Question about Veeam and our Potential DR Setup

[ITMIDCITY]

Hi guys, We've been using Veeam for over a year now and it has performed great for our virtual backups. We are begining to move towards setting up a DR location and I have a couple questions a long with a confirmation that the way i'm going about this is correct. We have vsphere essentials plus here at the "Home" location with 3 hosts. We have a physical backup server that runs both veeam and backup exec (for tape and the few phisical servers we have left). It is looking like our "DR" location will have an HP server with 12tb of space that I will put freenas on and set up as an iscsi san and then also have one vmware esxi host on another box. Obviously this won't be the fastest setup in the world, but we have to start somewhere and the only way we will go to this is if our Home location gets blown off the map. I have tried simple rsync to move over the vbr and vbk files and have found that it moves to much data for the current pipe to handle. I have since moved on to testing veeam replication. I found out right away that you can't use esxi 5.0 free on the host in the DR location. So currently I am running a trial for testing, and we will look at getting vsphere essentials for that location. I currently have veeam free set up on the DR host on a windows server. Here's my question (sorry wanted to give sufficient background), can we move our current essentials plus veeam licensing over to this box if we lose our servers here. Is there a way to test bringing up a replicated server in the free veeam version for testing without using the veeam server on our backup server at the home location? My guess is we will need to look at another license, but I wanted to get confirmation and see if there is an area where I am completely missing the boat.

Thanks in advance for any help or guidance you can provide.

[dellock6]

Hi, you first talked about free ESXi licenses, then about free Veeam. I'm confused, which one is in free mode? Because Veeam is licendes per "source" socket, so you can even use free ESXi at destination of the replica. For sure you cannot add then into vcenter as a 4th server, but keep it isolated and it works. Hope I understood correctly your question.

Luca.

[Vitaliy S.]

can we move our current essentials plus veeam licensing over to this box if we lose our servers here.

Yes.

Is there a way to test bringing up a replicated server in the free veeam version for testing without using the veeam server on our backup server at the home location?

Veeam B&R free allows you to create ad-hoc backups only, there are no replication jobs available in this version. However since you only need to license source ESX(i) servers to run Veeam B&R, you can re-use the same license file on your DR site (assuming you will be adding the same hosts to the Veeam backup console).

[J1mbo]

Because Veeam is licendes per "source" socket, so you can even use free ESXi at destination of the replica.

I might be misunderstanding, but surely the target hosts would require a paid-for VMware license, otherwise the target hosts would report "restricted version" fault when Veeam tried to create any object (like a VM). That said, VMware Essentials provides 3 hosts, 6 sockets, and unlimited vRAM (for 5.1) for only $500.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi James,

Yes, you're right. You need to have a paid license on your target hosts, see this topic for further details: Veeam with vSphere 5 Hypervisor (e.g. free ESXi) works..

Thanks!

[dellock6]

Whoa, sorry mates, still under heavy jet lag, need to re-read my posts before hitting submit...

[ITMIDCITY]

Veeam B&R free allows you to create ad-hoc backups only, there are no replication jobs available in this version. However since you only need to license source ESX(i) servers to run Veeam B&R, you can re-use the same license file on your DR site (assuming you will be adding the same hosts to the Veeam backup console).

Ok, Thanks for this. Let me take this one step further. Hopefully this makes sense and if not I can clarify. We have a subnet that is for backup traffic from our location to the dr location. I have our current veeam server (a physical) sending all our backups across that to our dr server with the veeam free on it (in essence a proxy right now). This dr server can only see the production hosts and the home location via the home veeam server. The replicated VM's will sit on storage at the dr location. I ran this over the weekend with one virtual server (running the esxi trial on the dr host so replication will work). The replica is showing up in the list of machines on the DR esxi host. Since our veeam is a physical and in the case of a disaster lets say I lose it. Just from the dr esxi I can bring up each virtual server, then transfer the veeam license, but I would lose any visibility as to what had happened if I needed to move them back to the physical is that correct? So I'm looking like we would need to virtualize this to get that functionality and keep it aware that it has moved? Hopefully I am clear enough as I'm trying to hash through it myself.

[foggy]

Yes, you can either virtualize the Veeam B&R and replicate it along with other VMs or just set it up in the DR location and pull replicate the VMs from the source site. In the latter case, you will be able to use Veeam B&R failover/failback functionality in case of disaster.

[ITMIDCITY]

Foggy,

We have the Veeam Server on the physical box hooked into our SAN to do backups straight off the san. If I moved our Veeam Server to our DR Location I could still accomplish this it would just be done through a proxy on that physical box is that correct?

Thanks again for all your help guys.

[foggy]

Yes, you can set up the backup server itself at the DR site and add your physical box as a source proxy server.