Replicate VBR to Secondary Site

[EvoGeek]

Has anyone thought about or explored this idea?

Primary site has a dedicated backup box. Box is running Windows 2019 with Hyper-V and VBR installed on host.

A guest Windows 2019 is installed and also running VBR.

Your guest machine is where your backups go.

Your host machine replicates the guest to the secondary site.

Now you have a copy of your VBR guest server at the DR location on a hypervisor ready to instant recovery from.

Pros:
Eliminates any need to do a backup copy and replication
Data retention is mirrored at both locations
Keep all storage savings from ReFS at both locations
Onsite backup box could be replaced if it failed
Can track both in VAC
One less step than a warm spare VBR

Cons:
DR site might not want to store as much older backup, just latest for disaster

Thoughts?

[PetrM]

Hello!

I'd recommend to use the single VBR server which can be installed on DR site. There are 2 possible options:
1) This server can manage both primary backup jobs and backup copy jobs to DR.
Backup copy job proposes flexible and automated way of copying data to a secondary storage and decreases an amount of data to transfer: it copies only backup file data instead of processing the whole server. By the way, all REFS advantages are still available in this scenario as well.

2) This server manages primary backup jobs and replication from backup to DR

The setup with 2 VBR servers doesn't seem to be reliable enough because of the following reasons:
1) Storing backups on a virtual disk creates an additional abstraction layer which potentially could affect RTO (read performance might be affected during restore in some cases) and the setup of an additional dedicated VM on DR becomes mandatory in order to be able to read data on a virtual disk
2) You have to setup the second VBR which has the only role to replicate the first one so you have one extra VBR server instance
3) Not sure about DRP if the VBR replica becomes corrupted by some reason

Thanks!