How does Veeam move data around?

[tom11011]

Hi Group,

I am running Veeam software in Datacenter A.

Veeam handles backups, replications, and copy jobs in Datacenter A and Datacenter B.

I run a copy job from Datacenter A to Datacenter B. I need to get 3.5GB file from Datacenter B and simply wanted to restore it to a server in Datacenter B.

It seems to be taking forever though, if I had to guess, the file is leaving Datacenter B, going to Datacenter A, then back to Datacenter B again. Is this possible? The file is taking about 1.5 hours to restore, I would think it would restore in a matter of a minute since everything is local?? We have datamovers in each datacenter.

[DGrinev]

Hi Tom,

Yes, this is possible. Can you provide a bit more details about the backup infrastructure.
If we are speaking about File Level Restore, you need Mount Server on site B to keep the data locally. Thanks!

[tom11011]

How does one mount the server at Datacenter B? When the restore job asked where i wanted it restored, I used a UNC convention with IP address of a server at Datacenter B. \\192.168.X.X\D$

[DGrinev]

You can go to the properties of the repository on site B and check the tab called Mount Server. Thanks!

[tom11011]

I'm not sure what you are saying there. I went into the repository settings of veeam and the server is already in there, its one of my backup servers. Can you supply more info ?

[skrause]

Each repository has a "Mount Server" setting. You want that Mount Server to be as close to the location that the backups are stored as possible in most cases.

Typically, setting the mount server to be the server that the repository is a volume on is the easiest/best option. Don't use your B&R management server as the mount server if it is not also the repository server.

An example: you have a Windows server named "VeeamRepo-DC1" in your production datacenter which you have a number of Windows volumes setup as repositories in Veeam (Repo-DC1-A, Repo-DC1-B, etc.) You then have a windows server in your secondary datacenter named "VeeamRepo-DC2" with repository volumes (Repo-DC2-A, Repo-DC2-B, etc.) You run a copy job that copies your backups on Repo-DC1-A to Repo-DC2-A and you want to restore one of them to your environment in the secondary datacenter. To insure that you are not having all of the data needing to go back and forth over the WAN you will want to make sure that Repo-DC2-A has its mount server set to be "VeeamRepo-DC2".

Does that make sense?

[tom11011]

I went to Backup Infrastructure --> Backup Repositories

Each server in there is set to be its own mount server, I did not make any changes, that was just the default.

[DGrinev]

Hey Tom,

It seems to me that you have chosen a new location during file restore, in this case Veeam B&R doesn't use Mount Server. It mounts the backup to the machine where the console was started.
In your scenario to keep the data locally, you should deploy Veeam console in the datacenter B and initiate File-level Restore by that console.
Please take a look on the FLR Scenarios description for additional information. Thanks!

[tom11011]

Ok thank you.