Veeam Replication over 2MB WAN

[Jamie.king]

Just curious if veeam will be able to replicate over a 2MB WAN

I will be scheduling the replication to occur out of hours, and have roughly 20 vms to replicate.
the initial replication will be on LAN (to save time).

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Jamie,

Actually, we already have customers who are replicating over WAN, however, you see, everything depends on the WAN link you are using, especially on its characteristics (latency, channel speed and packet losses), apparently, with Veeam Backup and Replication 4, it will be much easier to achive rather than with version 3, because of the replica seeding option and support of ESX4 changed block tracking feature for lightning-fast incremental backup. That's why you should try and see how it works for you.

Thank you.

[Gostev]

We had multiple architecture improvements in the 3.1.1 (current release) for replication over WAN, so this should work fine today. Version 4.0 also adds new additional engine optimizations specifically aimed for support for slow links like yours (aside of new features mentioned by Vitaly). I recommend that you install version 4.0 as soon as it is available (late October), and see how it works for you. On our side, we strongly believe that we provide the best software replication for VMware on the market today, and it will become even better with the 4.0 release.

[willrodbard]

HI,
I have a similar situation, we were told before we purchased that a 2mb leased line should be fine for incremental replications.
Our environment consists of around 20Vms as well, which total about 1.2Tb of virtual disk space, although I know for a fact that there will be around 400Gb of unused disk space, eg loads of 0's which I thougth VEEAM ignored when backing up or replicating.

At the moment we still have our new DR kit in house to perform the testing and for the initial 1st replication.
over a local gigabit connection we are seeing around a 30MB/s speed which is still taking about 10 hours to perform each replication job, this is the speed that the initial job ran at and about the same length of time it took to perform that job, it almost looks like it is performing a fresh full replication every time which means when we move the kit to the DR site and try and run it over a 2Mb link it's gonna take about 10 days for each job??

I will include more specific environment info if required but for now I guess my main questions are:
1: Do we need to move the pagefile to a seperate no replicated disk, will this cut down the level of block changes that occur and the same for the swap file? I thought VEEAM ignored the swap file atleast when replicting?
2: Is there a best practise guide that I can have a look at, or can anyone make any suggestions as to where I am going wrong.

Any help you guys can provide will be greatly appreciated
cheers
Will

[Gostev]

Will,

1. We do backup and replication on the image level, so there is no way for us to skip individual guest OS files inside the image. Moving page file to a separate disk and excluding the disk from replication is way to go. Version 4.0 includes the feature for excluding disks in replication job.

2. It is expected with the current version to see Incremental Taking Same Time as Full, however only changed blocks are transferred over WAN during incremental runs, so it is not going to be 10 days as you approximated.

Thank you!

[willrodbard]

Anton,
thanks for coming back to me.
I'll check out what kind of rates of change I get once I move the pagefiles

cheers
Will

[Jamie.king]

Thanks for the replies so far!

I'm very happy with Veeam, To give you a better understanding of my network (running esx 3.5 with virtual center 2.5), all but two of my vm servers (total Datastore size is around 1.2TB) are pretty much static and never really change, the other two will get updated roughly every 3 months (new release of installed software).

One thing I still am not quite sure is when running a replication the total size & processed size is the same everytime (20GB)!

1. is there a way to display the actual transfered size and not just the total & processed size in a report?
2. is only the vbk file replicated after the initial rpelication (incremental)
3. What is the recommended WAN Speed ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Jamie,

Please have a look at the following topic that should answer your first two questions: Replication across a WAN
As for recommended WAN speed, you see... it heavily depends on the WAN link specifications as well as the environment itself, so it can vary.