Veeam Enterprise Manager Failover / remote site

[matthewc100]

I'm a consultant doing some research for my customer who is considering Veeam. They want to know if Veeam Enterprise Manager can be deployed in a clustered / replicated manner so that in the event of a loss of the primary site they can failover to the remote site. While it seems simple enough (on paper) to replicate the VM's to the remote site, I could not find any mention of deploying EM in a manner consistent with DR.

Does EM support this deployment scenario? And, if so, what document should I be looking at? I went through the Veeam Enterprise Manager User Guide and the Veeam Backup/Replication User's Guide but did not find what I was hoping to find about this topic.

Thanks in advance.

[chrisdearden]

Enterprise manager is just a .net application - I dont think it is beyond the bounds of possibility to deploy it to SQL on a multi site mirror , with DFS for the catalog location and some form of NLB with a witness to keep the front end up.

but.

how critical do you think enterprise manager is to failover ? you would be a lot better off replicating the Vm with enterprise manager over.
Are you confusing Enterprise manager with the main VBR install ? in which case you can still replicate the VBR machine - if you have a streched layer 2 between sites you can always bring the VM up manually without the need for an ip change.

[veremin]

Hi, Matthew.

You can replicate Enterprise Manager VM to another site via Veeam B&R, so in the disaster situation you will need to use your backup server to perform a VM failover operation.

In addition, the best practice for protect your Backup and Replication Server is discussed in this topic.

Furthermore, in version 6.5 completely new feature regarding B&R Server protection was introduced. This feature is Configuration backup (Automatic/ Periodic backup of the Veeam product configuration to a specified backup repository). So,now there is no more need to back up or replicate B&R Server as a whole. With configuration backup all you need in disaster situation, when your back up server goes down, is reinstall your B&R software and restore configuration files.

For more information about Configuration backup, please, use User Guide (p.219).

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

[matthewc100]

Hi v.Eremin, (and Chris D)

I had followed the new configuration backup capability with some interest and was musing if that was the path to try. I'm glad to hear that you also think it would be a good thing to investigate first. I had thought that if we virtualized everything, then in the event of a total loss - or a long outage, this is a harsh environment - then we could just drop back to the remote site. The question of licensing, configurations, catalog management, etc., would seem to be addressed with the configuration backup.

Thanks for the suggestions, both of you.

[mgratla]

I feel like I'm missing something, but upon reading a lot of the documentation, no-one seems to address the issue of making Enterprise Manager highly available.

I'm about to implement a Veeam Distributed Deployment environment into two sites but everything seems to point to installing Enterprise Manager in a single location to manage both of my sites. Great, except what if that location goes down? Is Enterprise Manager capable of just spinning back up correctly if I use a standard replication job to move the Enterprise Manager server to my DR site and reIP it, or is it going to have a fit?

Or, is there a best practice that allows me to install a secondary enterprise manager server and have the two in an active:active configuration but accessible via a common IP (Using something like Microsoft NLB on both servers)

I'm probably over thinking it, but help and advice would be greatly appriciated

[foggy]

Mark, yes, you definitely can replicate your Enterprise Manager to be able to failover in case of DR.