Consolidating multiple Veeam BR servers

[jacoboceanic]

Hi everyone,

We have an environment that grew over time into one supported infrastructure, with multiple Veeam BR servers across the environment with SQL Express installed. All backup servers have network connectivity to each vCenter in the environment. We'd like to consolidate down to one backup server, and convert the remaining into standalone proxy servers.

Now, we'd also like to use SQL instead of Express for the database. That said I don't think there is a way to migrate several SQL Express databases into one SQL db (correct me if I'm wrong). So I see in my future a re-install of Veeam from scratch, and re-creation of backup jobs. Most importantly, I don't foresee any issues with importing the existing backups into the greenfield Veeam envionrment. All versions are running 9.5 u2.

But I'm curious if anyone has experience with this scenario. I should also note there are existing Scale-out Repositories. These I assume will need to be rectified before uninstalling the Veeam BR component?

Looking forward to your helpful comments!

[Shestakov]

Hi Jacob!
The scenario should work, but I`m curious if you considered using Distributed Deployment with Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.
Thanks!

[jacoboceanic]

Thanks Shestakov,
In our case we have 3 Veeam BR servers on the same LAN (across two L2 "stretched" data centers), 2 vCenters and about 5 clusters. Backups are working great, but unfortunately each instance is installed with SQL-Express.

Where we are running into complications relating to DR / Replication. We'd like to implement a global replication scheme, however each backup server will only be aware of their own replicas. We can of course replicate the VMs to the opposite site, but today this implies manual importing of replicas to the local backup server in order to recover. The idea is that we can consolidate the Veeam servers into one 'master' that has knowledge of all the VMs in the environment (production and replicas). We then protect this VBR instance as part of the same DR strategy. Does this make sense?

Thanks!

[albertwt]

Jacob,

I'm also interested in this approach.
What about the licensing ? By consolidating multiple Veeam servers, the number of Veeam license per CPU sockets is still remaining the same, so just one single master Veeam server to connect via the VBR console.

[foggy]

There should not be any concerns regarding the licensing, you would just probably need to combine your existing licenses into a single one, so it could cover all the source hosts involved.