Veeam Backup and Replication Frequency

[rdc373]

Hello all.

We recently rolled out Veeam at our company and are really liking the results so far.

I have a question about backup and replication frequency.

Here's what I have set up:

• Replication of two VM severs every 6 hours": 6-noon-6-12, to a secondary sever

• Onsite failure recovery backups every night

• Offsite disaster recovery backups to USB every night.

* Replications are going to a repository on the primary sever
* Backups are going to a dedicated Veeam server repository

Each repository is acting as a proxy as well. So my speeds are really good on an isolated backup network: running about 70MB - 125MB processing and 50MB - 65MB transferring.


What is the best way to do USB offsite and onsite backups? Should I make four separate backup jobs (2 servers x 2)? Just copy from the onsite backups to offsite USB disks bit-for-bit (does veeam have a feature for this?)? Or any other good ideas?

I have a few concerns with creating four separate backup jobs with the daily replications:
1 - a lot of time replicating and backing up (windows DC will be slow enough that it cannot process domain requests during some operations and a secondary DC/PDC is not an option)
2 - wear and tear on underlying RAID array's physical disks. The less I'm transferring from it - the longer it will last w/o a failure.

I'm welcome to any experiences, insight, ideas, etc....


TYI!

[mcrape]

You'll probably want to look at the Backup Copy Job in order to accomplish this. You'll need to setup a new repository for the USB disk, and in the properties you can check off the 'This repository is backed by rotating media' option (or something similar - I don't have the console in front of me a the moment). Checking that off let's Veeam know that the disk may disappear from time to time.

The benefits of the Backup Copy Job include the fact that a new file is created (vs. just copied). This allows for any sort of cleanup / repair that may need to be done on your backups. Another great benefit is that Veeam will suspend the job if an active backup job needs the file to run.

Depending on your scheme, the backup copy job can also merge the changes from your production environment, so no need to re-copy everything all over.

I used to try and manually copy the vbk files, but I ran into a problems in that it would take days to copy the multi-TB file, and backup jobs would fail because the vbk file was locked. Backup Copy Jobs solved that.

Hopefully that helps.

[Shestakov]

Thanks Matt for the good answer. Besides backup copy which helps not to take a snapshot twice, I want to mention a Remote Replica from Backup option not to copy the data twice.
Also here is a great description of the ultimate backup infrastructure.

[rdc373]

Thank you both for the great replies (sorry, life in I.T. -- very busy everyday. LoL)

I will implement the Copy Jobs next week. Then report back any useful information that might add to this thread. I was thinking that was the feature I wanted, just wanked to confirm this was the best way.

Again - thanks you two (and anyone else who adds to the thread0)

[aevans@ricoh.com.au]

Hi,

Currently we use Veeam purely for DR purposes to replicate our entire virtual infrastructure from production datacentre to a DR datacentre.
We need to continue to do this however I'm now investigating the possibility of also backing up some of these VM's to a backup storage SAN like HP StoreOnce. Backups would get flushed to tape weekly and sent offsite (might look into pushing to cloud instead as I've had enough of tape).

So we would replicate from a NetApp SAN to a Dell Compellent
We would backup from a NetApp SAN to the HP StoreOnce

Does anyone have a similar process running already?
How well does Veeam handle this? Can you do a replication and a backup simultaneously or will this go and cause conflicts and errors.

Sorry I've never used the backup side of Veeam so completely unfamiliar with how it works.

Cheers.

[PTide]

Hi Andrew,

Though you can take both replica and backup of the same VM it's not a recommended approach because you'll get your backup window significantly extended because of two snapshot taken one by one - one for replica and another one for backup.
Please take a look at this post and feel free to ask questions if any arise.

Thank you.