Replication / CDP design questions

[BigK2009]

Hello,

We are looking at using the veeam backup and replication as a disaster recovery solution for our VMs. So far, I've been able to understand mostly everything that I need. The only question/confusion that I have is on which backup type to use. In the veeam backup 4_1 user guide, it says that it recommends that if the ESX hosts are using shared stoage, the VM data is retried directly from the FC using vStorageAPI.

Question #1 - How does the Veeam server tie into the ESX datastores? Is it the datastores that have the VMs are actually zoned to the Veeam backup server to that the Veeam server has direct access? I've always been a little hesitant in letting a Windows Box touch Linux data.

Question#2 - We would like to replicate the VMs the production to the Disaster site. Would using the vStorage with Network be the best option? Question#1 may factor into this depending on the answer.

Question#3 - I read a few places that people had some issues with orphaned snapshot records leftover using the Virtual applicance option. Is the Virtual appliance a good option for what I'm looking for (replication)?

Question#4 - What is the best way to handle having Veeam backup servers at both sites? For instance, if the Production site died, we would need to already have a veeam backup server at the DR site ready to go to start turning up the replicated VMs. It would be nice if both sites could have all the job information, settings, etc...

Note: We have all Vsphere 4.1 Servers. Our production site has shared storage. Our Disaster site has shared storage also. The production site servers cannot access the shared storage at the disaster site and the other way around applies also.

Thanks...I appreciate any feedback.

[Gostev]

Hi Kris,

Welcome to our forums. Please note that you can find answers to a lot of questions you may have faster by just searching this forum. Trust me - 99% of all possible questions were already asked and answered on these forums for the past years

#1. Yes, you are right. Please review sticky FAQ topic for more information on direct SAN access mode. And there are existing topics discussing safety concerns of providing Windows server with ability to see VMFS volumes that you may refer to. In short, there is nothing to worry about.

#2. Replication is always done over the network. Source data retrieval method does not affect this, so you can choose whatever works best for you.

#3. These are old topics, the issue is now resolved, so you can use this mode if you want to. If you have FC SAN and your Veeam server is a VM, this would be the best processing mode in terms of performance.

#4. One option is to replicate SQL server database using native SQL replication, and point DR Backup installation to this database. Again, there are existing discussions about that too, so you may want to search to see what other users have implemented.

Thanks!