Best mode for WAN Backups

[bwestover]

I have three sites.

Site 1 (2 ESX hosts) is for internal employees, and houses file servers, email servers, intranet servers... and my Veeam Backup server. There is an iSCSI SAN at this site.
Site 2 (2 ESX hosts) houses our public websites, web servers and database servers. There is an iSCSI SAN at this site.
Site 3 (1 ESX host) is our DR site, primarily for Site 2, but eventually for Site 1 as well. This site uses local storage only.
There is a 2Mbps link to the other two sites from Site 1, and a 5Mbps link between Site 2 and Site 3.

I am making backups and creating replicas at each site (to/from the same site) as well as making replicas from Site 2 to Site 3.
I am running vSphere 4 everywhere.

I had this all running in version 3 with host agents, so when I was backing up something locally at a site it didn't use much if any WAN bandwidth. Now that Im running version 4.1, and using vSphere 4 I'd like to optimize this as much as possible. I am finding that with vStorage API Network mode, it seems to be trying to transfer everything across the WAN even if im backing up FROM Site2 TO Site2, and likewise at Site3. Local backups at Site1 (where my Veeam Backup server resides) by contrast, backs up very quickly with vStorage API Network mode. (100 - 200 KB/s versus 10-30 MB/s)

I think I can optimize my backups at Site1 by setting up my Veeam Backup server with direct iSCSI SAN access (using MS iSCSI initiator), or perhaps by using appliance mode. However, I don't understand what is the best way to optimize my wan backups.

[Gostev]

I recommend installing 2 Veeam Backup instances (Site 1 and Site 2), and federating them using the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. This way you can do fast and efficient local backups in each site, and replicate S1>S3 and S2>S3.

The actual mode does not matter for replication job (as long as it is vStorage API mode), because they only affect performance, but you won't see any difference due to your replication speed being WAN link speed bound anyway. Just make sure your jobs say "with changed block tracking" when processing VMDK files, as long as you see this you can be sure that only changes are transferred across WAN.

For fast local backup, using direct SAN access or virtual appliance modes will provide about the same results, both being faster than network mode.

Hope this helps!

[bwestover]

Thanks, that does help. I didn't know I could run multiple Veeam servers, and I had never heard of federating them with Enterprise Manager...

Looks like i have some reading to do!!