Can I use replicated backup copy as a TEST system?

[garymansell]

Hi,

I have a mission critical Java App (PTC's Windchill PLM System) on a VM which persists its data in a separate Oracle VM.

For DR purposes, I am looking to use Veeam to Backup and Replicate the two VM's to our other VMware environment at a remote site over our WAN link.

It occurs to me that it might also be possible to use the remote site's replicated copies of my servers as an almost up to date TEST environment (ie Yesterday's backup), and write any changes to a separate writeable datastore at the remote site. I am somewhat doubtful, though, as to how such a system might perform as presumably the Oracle DB will need to be reading/writing from/to a compressed and deduped datastore with a VMDK made with many increment snapshots at the remote site.

Does anyone have any experience of doing anything like this and would you expect Oracle to perform well enough to be used as a TEST System?

Rgds

Gary

[foggy]

Gary, if you are talking about starting replica VMs manually at the DR site with the purpose of testing, then review the corresponding sticky FAQ section for some details. Please note, that v6 replica restore points are stored as VMware snapshots, hence are not compressed and deduplicated. Moreover, each restore point is read-only as all the changes in case of starting replica VM are written into the new snapshot.

If you meant using backup files for testing, then I would suggest to consider On-Demand Sandbox functionality, which allows you to run VMs in an isolated network right from the Veeam backup files. In this case, backup files stay untouched as all disk writes are redirected elsewhere.

And if you are concerned about performance in the latter case, here is a good reading for you.

[Pretzeldude]

[merged]

Hello -

This is probably a bit of a noobish question for most of you, but I've been mostly using Veeam B&R 6.1 for backups so far. I now need to dig into the product a bit deeper and need some advice. I need to take a backup or clone of a working VM and restore it to another VM for development/staging purposes. I've been told by our development group that simply making backups of the dev server is not sufficient. They periodically want a full clone of the live server to work with for future patches etc.

What is the best way to accomplish this with B&R? Redirected restore or replication job? I also need to be able to change IP addresses after the clone job.

[Edit] Forgot to mention that this is VMware vSphere 4.1.

Thanks!