B&R design questions

[depps]

Guys,

I've read through the FAQ and think I have a fairly good understanding of Veeam but I do have a few questions regarding my setup.

We've got two 3 host ESXi clusters in colo with 1GB WAN links at each site i'm set on having physical VBR boxes as we have some spare dual quadcore DL380 G5's that I think will do the job. These are direct connected into the SAN's one iSCSI and one Fibre.

We have around 40 VM's and have 20 VM's at each site.

Each VBR box is going to pull over the 1GB WAN for CDP replication of our Tier1 VM's. Is it possible to backup these replicated VM's too? I want to get them onto tape. Should this be push instead to take advantage of WAN compression?

Tier 2 servers we'll backup to NFS on QNAP NAS' the question I have here is should I backup locally to the NAS and then use rsync to copy the VBK's to the NAS at the other site.

Or push to the NAS or pull to the NAS.

Then finally I think I'm going to run backups reverse incremental and then backup whole VBK's to tape in HQ, we should get all our VM's when compressed onto 1 or 2 LTO5 tapes.

Cheers!

[foggy]

Am I understanding you right that you want to backup the same source VMs that you are replicating? In this case you should keep in mind that it is impossible to run both backup and replication jobs against the same VM at the same time as VM files are being locked by the first job and you have to wait till it is finished in order to run the next one (otherwise it fails). So make sure you are scheduling jobs properly.

The other option here is to backup replica VMs, but in this case you will have to disable changed block tracking in the job settings, as it is not capable of tracking external modifications to VM. This will result in a few times slower incremental backup speed.

Regarding your tier 2 VMs, if you want to have backups in both sites, then it is recommended to backup locally and use rsync.

Thanks.

[depps]

There's no way to schedule replication to stop each night to allow for a backup job and then restart the replication when finished?

Backing up replica VM's mightn't be too too bad as we're only replicating a few smaller VM's.

Re: tier2 VM's you wouldnt recommend pushing over WAN to QNAP but rather rely on rsync?

[foggy]

There's no way to schedule replication to stop each night to allow for a backup job and then restart the replication when finished?

Currently no. There will be more control over this in v6 however.

Re: tier2 VM's you wouldnt recommend pushing over WAN to QNAP but rather rely on rsync?

Mounting NFS share to a Linux server in remote site and using it as a target is another recommended approach when backing up offsite. With rsync scenario, however, you can get synced backups in both locations (though you can always configure two backup jobs, one to backup locally and another to remote location).

In any case, I would recommend searching this forum for "offsite backup" for a lot of existing discussions on this topic.