Shared vCenter

[murenat]

Hello. The customer wants one VMWare cluster to be backed up by two Veeam Backup Replication servers, with their own repositories and proxies. Each server will work on a separate day. The question is, is it possible to add one vCenter to both Veeam Backup Replication servers, even though the Veeam Backup Replication servers are of different versions? Won't they overwrite each other when added?

[Mildur]

Hello Renat

It's possible and supported as long as they don't process the same VM at the same time.
Creating a backup of the same VM by two backup server at the same time will lead to VSS errors.

May I ask why they want to use two different backup server with different builds? To support older operating system?

Best,
Fabian

[murenat]

Thank you very much for your quick response. For the customer, this vCenter cluster is very critical. Therefore, at the management level, it was decided to install a second backup server. With the ability to make backup copies every other day, in turn, by each server. We were worried that when adding vCenter to a second VBR, whether the first one, which was already connected, might disconnect. Thanks for your reply

[tyler.jurgens]

That seems like you're over engineering the solution to the critical infrastructure problem. Instead of doing that, you could have another server sitting somewhere (offsite preferably) that you can parachute in and restore your Veeam configuration on, and be back up and running in short order, rather than trying to now sort out retention policies and whatnot. Or you could simply have the VBR server in your DR site running everything. If your primary site goes down, your DR site is still up. If your DR site goes down, you restore the config to a VBR sitting on your primary site.

Then you look to solve the second copy of your data problem by either having another repository offsite (in your DR site) that you run backup copy jobs onto, or use a cloud connect service provider, or use S3 compatible object storage to run your backup copy jobs onto. If its critical infrastructure, I assume you've already got a DR site sorted out.

Your data is what's most important, not the VBR. The VBR can be recreated in minutes with a bit of prep work. You've got yourself into an issue where now you've got duplicate infrastructure and managing restore points becomes more challenging. I can see the amount of work increasing to support this, but I don't see the benefits.