Replications etween Public and Closed Networks

[rufusa]

I have a conundrum that I think can be solved with VEEAM backup and replication.

Is the proposed solution plausible?

FACTS:

1. I have two networks: one is Internet-facing, and the other is a closed network.

2. The virtual machines on the Internet side receive OS and third party application updates.

3. When the Internet-facing virtual machines (there are 40 VMs, each is approximately 40 GBs) have received updates I export the VMs to an external drive. The export takes approximately 17 hours.

4. After export, I WALK the disk to the closed network (that is the nature of my environment) and perform an import. The import script deletes the targeted VM and replaces it with the recently patched VM. The process takes another 17 hours or so.

PROPOSED SOLUTION:

1. Stand up two VEEAM Backup and Replication servers (one for the Internet-facing network, and the other on the closed network).

2. After the Internet-facing VMs have been updated, perform a backup.

3. After the backup, export the backup files and WALK them to the closed network.

4. Copy the backup files to the other VEEAM Backup and Replication server.

5. Execute a VEEAM job to copy only the deltas from the backup files to the closed network VMs. I am assuming this is much faster than deleting existing VMs and replacing them with recently patched VMs.

[Vitaliy S.]

If you don't have an opportunity to replicate VMs, then manually importing them and doing the restore will work just fine. Yes, restoring only deltas will be possible via Quick Rollback feature.

Can you please tell us a bit more why do you have such setup?

[rufusa]

Security issues. The system owner doesn't want the closed network exposed to the public network. It is a pain, but that is how they do business.

[rufusa]

When you say restore, is this restore possible:

Internet-facing VMs:

VM1: Windows XP
VM2: Windows 7 x64
VM3: Windows 10

Closed Network:

VM4: Windows XP
VM5: Windows 7 x64
VM6: Windows 10

On the closed network, can I point VM1 backup at VM4, and copy just the differences, keeping the VM4 in place?

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, just to clarify my post, sorry for the confusion occurred:

1. Not sure I'm following you, as you state you still need to keep the VM4 untouched, but update it with new data?
2. When I was talking about quick rollback functionality, then it can only be done to original location, meaning that, unfortunately, this solution wouldn't work in your case.
3. Seems like direct SAN restore or hotadd restore should be used here in order to have decent restore performance rates.

[rufusa]

I am essentially talking about an merge. After moving the backed up VMs to the closed network, can VEEAM merge its backed up with an existing VM? At this point, I am thinking this should be fairly simple. VEEAM can look at the differences between the two VMs and merge the two.

[foggy]

Not as simple as that. Even if it would be possible, calculation of differences would take time similar to restoring the entire VM.

[Vitaliy S.]

To elaborate on Alexander's post - this would take the same amount of time, because these VMs will be treated as different ones (VMs will have different moref IDs) by the vCenter Server, thus the full scan will be required.

[rufusa]

Thanks for your input.