Replication Snapshots, Limit Number Per Day? Feature Request

[cgsm]

I have a replication job that I run to move our data from an HQ site to a DR site every 12 hours. I have set up "Restore points to keep" to keep 14 snapshots, which at the current job setting, keeps 2 snapshots per day.

I would like to increase the replication frequency (every 3 hours or better) to reduce our RPO but still keep 7 days worth of snapshots (in case of ransomware, something broke, lost file, etc.). I can set the "Restore points to keep" to the max of 28 snapshots, but at 3 hour replication intervals that only gets me 3 full days of snapshots. Plus, managing 28 snapshots is just messy and I'm sure impacts performance.

vSphere Replication has a setting that allows for something along the lines of "keep 1 snapshot per day for the last 7 days". Is this possible with Veeam?

[PetrM]

Hello,

Today, you cannot specify retention in days for replication jobs, only in restore points. However, I'd say it's hard to predict the level of performance impact depending on number of snapshots. From my perspective, it's worth testing in every single case. By the way, this technical paper provides some interesting results of performance change depending on snapshots number.

Also, did you consider CDP policy as an alternative? You can define the number of long-term restore points to keep in days.

Thanks!

[cgsm]

I cannot use CDP as I am using a VMware Essentials (Plus) license.

I find it odd you cannot specify the recovery point in days. It almost makes it seem like Veeam does not recommend running a replication job too often, which is odd, since replication should be used for shorter RPO and RTO targets in my mind.

[Gostev]

I find it odd you cannot specify the recovery point in days.

vSphere only supports maximum 32 snapshots per VM, which is why we don't allow to specify retention in days for classic replication, as we can never guarantee it will be met if the max number of snapshots is exceeded for whatever reason.

It almost makes it seem like Veeam does not recommend running a replication job too often, which is odd, since replication should be used for shorter RPO and RTO targets in my mind.

You're correct in that replication should be used for shorter RTO targets, and this is exactly what Veeam replication does provide as it allows you to just power on the replica VM to any restore point instantly, and RTOs don't get better than that. For shorter RPO targets however, we recommend using near-continuous replication aka Veeam CDP.