Datastore to Remote Datastore Backup

[steve]

Hi,

I'm currently looking for a backup/replication product for our ESXi virtual environments. We have 2 clusters of 2 ESXi 3.5 hosts (Prod and DR) each connected to separate fibre channel SAN's. The SAN's currently aren't connected to each other due to the distance (we have a very geographically large site) and lack of available dark fibre, but is planned for future. Everything is on the same LAN and managed by a single Virtual Center Server.

The idea is to get the Prod VM's backing up directly to the DR cluster's datastore for fast recovery. When I install Veeam Backup and FastSCP and connect to the VC Server I can see all hosts and datastores and can choose any VM's to backup/replicate, however, I can't choose the remote (DR) datastore as a destination. IS this right? FastSCP can [cold] copy from datastore to datastore no problems. I've been using the network/NBD method with and without VCB installed on the same server as Veeam Backup because the server is not connected to the SAN.

Edit... I’ve just read the help file again and saw the highlighted IMPORTANT NOTE – “ESXi cannot be used to accommodate the backup (VMware limitation). For this reason, ESXi servers are not displayed in the Destination list".

So does this mean it would work if I had a fat ESX 3.5 host in the DR environment? I kind of thought if FastSCP could cold copy from ESXi to ESXi datastore then a backup job would also be able to.


Thanks in advance for any input.
Steve.

[Gostev]

Hello Steve, yes right now you need to have fat ESX in the DR site. Alternatively, you can backup locally, and then use DFS-R or RSYNC to transport the files to DR site for fast recovery with Veeam Backup console local to DR site. Some customers are doing this already.

The big difference and reason why FastSCP is able to do this is because it copies full files, while backup and replications do both copy of full files AND incremental updates of these files afterwards.

[steve]

Thanks Gostev. The RSYNC/DFS-R suggestion sounds good - I'll give it a try.