SureReplica in the cloud

[benwaynet]

I want to be able to bring up most of my environment in a sandbox with veeam, but I don't have enough resources. Has anyone or is it even possible to replicate veeam to a cloud provider and use their resources for sandboxes?

jb

[Vitaliy S.]

If your cloud provider offers virtual infrastructure, where you can host your VMs and not only store your backup files, then I don't see any reasons why it shouldn't work. Spin up a Veeam B&R server, copy/move your backup repository to the cloud and then use it to run verification tests against the backed up VMs.

[benwaynet]

Wondering if anyone has done this?
We currently don't use any cloud server, just a few basic services.

thanks,jb

[dellock6]

Hi, it's really hard to do unless the cloud provider gives you dedicated ESXi hosts or vCenter, because Veeam needs to connect to these kind of objects. But since they are shared among many customers, usually a CSP does not give you access to those resources, even playing a bit with permissions on vCenter...

Luca.

[benwaynet]

that's what I was afraid of
We could use our own vCenter if we had a VPN between us, but I was hoping to figureout a why using common cloud vms
guess the cloud just isn't ready for DR/Sandboxes yet.

jb

[andersonts]

There are actually many providers providing replication to their cloud today so I wouldn't give up on this as a viable option. Many of the partners I support in my territory offer this as a service today. There is certainly some setup involved and security to be discussed but it can and is being done.

[dellock6]

Tim,
thanks for the information. Will you be albe to explain how those providers have configured their own vSphere infrastructure to allow for replicas towards them, while guaranteing multy-tenancy? I'm really interested in it.

Luca.

[tsightler]

Most "Cloud Replication" using Veeam falls into one of three categories:

1. Service provider gives customers access to one or more nested ESXi host(s) that become part of the customers environments. This typically works fine for replicating in and failover. There's usually some manual or automated process to move the VMs into the "real" cloud environment in the event of a failover.

2. Service provider dedicates one or more physical ESXi hosts for the customer which allows customer to run some loads themselves, and generally provides an option to move VMs into their cloud infrastructure for long-term failover.

3. Service provider manages the Veeam server and adds the customers environment to it, then provides access to monitoring and failover functions via their custom portal.

Here's a great blog post that discusses option #1:

http://blog.cnidus.net/2012/05/20/multi ... on-target/

A Google search for "Veeam DR Cloud Provider" will turn up quite a few providers that offer both options 1 and 2 including some diagrams of the concept.

[andersonts]

From my area Tom's number 3 is probably the most common...this allows for the MSP to bring multiple customers into a smaller pool of shared resources as most customers don't want to pay for dedicated resources.

[dellock6]

Ah ok, I was thinking about new methods of using it... Option 1 is something I've seen too in the past, from ZettaGrid for example, but it always sound to me too much complicated and almost impossible to manage at large scale in a Cloud Provider.
Definely number 3 is right now the best option, and we did it too, but is something different than what we where talking about, it basically means using CSP internal licenses, install some proxies at customer site, and then manage and run all the operations, giving customer only access to reports and some restores from the enteprise manager.

Luca.