Replication requirements

[geejaybee]

Hi,

I have no experience with Veeam so am looking for advice from some experienced real world users. We have a 2node ESXi cluster at 2 sites and wish to continously "cross-replicate" a couple of large VMs from each site to the other. The Guest VMs are WIndows 2K8 with 20TB vRDM storage attached. A potential supplier has told us that in order to replicate we would need at each site a repository equal to the VM size as well as the extra storage to hold the replica. i.e to replicate the 20TB VM from site A to a replica at Site B it would require 20TB repository at site A to "stage" the replica and 20TB at site B to hold the replica.
This seems a bit much. I had imaginged that replication as opposed to backup would replcate directly from the the Source to the Target with possibly a little space for metadata. I have probably completely misunderstood so hopefully someone can put me straight,

Thanks

Gee

[Gostev]

Hi, yes you probably misunderstood. Staging area at site A is not required for Veeam replication, except of little space for metadata. May be your supplier was talking about seeding the replica via backup file (this is optional)? This obviously does require the backup repository on site A to create the backup file (backup will be much smaller than VM size because of compression). But, of course, you can delete the backup from site A as soon as you move the seed to the DR site. Thanks.