v5 On-demand Sandbox/Virtual Lab questions

[rogersillars]

Hi

I've just been reading the new features on the virtual lab feature and it got me thinking...

We have 4 remote offices which we 'replicate' documents from nightly to our main data center. We then point our search engine to these 'replicated' documents so that it can crawl/index them.

Would it be possible to backup all the VMS from the remote site and then create an automated virtual lab and point our search engine to these isolated servers? I note in the documentation (page 106) there is a proxy appliance. This is all able to be scripted?

The advantages I see are:
We could backup all our remote sites to the main data center
We could then test each backup
We could save on 'replicating' the data and do the whole VM, which would make recovery heaps faster in the event of a disaster

On a second note what licensing would I need? Could we have standard licences for our remote sites and enterprise for the main data center and DR site?

Thanks,
Roger

[Gostev]

Hi Roger, yes this is possible. We are actually planning on implementing "autorefresh" feature for imported backups in the following updates. This would make sure that SureBackup jobs detects that specific VM is stored in the imported backup file, and attempts to perform "Import Backup" operation on imported backup location to pickup any the latest backup that may have been brought off from another site. This would allow to facilitate many interesting scenarios.

For now yes, it looks like this would require heavy scripting (need to research if we have everything what is needed for this available in PowerShell).

Yes, theoretically you can have separate licenses in separate sites, but these will be totally unconnected Veeam Backup deployments unaware of each other (each deployment will have its own Enterprise Manager, etc). And of course you cannot use Enteprise edition features on backups created by Standard Edition. So, for you scenario it is best to have single Enterprise Edition deployment edition spanning multiple sites. Since you are existing customers, you are eligible for free upgrade to Enterprise, so licensing is not something you should worry about anyway

[rogersillars]

Hi Gostev

Thanks very much. Any idea on the timeframe for the "autorefresh" feature? That sounds just what we are after.

As another option would it be possible to write a script to mount a read only copy of a replicated disk? For instance we have backed up or replicated a VM's disk with data on. Would it be possible to have another VM mount that disk as a drive letter and read/index the contents of that disk? This would save a heap of resources as the only thing needed would be access to the disk, not extra VMs running.

Thanks,
Roger

[Gostev]

Roger, no idea for timeframes yes - we are just started next release planning. But, we need this functionality for a number of use cases, so it is high priority in my book.

It is certainly possible manually - just publish VM with Instant VM Recovery (do not actually start it), and mount VM disk from vPower NFS datastore to any VM. I do not know if is possible to script, I know we had a tool in the works, but we ended up not releasing it with v5 due to lack of QC resources. I will talk to our PowerShell dev next week and ask if this might be possible to do through PowerShell until the tool is released. Thanks!

By the way, we are planning to launch a contest for most creative use of vPower-based functionality later on, so you can consider you have entered it already.

[rogersillars]

Hi Gostev

Thanks, see all my crazy ideas may actualy win me something