Design Assistance for VB&R 6.x upgrade

[vertices]

Quick and Dirty Visio Diagram here:
http://ge.tt/97wykWC

Our current deployment consists of the following:

Site 1 Primary:
3 x ESXi 4.1 hosts connected to iSCSI SAN
1 x Dell Windows Server running Veeam B&R 5.x that is connected into the LAN and SAN. This server backs up all the VMs direct from SAN running in the 3 hosts to local storage on this Dell server.

Site 2 DR:
1 x ESXi 4.1 host connected to Dell SAN
There is a 2008 R2 Veeam server here that pulls replications of all VMs from the primary site to this single ESX host which stores them on the iSCSI SAN.

Connection between the sites is 20mbps. About 20 VMs total are being replicated, with a total of around 1 Tb of data.

Goal is to continue backing up locally at primary site, and also house replicas at DR site.

We are looking to upgrade to ESXi 5.x as well as VB&R 6.x.
My question is in regards to overall design. We also need to be able to seed the backups with a USB drive.

It seems to me that we want to remove Veeam from the VM at the DR site and instead deploy a Veeam proxy on that VM. Also deploy another VM at the Primary site and deploy a Veeam proxy on that. Then take the current physical Dell Windows Server at the Primary site and set it up as a Veeam server and backup repository. Does that sound like the best way to deploy V6?

In regards to seeding, it seems I will have to copy backups to a USB drive at the primary site. Then setup a temporary repository on a workstation at the DR site and copy the backups into it from the USB, then restore the VMs from that repository. Does that sound correct? Also can you deploy a repository on a workstation instead of a server class OS? It’s just a temporary onetime thing to seed.

I’m also guessing it will be best to upgrade to ESXi 5.0 just prior to deploying Veeam 6. I’m thinking we will just start with a fresh deployment of Veeam and avoid any upgrade issues.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[tsightler]

So are you doing direct SAN at the primary site with the current physical Dell server? If so, I'd probably use it as a physical proxy/repository for both backup and replication and install the Veeam server at the remote site and also use it as a proxy for replication. Why install the Veeam server at the remote site? Because it allows you to have the Veeam server at your DR location in the event of a failure and minimizes the total number of required machines to 2, one being your existing physical and the other being the VM at your DR site. Also, when you failover you can use the server at the remote site to run your backups during that period of time.

The disadvantage to this setup is that you could always loose your DR site and not the primary, in which case your local backups wouldn't run. Also, if you had a connectivity issue between your DR site and production, your local backups wouldn't run, but that's usually a short lived issue.

As a third option, somewhat of a compromise between the two, might be to continue to use the physical box as the local backup proxy/repository, install the Veeam server in the primary site in a VM and use it for the replication proxy, and then the third VM at the remote site as a proxy. Then simply replicate the Veeam server VM to the DR site as well. That's the advantage of installing the Veeam server as a VM.

There's no real right or wrong here, just throwing out a few other options.

[foggy]

Just to add on the rest of the questions:

1. Here is the step-by step instruction to the replica seeding process.
2. You can deploy backup repository on any PC, not running server OS necessarily.

[vertices]

Am I correct in assuming if I have 1 proxy at each site, and replicate between sites specifying those 2 proxies, that all replication traffic over the VPN will always be between those 2 proxies? I'm trying to nail down some QoS policies over this WAN link. I just need to make sure nothing in Primary talks to DR except between the 2 proxies.

[Vitaliy S.]

In case of replication our data flow is the following: Disk > Source proxy > Network > Target proxy > Disk

On top of that, there is a quite informative post from foggy describing all the connections required, please check it out: Off-site Replication connections