Local and DR side Veeam servers, can one be the backup proxy

[k00laid]

Hello, finally doing the v6 upgrade here and had a question. In our scenario we have two Veeam servers, on local to the ESX hosts and one at our DR site, each running jobs nightly. As I understand the new architecture, with a Veeam server that is across the WAN from the target you deploy a backup proxy at the site with the targets. Can I have my local onsite Veeam server act as the backup proxy for my offsite Veeam server? If not, which is best case scenario, running this on a VM or a physical server?

[gvinpin]

I do not see why not.
2 Veeam servers can be a proxy to each other.
You will have to create a job on a different server, thou.

[Vitaliy S.]

You cannot share the same proxy servers between different backup servers.

Given the description of your initial configuration I would recommend to install backup proxy on a VM for each site, however with new architecture there is no need to have two backup servers at all. In other words, you can keep a single backup server at the main site, and deploy as many proxies (data movers) and backup repositories as you need.

[k00laid]

I would love to do all my backups from one server, the only issue we would have with it at this point is getting the backups imported to the offsite Veeam server for backup testing and restoration. We go through monthly and test each backup job with human interaction to run reports. Is there a way though powershell to script importing the backups?

[Vitaliy S.]

Like this - Powershell command to import backups?

[ThomasMc]

v6 makes it a little easier with the new design:

Code: Select all

$reposvr = Get-VBRServer -Name "MyRepoServer"
Add-VBRBackupRepository -Name "Repo DR Side" -Server $reposvr -MountServer $reposvr -Folder "E:\Backups" -Type "WinLocal" -ImportIndex -ImportBackup

Although I'm still not following why you need another Veeam server to test on the DR side, setup your Lab on the DR side and enable the NFS server on the DR side Repo and fire off a surebackup test

[k00laid]

v6 makes it a little easier with the new design:

Code: Select all

$reposvr = Get-VBRServer -Name "MyRepoServer"
Add-VBRBackupRepository -Name "Repo DR Side" -Server $reposvr -MountServer $reposvr -Folder "E:\Backups" -Type "WinLocal" -ImportIndex -ImportBackup

Although I'm still not following why you need another Veeam server to test on the DR side, setup your Lab on the DR side and enable the NFS server on the DR side Repo and fire off a surebackup test

Thank you for the code sample.

I guess it would be more of a what happens that you need to DR site scenario. If HQ burned to the ground or was unaccessible, you couldn't kick off a recovery that way could you?

[foggy]

Jim, if I'm getting your case right, you can have a second Veeam server in your DR site for the case of HQ disaster, but you still can test your backups using your production Veeam server without the need to import backups every time.

[vertices]

[merged]

Can 2 separate Veeam servers, each with their own jobs, each in different sites, point to each other as proxies?

Site 1 has a Veeam server doing backups. Site 2 has a Veeam server pulling replications from Site 1. Can this Veeam server in Site 2 point to the Veeam server in Site 1 as a proxy? It appears to let us do this. So the Veeam server in Site 1 is essentially a proxy for it's own backup jobs, but also a proxy for the Veeam server in site 2 to optimize replication jobs.

Is this ok to do? Thanks.

[tsightler]

While this will probably technically work, it is not supported and there can be unintended consequences from sharing proxies. Each Veeam server assumes it has exclusive ownership of the proxy and there can definitely be issues since one server will not be aware of which disks are hotadded to the proxy by the other server. Thus one server may attempt to backup and/or replicate drives that are temporarily attached to the proxy by the other server.

Sharing of Windows proxies and repositories between servers is not supported, each server needs to have it's own infrastructure. While it might appear to work, it's very likely to break somewhere down the line in unexpected ways. You can share a linux repository with multiple Veeam servers however.