an option for our remote sites. Not to mention topics such as regulatory compliance and data sovereignty complicating things.

Ideally, it would be nice to be able to setup a backup copy job that stores data directly in Azure blob storage, but I know it's more complicated than that. I've seen articles describing setting up a Veeam Backup and Replication server in Azure and attaching disks. That seems rather restrictive and looks like it could be quite costly since the disks are limited to 1TB each and you are limited to how many can be connected to each VM.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the clarification Paul,
What are the links bandwidth do you have between your sites and what are the approximate sizes of backups (VMs)?
May be it`s better to backup copy to the closest offices. It maybe even faster than to-Azure option, no talking about cost and simplicity.
Thanks!

[pgfitzgerald]

Nikita,

Thanks for your time so far!

The bandwidth of each MPLS link varies from site to site, ranging from 2Mbps to 8Mbps. Internet bandwidth at each site is usually considerably more, which is one of the reasons why we were interested in Azure for off-site backup storage.

We're still in the planning phases and I'm gathering information on the size of data and backups as well as other aspects of the various backup and DR strategies at each of our sites.

The first site we're working with is near São Paulo, Brazil. (According to http://www.veeam.com/service-provider-lookup.html, there are no Veeam cloud providers in Brazil.) They have about 5TB of data that will be backed up. We don't yet know what sort of deduplication and compression we will be able to achieve. At the moment, they rotate 8 LTO-5 tapes. They do daily backups Monday through Thursday (tapes 1-4) and reuse them each week. They also do weekly backups each Friday (tapes 5-8) and reuse them each month (roughly). Fortunately, they're not terribly large or complex so this site probably won't be too much of a challenge compared to some of our others.

Are there other cloud options that might work in areas without a Veeam cloud provider?

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Paul,
So in Brazil your company use backup-to-disk+to-tape, which is fine if you keep tapes separately from the disk repositories.
Unfortunately, there is not much you can do for those regions where no cloud service providers operate. I would suggest once again to consider either tape repositories or copying backups to the closest sites.
Some VMs show great compression/deduplication results + WAN acceleration can save a lot of space to be transferred over WAN + you can leverage seeding opportunity. Means it worth trying to see if 8Mbps is enough.
Thanks!

[pgfitzgerald]

I'm still working on this... here's the latest. Please critique.

• We will have a single primary site at headquarters.
• We will have multiple major hub sites around the world. (North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc.)
• We will have multiple minor satellite sites around the world. (North and South America, Asia, etc.)
• Primary and major hub sites are all connected to a global MPLS network.
• Minor satellite sites are either connected to the MPLS network or have some form of site-to-site VPN established.
• Basically, all sites have some form of WAN connectivity.

• The primary site will do onsite backups to a large local repository and backup copy jobs to the DR site over the WAN with WAN acceleration.
• The major hub sites will do onsite backups to smaller local repositories and backup copy jobs to the primary site over the WAN with WAN acceleration.
• The minor satellite sites will do offsite backups either to the primary site or the nearest major hub site over the WAN (whichever is closest probably). The smaller sites do not have the need or the budget for a Hyper-V cluster or a dedicated backup repository.

QUESTIONS:

• Is there any way to leverage WAN acceleration when doing offsite backups over the WAN?
• Compellent Replay Manager will be installed on the Off-host Backup Proxies. Does it also need to be installed on all Hyper-V hosts?

I think that'll do it for now! Thanks so much!

[pgfitzgerald]

Anyone happen to have any input on my two questions?

[foggy]

[*]Is there any way to leverage WAN acceleration when doing offsite backups over the WAN?

Backup copy jobs provide the ability to enable WAN acceleration.

[*]Compellent Replay Manager will be installed on the Off-host Backup Proxies. Does it also need to be installed on all Hyper-V hosts?[/list]

Since it looks like this is the piece of software having hardware VSS provider as part of it, then yes (hardware VSS provider has to be deployed on both the Hyper-V host and off-host proxy server).

[pgfitzgerald]

Backup copy jobs provide the ability to enable WAN acceleration.

Ah, okay. So when a satellite site has no local backup repository and is backing up directly to a remote site's repository over the MPLS network, WAN acceleration is not an option.

Since it looks like this is the piece of software having hardware VSS provider as part of it, then yes (hardware VSS provider has to be deployed on both the Hyper-V host and off-host proxy server).

Yes sir, that is correct. I'm told the Compellent Replay Manager is what provides the Hardware VSS Provider.

Thanks so much! The only thing left now is for me to finish the capacity calculations and write up the plan for approval. I'm so excited!

[foggy]

Take a look at this thread and specifically calculator referred to at the bottom of the page, should help you with the calculations.