Offsite replication and recovery question

[darkhelmet]

Hi al, I have a question regarding a setup that I would like to advise to a customer. It goes like this:

Customer office (hardware allready present)
VMware vSphere 4 with 3 hosts
Dell Equalogic SAN
Backupserver with lots of SATA disks with Veeam
|
9,2Mbit WAN link
|
datacenter (to be bought)
VMware vSphere on a single host with local storage
2x Xeon
24GB RAM
8x 1TB SATA
Veeam in appliance mode (as a VM)

Backing up locally to the backupserver and then replicating to the datacenter. The idea is that this way one has an offsite backup and restore solution with just one server.

Is this doable?
Is recovering on the same single ESX host a realistic option?

Note: Yes they have an EQ with 3 nodes now, but the load is light. Super performance is not expected by the customer when recovering from a disaster, they mainly want to have access to their data. It's just hanging on until the main setup is delivered/restored. We will do a proof of concept with the chosen setup at the customer site with an emulated WAN link to see of all daily changed data can be replicated every night.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Bas,

Yes, this is one of the most commonly used setups for our customers these days. Making backups onsite for DR purposes and doing replicas offsite for HA, this will insure you have a minimum downtime for your mission-critical servers.

As regards to what backup mode to choose, I would recommend to stick to vStorage-API SAN mode on customer's site, assuming that you have a direct SAN connection to the backup server.

Also please note that Virtual Appliance mode requires disks of a backed up VM to be located on a storage accessible by the ESX host on which the VM with Veeam Backup & Replication is running, so I would choose either vStorage API - Network mode on the DR site (Datacenter) or use the same backup server located on Customer's site to perform replication jobs.

Thank you!

[darkhelmet]

Thank you Vitaliy for your fast reply.

The last bit I dont fully understand though:

so I would choose either vStorage API - Network mode on the DR site (Datacenter) or use the same backup server located on Customer's site to perform replication jobs.

There will be an open tunnel between the customer site and the datacenter, but it will be a slow link. SO opening VMs over this link is probably not a good idea.
I looked up in the user guide, but I cant see exactly what the difference is with both options you mentioned. COuld you please elaborate?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I was trying to say that provided you want to install Veeam Backup and Replication server on the DR site (Datacenter), I would choose vStorage API - Network job mode to replicate VMs from main site (Customer's).

On the other hand, if you're going to use just one Veeam Backup installation on the main site (Customer's), I would recommend to use either vStorage API - SAN mode or Virtual Appliance to get best performance for the jobs.

You may want to refer to User Guide (pages 10-11) for more information on the data flow process during backup/replication jobs.

Hope it helps!

[darkhelmet]

I would prefer to have Veeam on both the customer site and datacenter. So data is on both sites and is replicated between them.

[st0623]

If you have any issues with the network between your sites. Pretty much the standard considerations, distance/latency, packet loss, compressibility of the data. Consider HyperIP to accelerate the replication portion of the traffic. How much data is being moved?

You can test it your POC config over the simulator, for free. check out www.netex.com.