Switching to Cloud Edition

[Dave-Departed]

Hi All,

We currently have VBR Enterprise Plus v7 (took advantage of the recent upgrade offer), but we are having trouble getting our existing infrastructure to work properly with backup copy jobs for offsite backups, etc.

I'm looking at Cloud Edition, and if I'm reading it right, it's an annual subscription, and it is meant to fully replace our existing VBR deployment?

So what happens if existing customers just outright bought VBR (non-Cloud Edition) and then want to leverage cloud storage? Can we buy the Cloud Edition license outright? Seems like a waste if we are just to write-off our initial spend on VBR?

Thanks

Dave

[Dave-Departed]

Anyone?

Has anyone out there followed this path? Or done things a different way? I've got budget meetings in the next few weeks, and need to present a case for Cloud Edition!

[dellock6]

Hi Dave, I think you'll get better answers by contacting sales guys or your local resellers, forums are usually more technical oriented. You are right in saying Cloud Edition is an annual subscription and it can be use instead of the bought license, but honestly I do not know how to switch from one to the other, from a licensing point of view.

Luca.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, our sales guys have more experience in this type of questions. I would appreciate if you could update this thread with your findings and final decision.

[tsightler]

One think I will say, from a technical aspect Cloud Edition does not really "replace" your existing VBR, it simply includes an additional component that allows backup files to be pushed to cloud storage or potentially just another disk. If you are simply looking to make copies you should probably work with support to see if you can get Backup Copy jobs working as I can't really imagine a scenario where Backup Copy doesn't work but somehow Cloud Edition will.

[Dave-Departed]

@tsightler, wouldn't we have to uninstall the existing VBR and then install VBR Cloud Edition? Thus 'replacing' it? Yes, we simply want offsite copies of our Veeam backups at this point, and we are attempting to get BCJ's working with our remote site, with little success, unfortunately. How can BCJ's work with AWS S3 storage or similar? I thought that was the whole point of Cloud Edition? Are you saying that I can present an S3 bucket to Veeam as a repository without using Cloud Edition?

[tsightler]

@tsightler, wouldn't we have to uninstall the existing VBR and then install VBR Cloud Edition? Thus 'replacing' it?

Nope. You simply update the license file for your existing VBR and then install the cloud component.

Yes, we simply want offsite copies of our Veeam backups at this point, and we are attempting to get BCJ's working with our remote site, with little success, unfortunately. How can BCJ's work with AWS S3 storage or similar? I thought that was the whole point of Cloud Edition? Are you saying that I can present an S3 bucket to Veeam as a repository without using Cloud Edition?

That's not what I was trying to say so sorry about that! Certainly if you are looking to push backups directly to S3 or some other object based cloud storage then cloud edition is the correct option (well, technically you can run a Windows/Linux repo on AWS and use BCJ to that) although you should make sure you have the required bandwidth and setup to do this. I guess that wasn't clear from my reading of your previous post. It sounded to me like you were going to attempt to use Cloud Edition to copy backup files to your remote site instead of using BCJ. Theoretically cloud edition can also do this (it supports copy between to "regular" storage devices as well), but BCJ should always be better for that use case.

[Dave-Departed]

Ok, now I understand

I currently have a support case open for BCJ's to our remote site, because they very often fail (mostly with an RPC Server Unavailable error, or with an error related to the WAN accelerator cache, which I now appear to have resolved by reseeding the target cache - The RPC error still remains), and on top of that, I'm just not sure our connectivity is good enough between sites (at HQ we have 10mbps DIA, but at our remote site, we only have ADSL2 with ~8mbps down and 500kbps up), so it seems that BCJ's just can't complete within a 24h cycle.

As for Cloud Edition, I assume it works in the same way as an incremental backup? Upload an initial full backup as a .vbk, and then increments from then on, as .vib? What's the compression like on it? Because we see about 40gb of changes per day (that's in our normal Veeam backups). So as you said, I'm wondering whether our 10mb DIA is enough to support using Cloud Edition?