Veeam V5 Surebackup & DR Question

[Hasslehogg]

Hi

Can anyone help me please, i ran a trial a month ago or so with V4, so i havent seen version 5 yet and i have a few questions to help me understand. if anyone can answer them i would really appreciate the help before we take the plunge

1 Surebackup, its my understanding to verify the backups, surebackup brings the backup online to a fenced off network so it doesnt affect the live server,
do we need a DC & DNS servers in the fenced off environment for it to check the validity of the backups?

2 DR, similar question to the above, if we setup a DR environment\lab in our vmware environment, obviously it would have to be fenced off from the live
network, this one i am sure we will need a DC & DNS server on the fenced off network, true?

3 Someone mentioned to me with SmartCDP that you can do this at the folder level, basically what i want to know is, we have a F&P server in New York and
we want to replicate say the users folder on that server over to the Houston office for backup\DR which would then go to tape. Can this be achieved with
Veeam, we are currently using DoubleTake or Oncourse to do this, if we can negate the need for these products as a bonus to Veeam that would be good.
I didnt believe this though as i thought Veeam only backed up VM's and vmdk's and didnt go inside the OS to replicate just a folder? i thought with Veeam
we would have to replicate the full VM or vmdk?

thanks in advance for the help

[tsightler]

1. In general, yes, you'd need a DC and DNS server in the fenced environment. You might be able to do some basic testing using a cached/offline login. Veeam allows you to define groups of machines that include DC and DNS servers and power them on in order to create a copy of your real setup in the fenced environment. Of course, this is an issue if your DC and DNS servers are not VM's, or are not local to the Veeam server.

2. Yes...see above.

3. Veeam backs up only full VM at image level, although you can exclude specific volumes. For your scenario you could create a separate volume (i.e. VMDK) for the share that you want to backup, then create a backup job that only includes that single VMDK.

[Hasslehogg]

Tsightler thanks for the replies

1 i was hoping for that for the OS verify that surebackup doesnt need to logon and if it did need to logon i could supply local admin credentials rather than domain credentials. Do you know if surebackup needs to logon to the backup to verify please? I know you would need DNS and DC for applications verification but i dont require that

2 for a Dr i understand we need a DNS and DC, unfortuantely our DNS and DC are physical and also out of our control\reach, anyway around this thats you know of?

3 i thought this would be the case, thanks for your help

[tsightler]

1 i was hoping for that for the OS verify that surebackup doesnt need to logon and if it did need to logon i could supply local admin credentials rather than domain credentials. Do you know if surebackup needs to logon to the backup to verify please? I know you would need DNS and DC for applications verification but i dont require that

I guess I don't know what exactly you're trying to verify. If you just want to verify that the system boots to a login prompt, and VMware tools starts, then I think you'd be OK.

[Gostev]

Tom is right, only (some) server applications can be affected if there is no DC and DNS in the isolated environment, so application tests should be disabled in SureBackup job settings. All other recovery tests do not need DC/DNS presence (VM startup, OS boot up, ping).

2 for a Dr i understand we need a DNS and DC, unfortuantely our DNS and DC are physical and also out of our control\reach, anyway around this thats you know of?

I suppose you could get virtual read-only DC (aka branch DC introduced in Windows 2008) with secondary DNS server on it, and use it specifically for this.

[Hasslehogg]

Anton\Tom thanks for the info