Overall design of Veeam backup etc

[AlbieNorth]

Hi,

We've had Veeam 7 for over a year and the other IT guy in our company did a great job of just getting it up and running. I am now getting involved as we have to start testing how well it all works in a disaster situation. He and I have talked and I wonder if overall we have our setup designed right for our infrastructure and goals. I would like to get a few responses on "a good design" for what we are doing - even if it means starting over with our backups (we have critical data backed up via a backup appliance so we could to that). Here is our setup:

Primary site (Head office): 2 VMWare hosts, about 8 vm guests; data resides on a NetApp SAN

Offsite at data centre (DR site): 1 VM host, 3 vm's already running there (backup mail, a DC and an RDC server)

- a separate physical server at the DR data centre runs Veeam and has drives within it to hold Veeam backup data (about 14 backups using Forward incremental)

Objectives:

1) be able to spin up 3 to 4 of the VM backups backed up from the primary site if the head office was down entirely and we had to rely upon the DR site (don't need all 8 guests from the primary site as a few are already running at the DR site). Might also be just one of the vm guests if just one vm is down at the head office.

2) able to revert to a vm backup at the primary site if a vm there got corrupted i.e. hardware is not down at the primary site but we have to revert to a previous day's image because of a problem.

Current situation as it seems to me:

- should be able to spin up something at the DR site because the backup images are there; don't know how to do yet
- don't think we are in a good spot if we wanted to spin up a backup at the primary site as they all reside at the DR site and it would take a long time to stream it back
- I think this was all set up using the "basic" setup so from what I can tell, no backup proxies used; I know that the guy setting it up checked off to use WAN acceleration but not even sure that is working (I did not see anything in the job details to indicate if it was working or not)

So any suggestions on how we "should" be setting this up?

Thanks.

[meilicke]

A few questions:

What is your data retention policy?
What is your recovery time objective?
What is your recovery point objective?

These answers will drive how your infrastructure is setup, not just backups.

Another good step is to see who your local technical sales person is, and sit down with them to discuss a good strategy.

[foggy]

Considering your objectives, it would be reasonable to have local backups at primary site and use replication jobs (using replica from backup functionality, if you're going to upgrade to v8) to have ready-to-run replicas at the DR site for the case of primary site goes down. You can also have backup copy jobs replicating backups offsite for archival, depending on your RPO requirements.

And you definitely need proxies on both ends for optimal data transfer.