Offsite Backup and Replication to NAS?

[billygareth]

Hi Folks,
New to Veeam (trialling it at the moment). Have been with Altaro for years but I am starting to see holes in it so looking for alternatives.

This is my situation:
1. I have about 25 Vm servers across my client sites that need coverage and also a handful of workstations and physical servers
2. I need to be able to have two backup locations and two instant restore points for each client:
a. Onsite location (at client premises) usually a NAS
b. Offsite location in the same town (Not cloud)
3. Need to be able to spin up a virtual copy of the vms at either location at a moment notice. So if a client premise burns down I can have their server running at the offsite location within minutes/hours
4. Offsite location will be a NAS unit located in the same town but at a different premises (Currently using Altaro Offsite server running on a Win PC connected to an ISCSI LUN on a NAS)
5. Need to be able to manage all devices from one pane of glass
6. Need to be able to auto generate monthly backup reports for the clients (transparency)

Cloud recover from AWS etc I s not an option due to the slow and unreliable internet in our area. I need to be able to have the devices backed up to a location nearby where if required I can recover the device as both a virtual and physical.

I have installed Veeam Community Edition to trial and all seems straightforward for local backups but can't for the life of me find how to setup an external location that isn't cloud or a service. In altaro I specific the IP address, open the ports and put the account info in and Bingo. Still need to do seeds but easy to connect to the offsite location. I can't see anything like that in Veeam Backup Repository setup screen but then maybe I am looking in the wrong place as this is a different program.

Can someone educate this potential convert is how to set this configuration up or advise if I am going about it the wrong way completely and there is another way?

I am liking what I am seeing so far with Veeam but need to know that it will do what I am after in a cost effective and management way.

Thanks

Billy

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

1) you need a repository (iSCSI with REFS and Server 2016 or newer preferred) on the target location. You need some Windows machine at the target.
2) add that server as managed server
3) use the backup copy job to copy the backups

If bandwidth is low, then you can use the wan accelerator

I also like to recommend the quick start guide for evaluation: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... arted.html

Best regards,
Hannes

[billygareth]

Thank you. I appreciate the assistance. The other big question (and the main reason for moving on from Altaro ) is that Altaro replication requires the same version of windows hypervisor at the offsite end as is in use at the client end. I have no problem with having a vmware and Hyper-V recovery environment at the recovery end but as I have hyper-v hosts from 2012, 2012r2, 2016 and 2019 at client sites so I would need to have a recovery environment built with each version at the recovery end. This is not practical.
Is Veeam able to manage this with just a 1 x vmware and 1 x Hyper-v recovery environment at the offsite/replication end?

Thanks

[veremin]

As far as I remember, you should be able to replicate to target host running higher Hyper-V version - so, having 2019 server at target site should be enough.

The same - for ESXi, as long as both source and target hosts support VM hardware version.

Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
I'm not sure whether everyone is talking about the same here. Please keep in mind that Veeam replication is something completely different than "replication" in most other products (don't know Altaro). What most products call "replication" is a "backup copy" at Veeam

I don't see why anyone needs a hypervisor at the destination for the copy of a backup.

For restore: it depends... for today we have the following situation
- Hyper-V backup must me restored at a Hyper-V (restore host must be compatible with virtual hardware. in general, restore to newer version works)
- VMware backup must me restored at a VMware (restore host must be compatible with virtual hardware. in general, restore to newer version works)
- physical Windows can be instant recovered to Hyper-V

additionally for the future (V10)
- Hyper-V, Windows agents and Linux agent backups can be instant recovered to VMware

Best regards,
Hannes