Feature Request: Restore Plan

[k00laid]

Hello All, I'm currently working on a formalized DR plan for my organization and had the thought of extending the general idea of a failover plan to a restore plan. Would it be possible to be able to go through and logically group sets of VMs from their backups so that if need be all I have to do is right click and say "start to..." (much like a virtual lab/application group) and all of the restore options are already preselected?

From a DR perspective this would lead to greater efficiency in a disaster and also make it easier to deal with if IS resources aren't available when a restoration has to happen.

[Alec King]

Great question, thanks Jim! We're always looking for ways to help our customers recover faster - that's what Availability for the Modern Datacenter is all about, right?

Could you share some more details of your DR architecture, what infrastructure is already in place? (vCenter? Domain controller(s)? etc). How are the DR hosts and storage configured?

And how would you like to use restores? In combination with replicas? Do you want to 'tier' how you bring the DR site online (replicas for critical VMs, restore for less-critical)? Where are your backups stored now? (are you using Backup Copy to send backups to the DR site?)

Thanks
Alec

[k00laid]

Hi Alec,
Our architecture is something that is actually something that is a bit of in flux, but essentially we have a prod site and a dr site with vSphere based resources in each necessary to run what is needed. Our vCenter is already virtualized and I'm going to shortly be moving the "head" of our B&R infrastructure from a physical box to a virtual server leaving me with a virtual B&R server, one prod side Windows based respository and 2 DR side Windows based repositories.

Once Veeam is virtualized my plan is to replicate both the Veeam server and vCenter between the locations nightly and then have backups of each of my other systems done locally and then backup copied nightly to DR. I would very much so like to tier how systems are brought online as my DR plan is already breaking systems into various buckets based on priority. What would be really neat would be to have a resources check in between each of the groups to ensure that enough virtualization resources are available before starting up the next group, kind of like backup QoS.

[Alec King]

Thanks Jim,

So you will only use replication for the vCenter, and the Veeam B&R server, and all other VMs will be backups? Have you considered using replication for some other critical VMs? You could then create several Failover Groups in B&R to meet various DR scenarios and the priority buckets you require.

[k00laid]

My rationale for this is that I have finite storage available. I have a great deal of slower storage for backup, but I don't want to be tying up production or near production grade storage with multiple restore points of replicas for the vast majority of my virtualized load. Sure it makes sense that maybe the 1st tier of VMs be that way, but I don't want all of them.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for your use case, it's a good reading indeed. Do you have anything in mind if the entire site goes down? Any runbook or documented steps of what should be done first?