Replication every 15 minutes

[jbrullemans]

Is it possible with Veeam to create every 15 minutes a replication and is that normal to do it like this?
What we want to achieve is that we have an almost up 2 date standy server park if anything goes wrong. Or are the better ways of doing that. It contains an file server, exchange server and 2 DC and 2 Application machine's.

[foggy]

John, it is ok to run replication every 15 minutes with Veeam B&R. You can even specify to run replication "continuously" in the job settings meaning that the next job run will be started just after the previous one is complete, thus maintaining your servers in the most recent state.

[jbrullemans]

Doesn't this impact our servers very much? And what about the normal backup jobs we have. To backup the VM to a network share. Can this still be run with also replication. We sometimes need file level restore.

[foggy]

Well, if you are going to combine both backup and replication then keep in mind that they cannot run at the same time and you should set them on separate schedules.
Regarding the performance impact, it depends on different factors such as number of changes produced by your VMs, jobs settings, and also whether your Veeam server is physical or virtual. Of course, Veeam B&R set up on a VM impacts overall host's performance while there is no overhead on the host if you use physical backup server with direct SAN access processing mode. Normally there is a performance impact during snapshot removal, but in case of near-continuous replication, there will not be a huge overhead as job finishes fast due to little changes produced by VM since previous job run and snapshot does not grow much and can be deleted very quickly.

[tsightler]

Well, you have to be careful with this. Even having a snapshot open has some impact on VM performance with regards to I/O, although this varies tremendously based on the storage capability and hardware integration level (VAAI). Not only that, but this customer asked about 6 servers. Having one VM with a snapshot has some impact, having 6 VM's with a snapshot would be worse.

I've seen customers attempt to replicate 6 VM's with 6 separate jobs all on "continuous". This means six open snapshots at the same time, and things can get ugly quite quickly.

Assuming you put all six VM's in a single job, and set it for 15 minutes, and unless your Exchange server is very busy, I'd guess you'd probably be fine and not really notice the impact. On the other had, if your Exchange server has 1000 busy users hammering away at it, well, I've seen snapshots grow faster than VMware can remove them. So it's all dependent on your environment. Basically, you have to have enough performance overhead in your systems to support the impact that RPO that you select will create.

[Gostev]

Similar topic about replicating even more often > Replicating continuously

[davegold]

Hi,

I was wondering if it possible to run backups or replication every 5 minutes?

I'm thinking that the 'startup' time for VSS and VMware snapshots could take that long, and the deletion of the snapshot could take that long, if it is a busy system.

I'm thinking every 15-30 minutes is reasonable, but 5 minutes isn't really something Veeam Backup was designed for.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Dave

[corp_jones]

Hi Guys

We have 2 ESXi servers with around 2 and half TB local storage, 1 server is for running all the live VM's (around 4) whereas the other ESXi host just runs a VM with Veeam with the intention to do nightly backups and continuous replication, when I selected continuous replication in our tests however it looks like it repeatedly creates snapshots, my concern is its going to impact performance a lot..

Has anyone used continuous replication and have any recommendations/advice?

Advice would be much appreciated!