Help on DR site setup

[Eiktyrner]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to run my planned setup by you guys before buying just to see if I've missed anything or if I can improve on something.

I'm going for a setup like this one where I will have two sites with a 100MBit fiber between them (probably throttled a bit so it doesn't use up all our bandwidth)


I'm thinking of going with two Dell R520, one on each side, with about 8TB of usable space on each using local SAS or SATA disks.
I've already got VMWare essentials for 3 hosts and Veeam B&R for two sockets.

1. I will be running a windows AD and since it's recommended that you have two of them I'm thinking of running a VM on each server with that so it can fail over. For this Veeam shouldn't be needed right? It's all handled by AD if they are on the same domain?

2. The rest of the VMs are mostly linux servers running things like webservers. I was thinking I can just replicate these to the Site B and then use the failover function to run the replica. How do I trigger that if I'm at Site A, do I just login to the Veeam server running at Site B and do it from there?

3. Say that I have a site hosted on site A (http://www.example.com) and then my Site A goes down completely, what steps do I have to do to get it to point to the replica on Site B? I'm guessing I have to change the domain record since it still points at the external address of Site A? So that will take some time... Or am I missing something here? There must be a quicker way.

4. Is it okay to have two identical setups or do I need more space at B to handle the replication? Any overhead?
4b. I will have a local backup repository at Site A on a 10TB NAS.

Maybe there is a guide or some more documentation on this kind of setup somewhere? I'm guessing it's fairly common to do something similar.

Cheers,
Jacob

[dellock6]

Hi Jacob, your design sounds ok to me but yes missing a point, look at reply for point 2.
1- yes and no. Yes because AD offers you to have multiple controllers, so having one per site is a good design. No you still need to do backups, otherwise you will not be able to restore deleted objects or corrupted AD database
2- you only need one veeam server managing both sites. You can put it in Site B, and deploy an additional VM with proxy and repository roles in site A. In this way all jobs (both backups and replicas) are cohordinated by the same console. For further protection, run configuration backup in Veeam server at Site B and copy those backups in site A. If you loose site B, you can restore Veeam server on Site A
3- This is something out of the scope of Veeam, but I would say you also need to have redundant and distributed internet connectivity in order to re-route incoming traffic from one site to the other. I'm not a networking expert, but I would say you need to discuss this with your ISP, or even to have multiple ISPs
4- some more space on Site B is needed depending on the number of restore points you want to keep in replicas

Luca.