Design Help

[ropeguru]

First off, I am using the Community Edition for my home lab as that may affect the design options.

Here is what I have:

Location A:

Veeam installed on a 1U server running Server 2016, single socket 4 core w/HT, 64GB RAM, single 220GB SSD
Single VSphere 6.7, VCenter VCSA running as a VM, 10Gb NIC
TrueNAS box, 20 CPU, 196GB RAM, bulk HDD storage, 2 6TB (2 2.7TB NVME on each) PCIe NVME in a raid 10

Location B:

Single VSphere 6.7, connected to vCenter @ location A, single socket 8 CPU, 16GB RAM, 8 1TB HDD in RAID6 for datastore
Storage VM type TBD but will be a BVM to make use of the datastore space, could be a Veeam Proxy with direct attached disk for the backup storage???

So my questions are, in location A, I want to keep all data movement off the 1U server and offload to a VM. In location B, what do I need in order to facilitate backup copies from location A to location B using Veeam transport methods and not direct SMB/NFS/etc to the storage VM to be built.

Still new to this so not sure what proxies, etc. I need to build at each location. While the design I am looking for might be overkill for my needs, I am also using this as an opportunity to learn more about Veeam since this is all a home lab. It will, though, be backing up "production" personal data files, so I need it to be sound.

Thanks...

[Dima P.]

Hi ropeguru,

in location A, I want to keep all data movement off the 1U server and offload to a VM.

Possible. You need to register such machine as backup repository.

In location B, what do I need in order to facilitate backup copies from location A to location B using Veeam transport methods and not direct SMB/NFS/etc to the storage VM to be built.

You need to add secondary backup repository at location B to the same Veeam B&R server and use backup copy jobs to transfer the backup files from repository A to repository B. Thanks!

[ropeguru]

That is so simple..

So any backups whether they are OS server based, VM through vCenter, etc. will always talk directly to the repository and not have to traverse the main 1U server?

One thing I left out of the original post is that the 1U server is only a 1Gb network connection, so I am trying to keep everything of that except the management type stuff..

[Dima P.]

Robert,

So any backups whether they are OS server based, VM through vCenter, etc. will always talk directly to the repository and not have to traverse the main 1U server?

For most platforms proxy servers upload the data from the source side to the repository side, so Veeam B&R server is not involved in the backup process or data transfer (unless you use Veeam B&R as a gateway server for SMB/NFS repository as a repository or as a proxy)

One thing I left out of the original post is that the 1U server is only a 1Gb network connection, so I am trying to keep everything of that except the management type stuff..

Stay away from using Veeam B&R as repository or proxy and you'll be good.

[ropeguru]

Thanks Dima,

That is what I was looking for. So, even though local to the main Veeam 1u server, drop a proxy server into my virtual environment and it will carry the backup/restore traffic to and from the repositories. Just drop a repository in location B that the location A proxy will push/pull data.

[Dima P.]

You are welcome Robert! Sounds like a good plan - let us know how it goes!