Pulling Replica to DR Site

[Nick_Barriga]

Hi All,

I need a solution that allows me to pull replicas down to a DR site as opposed to pushing them up. Currently I have a single Veeam Server at the primary site and a single Veeam server at the DR site. The primary site Veeam server is already responsible for handling local backup jobs, local backup copy jobs and backup copy jobs to the DR site. The servers are all running VMWare hypervisor.

My preference is to directly replicate to the DR site (not replicate from backups etc.) and I would like the DR site Veeam server to handle this so that we can leverage Surebackup jobs etc. I would like to ensure that no jobs are running at the primary site when the replication runs and also that there are no Veeam snapshots on the VM;s when the replication jobs start. I have read that there are scripts etc. that could be leveraged but I have not been able to find the scripts or any suitable solution on the forums. If there is a cleaner method that does not involve the use of scripts that would also be preferred.

I have raised a ticet with Veeam technical support but unfortunately found that they were not able to assist me.

Thanks all for your help.

[veremin]

Basically, there are two options to meet your requirements:

- Control everything from a single backup console (either local or remote one)
- Distribute workloads between two backup consoles. In this case you will have to guarantee that no job overlap occurs. You can achieve this by working on backup and replication jobs schedules or by adding pre-job scripts to replication jobs (execute replication job only when no backup jobs are running)

Thanks.

[chjones]

What I used to do ( at my previous employer) was to run Veeam at the primary datacentre inside a VMware VM. I used an external MSSQL Database Server. What I would do is use Veeam to replicate the Veeam VM and it's Database Server VM to my DR site every day (or you can increase the frequency if desired). I used to configure the backup job that included the Veeam and DB VMs to start the replication jobs upon completion.

If your primary site goes down you just need to power on the Veeam and DB VMs and Veeam is back up. If you can still see your repositories you can rescan them and see all the new restore points since the last replication.

If you want to go even further you can use SQL Always-On or SQL Log Shipping/Replication for the Veeam DB Server so when you power on at the DR site, Veeam will connect to the replicated database and already be up to date with any jobs that were run after the last replication.

If you use backup copy jobs or other VM replications then you can recover from those at your DR site immediately after powering on the Veeam replica.

This worked very well for me in the past.

For extra protection you could also use storage replication to replicate your backup repository (I know Veeam don't recommend this), but if you do this as a secondary copy along with Backup Copy and Replication jobs managed by Veeam, you have extra protection. All you need to do is power on your Veeam and DB replicas, add the replicated repository and Veeam will scan it for all restore points, then restore whatever you need.

There are a number of ways to approach this.

[Nick_Barriga]

Basically, there are two options to meet your requirements:

- Control everything from a single backup console (either local or remote one)
- Distribute workloads between two backup consoles. In this case you will have to guarantee that no job overlap occurs. You can achieve this by working on backup and replication jobs schedules or by adding pre-job scripts to replication jobs (execute replication job only when no backup jobs are running)

Thanks.

Thanks for the response.

Is there anywhere where I can obtain some sample scripts?

[veremin]

Check both general forum and PowerShell subforum; this matter has been discussed before, so there must be some examples available.

The algorithm should look like this:

1. Establish connection from remote backup server to local backup server, using Connect-VBRServer cmdlet
2. Get a backup job, using Get-VBRJob cmdlet
3. Check the job state, using its .GetLastState() method
4. Execute a replication job, in case the state != "Running"
5. Otherwise (state == Running), pause a script and start everything from step 3

Thanks.