Move from SRM to B&R

[norelco]

Hello

I'm running SRM with vSphere Replication at the moment and I'm looking to start using Veeam B&R for backup. We want to keep our backups offsite but don't really want to double the traffic on the line between sites (SRM + Veeam traffic). I don't think we'll be able to backup the SRM replicas as they are not registered VMs in vCenter as live VMs until the recovery script is run. The sensible option seem to be to move to Veeam for both the replication and backup portions of the solution.

I don't want to have to do an initial sync of all the VMs to the DR site again. I see you can use a Veeam backup as an initial copy, but I don't see how we can do a backup if the SRM replicas aren't actually registered in the remote vCenter. Does anyone have any smart ideas? Will I actually need to run the SRM recovery script (or maybe do a test script) to get it registered and then back it up?

Hmm, I might have already answered my own question there. What does everyone else think?

N.

[foggy]

Hmm, I might have already answered my own question there.

Pretty much. Btw, you can map Veeam replication jobs right to the restored VMs (or use their backups as a seed).

Another option could be to backup the VMs locally and then move (probably physically, if that is the better option for you) the compressed and deduped backups offsite to use as the seed for both backup and replication jobs.

[norelco]

Actually we used the free VeeamZIP to do just that (creating backups to USB). Veeam filling in where the VMware supplied tools lack (although I understand the 5.1 version might be able to do this now). It took a while to get that done though because there was several TBs of data to shift and no IT people at the recovery site so copies were hand carried when someone was visiting.

I think I'll look at recovering the VMs with SRM and mapping the replication jobs straight to those then.

thanks!

[Gostev]

No, vSphere 5.1 has nothing comparable to VeeamZIP.