VBR at primary site, VAO at DR site

[SteelContainer]

Hi there,
I understand that the best practice is to have VBR running at the DR site to control backups and replication.
I was told that if a client already has VBR installed at the primary site then it's possible to just install VAO at the DR site to control replica failover etc.
Is this true? or does VAO require the primary VBR server to be at the DR site?
Are there any limitations by running them at separate sites? i.e. Limited functionality if the main VBR server cant be contacted? or does it have a copy of all backup/replica details stored in it's own local VBR install?

Thanks!

[haslund]

Actually, the reference design is to have a VBR server at production handling backups and a VBR server at DR for replication. This is because of mainly 2 reasons, most customers already have VBR for backups at production but secondly in case the connection between production and DR is offline backups can still be produced.

So why a VBR at the DR site? This is to handle replica failovers.

Connecting VAO to production VBR is very easy, simply just from inside VAO connect to it (VAO agent gets installed): https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vao/u ... tml?ver=20

The only disadvantage I see of using a VBR server for backups in the production site is that you have some additional manual work to make VAO handle restores from backups to the DR site.

[SteelContainer]

Great thanks for that.

I suppose it could make seeding replicas from backup files more difficult if the backups and replicas are managed by a separate VBR. There could also be some overlap with backup and replica jobs running at the same time if jobs aren't scheduled correctly.

It would be good if it was possible for the Prod backup VBR server and the DR VBR server to talk to each other and check for running job conflicts etc but that might get quite complicated.

[haslund]

Correct, however, if this is greenfield you could consider simply using a single backup server located in the DR site and avoid these issues. Just make sure you have a stable connection between the production and DR sites.

[bittenbt]

Can you provide additional information on the manual process to use VAO v3.0 to create an Orchestration Plan using Replicas? We have an issue where the VAO pre-check validation is failing saying it can't verify the source replica from the primary site. We are not using the primary site for replicas, only backup jobs. The Veeam VAO server is creating and managing the replicas to the DR site. thanks, Tim

[haslund]

@bittenbt: Your setup is a bit unclear, "can't verify the source replica from the primary site". Can you provide some details on the sites? Where are you replicating to and from? Which Backup server is used to perform the replication? and where is the "replication backup server" placed? Which errors are you seeing exactly in the UI? Thank you

[bittenbt]

The configuration has 2 Veeam Backup servers. One at the primary site is for local backups only. The secondary site has Veeam VAO server with a Veeam Backup Server instance that is pulling replicas to the DR site. In VAO, the configuration plan the readiness check fails stating the the replica from the primary site is not valid? Not sure what this means given we're "pulling replicas" from the VAO Backup server and not from the primary site. I will open a ticket with Veeam Supprot and post the ticket number in the forum.