Remote production site, local DR site: hints?

[Moebius]

In this case, the production VMware datacenter is remote, and has a decent wan link (100 Mpbs up/down) to the local VMware site which will become the DR site.

The customer will set up a Veeam server on the remote site and run "local" backups (i.e. to the repository at the remote site) and frequent replicas to the local DR site.
I would also like to keep daily backups at the local DR site, but using the wan link for both the backups and the replicas seems too much to me.

I read that backing up the replicated vms has several limitations and is not recommended by Veeam.
I think I could stop the replicas at night times and run the backup then, but this looks a bit like a workaround and I'm not happy with this solution,
What other options do I have? Somebody mentioned the possibility of doing replicas from the backups (that would mean using the wan link for backups instead of replicas) but I'm not familiar with this concept.

[skrause]

How frequently are you replicating?

I prefer when I set things up to have my server managing replication jobs to be in the DR site and "pulling" the data so that in the case of a failover I don't have to go through the hoops of getting the Veeam configuration restored into the DR location.

If you have a stable connection between the sites and don't want to run more than one Veeam management server I would just place the server in the remote site and have a repository/proxies in the production site. This would give you the advantage of having your Backup and Replication jobs all being managed by the same server so you don't get overlap. We orchestrate all of our backup jobs for all of our datacenters from a single B&R server in our non-production datacenter and it works pretty well.

Provided you have a low enough change rate in your backup files you could just do a backup copy job to the DR location.

There are some threads I have noticed talking about using a backup copy job as a replica seed so that might be an option as well.

[Moebius]

Thank you Steve, keeping the Veeam server local and placing a proxy in the remote production site makes sense.

I will probably replicate from the remote prod to the local DR site every 4 hours. I'll have to see if there is a time window to allow also a daily backup on the wan link.
I don't like much the idea of replicating from a backup copy. The lag between the live vm and the replica increases too much.