Poor mans DR for few VM's from Site A to B using Veeam

[TDG]

Hi need some help

Site A - Main DC with big VMW infrastructure with one VCSA
All servers are VM's, Veeam server is a VM & the UTM is also VM
Have Veeam backup to Wasabi & Critical public facing VM's replicated to Site B - See below

Site B - Main HQ (Connected to Site A via a 10Gbps p2p link) Have a smaller VMW infrastructure
Have some VM's for AD, DNS, DHCP etc..
No Veeam server, UTM is hardware (Have spare ext IPs for public facing VM's in case of a DR)
Some critical public facing VM's are replicated here form site A via the p2p link

Say if Site A is totally down for few days how can I do DR for the few replicated public facing VM's form Site B using Veeam ?
and after few days how can I fail back to Site A using Veeam

Don't want a too complicated solution and happy to do manual steps in case of a disaster

Let me know if you have any good ideas

Merry Christmas & HNY to you all

Cheers

[TDG]

Will this work ?

Best practice here would be to move the Veeam server to the remote site B. Leave sufficient VM based proxies at the main site to handle the backups and storage interactions at Site A. As long as all the replications and failover are handled from Site B, failover and failback can all be orchestrated from the VBR server

But my VCSA is in site a and all VMs are added on the Veeam server via this VCSA
May be add using ESX hosts ? Any disadvantages doing this ?

[Mildur]

Hi TDG,

Indeed, the best option is to host your backup server in Site B and use Veeam Replica jobs to replicate your VMs from Datacenter 1 to Datacenter 2. In case of a planned downtime or failure of Datacenter 1, you can power on the replica VMs in Datacenter 2 through the backup console. Once Datacenter 1 is back online, fail back to the original VM in Datacenter1 (together with all changes).

You can migrate your current backup server to Site B using the configuration backup and restore process.

Before proceeding, ensure that the network configuration allows the required communication between Veeam and vSphere components as listed in the Helpcenter – Port List.

Best regards,
Fabian

[TDG]

Thanks Fabian

Any reply for my question below

But my VCSA is in site a and all VMs are added on the Veeam server via this VCSA
May be add using ESX hosts ? Any disadvantages doing this ?

[TDG]

One of my friend suggested this so it makes sense to run the VBR server form Site B

VCSA would be better in an HA configuration, however from a Veeam perspective, you can add the hosts directly to the Veeam server as long as they are licensed. As far as a physical server vs a VM for Veeam, both are fine, repositories can be attached to a physical host or vmdk attached to a VM, both work well.

With version 13 of Veeam which has released there is a facility to run Veeam as an active/passive HA paid, but this presently uses a Linux appliance Veeam provide, an upgrade to your licensing and there is presently no migration tool to get from where you are now to the Linux version. This migration tools is planned however.