inital population for Veeam Backups?

[slidek9]

Hello,
As I am having some issues with bandwidth I would like to pre-populate my data at the DR site.

With the introduction of Forward incrementals and Synthetic Fulls, it is now possible to use Backup without having to run a 'Full Backup' once a month to cleanup.

Backup vs replication; the backup is much more efficient as it does inline de-duplication with other VMs, this equals less traffic on the line.

Now I can perform a 'inital replication' when doing a replica; but does anyone know of a method of performing a 'initial replication' of a backup job. I was thinking, run all the backups on the source site, then copy the backups to my NAS box and ship to the DR site, then migrate the Veeam VM (without the datastore) down to DR site and somehow putting it all back together and go live with incrementals.

Has anyone got a trick to do this (last time I tried I got child datastore errors in Veeam).

Thanks!

[slidek9]

Hiya,
Just incase anyone is in the same boat; I am working with the nice chaps from Veeam support:
I will update this when I find the best way to do it!

I have two solutions; please could you have a read though and let me know if they are feasible?
(If I cannot solve the bandwidth issue, I’ll bypass the problem!)

Source site = TGH
DR site = DR

Solution 1.

1. Create a Veeam server at TGH in VMWare.
2. Attach a M: drive via VMWare
3. Do a full backup of Virtual machines needed for DR to M: drive.
4. Copy the M: drive to NAS box, remove M: drive from server
5. Power down Veeam server
6. Physically Courier the NAS box to DR site (many TBs of data)
7. Migrate the Veeam VM to DR site and Power up
8. Create a new drive N:
9. Copy the contents of NAS box to N:
10. In Veeam repoint the backup job to N:
11. Kick the job off again and it will do a incremental (not a full)
12. Kickoff 2 or 3 more jobs to ensure that the line is being used 100%

Solution 2.

1. Create a Veeam server (SQL Express) at DR site
2. Shutdown Veeam services on DR Veeam box but leave SQL express running.
3. Create a Veeam server at TGH and connect it to the DR site Veeam SQL
4. Do a backup at TGH to a local disk
5. Copy local disk contents to NAS and ship to DR site
6. Shutdown the Veeam server at TGH
7. Startup the Veeam service on the Veeam box at DR site (will this connect in to SQL express and retrieve the metadata we created at TGH ok?)
8. Copy backup data off of NAS to drive on DR Veeam server, re-point the job to new drive.
9. Perform incremental job (but no full backup needed).
10. Kickoff another 2 jobs so we are using 100% of the bandwidth

[slidek9]

Ok, so I am trying to make progress for solution 2.

I have got as far as step 7. But there is an entry in the SQL somewhere that is telling it that the TGH server still has ownership of the database. Natch I do not want to uninstall the Veeam software on the DR PC as this may uninstall the database too. So I need to wade though the SQL DB and find the servername to change to re-point it to the other server. Not easy when you do not know SQL!

[Bunce]

its a registry setting from memory. should be able to find it via a search off my posts.

[Gostev]

SqlLockInfo