I have an issue/concern with our disaster recovery plan, the problem being new Veeam backup chains.
I've been told I'm the only person to ever ask/raise this question/problem or have issue with the current solution I've been provided by Veeam to solve it.
Scenario:
We have an active & passive datacentre
We have VMware 8.1 with SRM (but this challenge exist with pretty much all solutions including Veeam Orchestrator)
Primary backup chains on site 1, Copy jobs going to site 2, and another to a third location.
If site one disappears all VMs get created in site 2, with this process they get a new MoRef ID (we can solve this with the VMID migration tool)
Problem - we need to now backup VMs on site 2 but don't have any primary backup chains BUT we have complete copy job chain file. Unfortunately you can't map backups to backup chain files
Solution from Veeam:
1. You need to buy twice the capacity on site 2!! We have over 1PB of backups, my boss was not happy when I told him this is Veeams Solution
2. You could have your primary backups in site 2!? We have over 50TB of daily change in our environment, to back this up over a WAN link for most would be a challenge within an 8hr backup Window. It would also require a complete design change and moving infrastructure and PB of data between locations. Not going to happen
I could solve this using other technologies such as storage replication, which requires expensive storage to solve ... Or my suggestion - make it so I can map to copy job chains! Why are they different anyway? It doesn't make sense and you lose important flexibility
I have a feature request created (PRT-208) but it seems to take a back seat to adding a lot of cloud and security features that aren't as important to our organisation than the ability to get through a DR event if we have one.
Feature Request: PRT-208 “map backup job to backup copy job data (BCJ to BJ)” - “short-term priority”
Am I really the only person in the universe to raise this concern/dilemma?? If there are others, please push your reps to have this raised as a priority.
Cheers,
Paul