Testing Veeam Backup Free - Target to SAN

[bushtor]

Hi,

I just wanted to test if Veeam B&R can do what I need:

We have our production VMWare hosts and SAN at site-A and recently I installed another SAN and a spare VMWare host (with currently no VMs) at site-B.

I need to copy a few selected VMs from site-A's SAN to site-B's SAN every night. In case of major breakdown (fire etc) at site-A I can fire up the spare host at site-B and connect it to and fire-up the saved VMs at site-B's SAN so we have a backup environment up and running in a relatively short time.

I installed Veeam B&R free edition to see what I could achieve. However when it came to selecting the backup target B&R displayed a normal drive and folder dialog. I hoped that it also could display a similar 'Browse Datastore' dialog, like the one I have in VCenter Server client, so the backed up folder is placed directly in the SAN at site-B. Remember I would like to copy selected virtual machine folders directly from site-A's SAN to site-B's SAN so the copied folders show up in the VCenter server *Browse Datastore' dialog like ordinary created virtual machine folders. The copied folders must be ready to run (unpacked on the fly if copied with some ZIP compression).

Can B&R do a direct SAN to SAN copy like I describe above?

I just want a complete copy every night. No history (I have other backup systems doing that). Does B&R have some algoritms to reduce the amount of data needed to be pushed over to update to the 'current' version of the folders each night?

Thanks for comments on this...

regards

Tor

[foggy]

Welcome to the Veeam Communty Forums, Tor!

Can B&R do a direct SAN to SAN copy like I describe above?

I suppose you are mixing backup and replication terms here. Depending on what your requirements are, you can either backup your VMs and place the compressed and deduplicated backup files on a backup repository in site B or replicate the VMs to your target ESXi host to be able to failover in the shortest time possible. In the latter case, the replica VM is stored in a native format and you have the ability to specify the datastore to place it and its restore points on.

I would suggest to review the corresponding user guide chapters to get better understanding of what each of the options does and also this topic, which can assist in deciding on your personal needs.

Does B&R have some algoritms to reduce the amount of data needed to be pushed over to update to the 'current' version of the folders each night?

Yes, Veeam B&R copies VM blocks that have changed since it was last backed up (replicated) only.

[bushtor]

I possibly mix the terms backup and replication, sorry about that.

However I hoped that I should be able to achieve what I have described, simply copying complete VM folders from one SAN to another SAN, selecting target with some 'Datastore browser' dialog like in vmware vcenter client and not only higher level shared resources.

Is this possible, either with the free or the paid version?

regards Tor

[foggy]

I guess you need to use replication jobs to get what you are talking about (to have your VMs put on the specific target datastore and registered on the target host).