Replication for DR design

[DavidrBrace]

Hi,

I'm looking to put replicated copies of a small VM environment to a single off site server.
Setup as follows:
2x physical hosts connected to a HP MSA2300 series iSCSI array.
1x physical veeam 6.5 server connected to the same array
On this setup there are 11 VMs totaling 1.4TB of used disk, average nightly change is 30GB with 8GB of that transferred after de-dupe & compression. With the nightly backup completing in an average of 55min.
Two sites are linked by a 20Mb un-contented private link

A couple of questions:
1) Can I stick a single server running VMware hypervisor at the remote site and put a veeam proxy in a VM to handle the incoming data?
2) As always cost is a concern so I'm looking at using a server with 12 1TB 7.2k rpm nearline sas drives in a RAID10 array to hold the data. Is this going to provide enough performance to handle the replications considering the backup proxy will also be on there or would I be better off adding an additional pair of disks in a R1 set to hold the backup proxy?
3) Does the replication target need veeam licensing?
4) Finally have I missed any thing glaringly obvious in this setup?

Thanks in advance.

[veremin]

Yes, you can. In case of the offsite replication it’s strongly recommended to have one Veeam proxy running in the production site (closer to the source host), and another one in the remote DR site (closer to the target host).

Additionally, it might be worth to put into use replica seeding functionality, that allows you to reduce initial traffic sent over WAN or slow connections. If backup of your VM has been already taken, it can be moved to the DR site via simple external disk, imported and used as a “seed” for replication job afterwards. In this case, first replica will be incremental, instead of full. More information can be found in the corresponding User Guide. (p. 48)

As it’s mentioned in this sticky FAQ, there is no need to licence replication target host.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[DavidrBrace]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I will check out the user guide. I have speed read it but must have skipped over the bit about seeding.

As for the proxy role close to the source, can the role be installed on the existing Veeam server? I don't really want to (read don't have to money to) put any more boxes at site. The replication jobs would be set to run after the normal backups.

[veremin]

Yes, the role of source proxy can be played by Veeam Server itself.

However, you need to be sure that it’s able to cope with such routine.

According to the best practise, proxy resources should be as the following:

Ram : 2GB + 2GB*Concurrent Job
(v)CPU : 2*Concurrent Job

Moreover, if your proxy is used at the same time by multiple jobs and you want to regulate it, just specify the maximum number of concurrent tasks per proxy. If this value is exceeded, the backup proxy will not start a new task until one of the current tasks is finished.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.