Veeam Standard Edition with AWS VTL

[AuGL]

Hello everyone,

One of our offices has Veeam Standard Edition with no offsite backups currently.
They are running VMware foundations on two servers.
Their full backup size is around 1.5TB at the moment. They keep 7 restore points.
They would like to make use of AWS VTL to send weekly and monthly backups to AWS for an offsite copy.

1. Can Standard Edition work with AWS VTL?
2. Does Standard Edition have a GFS media pool?
3. What other limitations should I be aware of for Standard edition considering the above requirement?

[soncscy]

Hiya Glenn!

You can use tape with the Standard edition, but I think it's file to tape only, so you don't get GFS.

One thing I helped a colleague with at another company who was in a similar situation was we would just keep the normal Disk based backups (forever forward) and just use an Export Backups for their weekly/monthly needs, and made File to Tape jobs for those backups.

Since it just sits on Amazon anyways and it's a pretty small environment, we just gave the tapes plan names in Veeam for their sorting purposes.

Upgrading makes this cleaner for you, but this is an option for you.

[Andreas Neufert]

You can use for example Synthetic Full + Incremental processing which gives you a weekly full file (*.vbk) and you can then back the vbk file up to the VTL.

Or upgrade to one of the editions that can offload older backups to S3. This is likely the cheaper option as you save a lot of money for the S3 space.
The File2Tape will generate always full files in the S3. While our Object storage is incremental forever and store multiple full files only once + the delta blocks. It is pretty efficient for this approach.

[AuGL]

Thanks for the replies, I need to revisit this.

With the standard edition, do I create a backup job for daily backups, and then another job to send existing backup files to VTL? Is that the file to tape option, or can it actually do proper backup to tapes?

The site has limited bandwidth, so is there a weekly incremental option for the backups? To send just the incrementals offsite to AWS VTL, or does it always have to send the full backup offsite?

[Andreas Neufert]

Our Object Storage integration is incremental forever.

The Tape VTL GW will transport fulls at least on a weekly base. The primary job needs to be SynthFull+Incremental to allow file to tape to copy the weekly fulls.

Enterprise Edition can create with Backup2Tape from any given primary backup chain the needed fulls.

In any case, you shouldy simply look into switching to Veeam Universal Licensing, as this gives you access to all product functionality. Right now, you can do it at the standard renewal cost for your existing license.