Strategy check for new installation

[lwhitworth]

Hi all,

I'm very new to Veeam and am setting up our backup and replication jobs, and would just appreciate a quick check that I've got the right jobs set up for what I'm hoping to achieve.

In terms of the vSphere side of things, I've got three hosts and a Dell SAN, and that's what's running all VMs. In another building I've got a fourth host with a ton of disk space which runs vSphere standard, and in that is a VM with Veeam on it.

I've got one backup job (set to keep 14 restore points) that runs every hour to backup all VMs to a large drive on the Veeam VM.

I've also got three replication jobs (one for each datastore in the production environment) that's set to keep 1 restore point that replicates to three datastores on the fourth host. Again this (at present) runs every hour.

Now as far as my reckoning goes, if we were to ever lose the main site, I could just turn on the replicas on the fourth host in vSphere and at most I'd have lost an hour. The backups are there so that if anyone does anything silly and I need to recover a file etc. I can do that from one of the fourteen points. Once I'm sure of how much space I need for the backups I'm going to either increase the number of restore points/decrease the frequency of backups so that I can hopefully keep upwards of a fortnights worth.

Does this sound about right for my objectives???

Thanks in advance!

Luke

[foggy]

Luke, your approach looks quite reasonable. The only thing I would mention, you could setup additional Veeam server for your backup jobs on the source side to get most of the fast source data retrieval from your SAN. Thanks.

[lwhitworth]

Cheers foggy. Would there be a licensing implication for the second instance of Veeam server on the additional server?

[foggy]

No, Veeam B&R is licensed per host socket so you can add a second Veeam server using the same license.

[lwhitworth]

Awesome. So in this scenario, I would create a new vm running Veeam B&R to do the actual backups, and then I would assume set up a copy job or similar to move the files from the production site to the DR site once in a while?

[foggy]

You can set the DR site as a backup target if you need not backups to be kept in both locations.

[Vitaliy S.]

My 2cents - you can create local backups and then sync those files with your offsite location via rsync or any other way. Please search this forum for more ideas on offsite backup approaches.

[lwhitworth]

Thanks very much for your suggestions gentlemen. I ended up creating a new veeam instance in the production network and pointing the backups to a shared folder on a vm in the dr site and it's working much faster than previously. One very happy customer!

[Gostev]

Afraid you will have extremely bad synthetic fulls performance this way, too much traffic would have to go over WAN. You may want to use agent-enabled "smart" target in remote site (Linux) for it to do full backup processing locally instead of over WAN. v6 will also support Windows-based agent-enabled smart repositories.

[lwhitworth]

Ah cheers Gostev. I'll live with it for now and look forward to the boost it'll get once I upgrade to v6