What do I need?

[etsrad]

Hey all, trying to figure out whether Veeam is the best solution for us. We do have physical servers and I know Veeam only does virtual so that's one concern.

More importantly though, our future planned environment is two hosts.

Main site -
ESX HostA - 10 VMs
ESX HostB - 10 VMs

DR site -
ESX HostC

Obviously, I think I would need to do replication (HostA's VMs to HostB and vice versa), so that everything is running and replicated at my MAIN site...and since they hosts will be in the same rack and connected to the same switches I am thinking I can get an RTO and more importantly, RPO of under 5 minutes? Note that I also plan on replicating HostA and HostB to HostC every 15-30 minutes.

So, regarding the main site, if HostA goes down and I bring up the VMs on HostB, can I achieve RTO and RPO of under 5 minutes?

As I understand it....HostA would be REPLICATING using the Veeam software to HostB (not backing up).....so can it also do backups while doing the replication?


As for HostC (DR site 10 mins away from the main site), say we are in a DR situation and we bring up all the VMs online on hostC, is there a way to change the networking automatically? Because our DR site is 192.168.10.x and main site is 192.168.1.x, and I hear its best practice to change the IPs at a DR site. Lastly, one our DR site is back up how do we and how easy is it to move everything back?

Thanks in advance.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

So, regarding the main site, if HostA goes down and I bring up the VMs on HostB, can I achieve RTO and RPO of under 5 minutes?

The performance of your replication jobs will heavily depend on the backend storage. Moreover, please keep in mind the time that will be required to create an application-aware image processing (AAIP) operation and then commit VM snapshot.

Additionally, job performance will depend on the VM changes, the more changes will happen, the more data you will need to send. I would suggest installing a trial version and then see Veeam backup in action.

As I understand it....HostA would be REPLICATING using the Veeam software to HostB (not backing up).....so can it also do backups while doing the replication?

You can point your replication jobs to backup files and then replicate from backups. As to running backup and replication jobs against the same VMs in parallel, then your second job (VM task) will be put in a queue and will resume once first job finishes processing VM data.

As for HostC (DR site 10 mins away from the main site), say we are in a DR situation and we bring up all the VMs online on hostC, is there a way to change the networking automatically? Because our DR site is 192.168.10.x and main site is 192.168.1.x, and I hear its best practice to change the IPs at a DR site. Lastly, one our DR site is back up how do we and how easy is it to move everything back?

You can use Re-IP and replication failover/failback options. Please check out these links > Configure Re-IP Rules and Replica Failover and Failback

Thank you!

[etsrad]

Thanks, I am mostly concerned about data protection for HostA and HostB. So forgetting backups for now....I can simply replicate from HostA to HostB and vice versa correct? Since both hosts will be in the same rack and connected to the same switch I should be able to get 5 minute RTO and RPO?

When doing replication...does it "pause" the VMs? I tried a few other backup/replication software and everytime it was doing a replication it would pause the VM and we wouldnt be able to access it.

Also, everything will be local disks, no shared storage, so HostA has its own disks and so does HostB

[Vitaliy S.]

I can simply replicate from HostA to HostB and vice versa correct?

Correct.

Since both hosts will be in the same rack and connected to the same switch I should be able to get 5 minute RTO and RPO?

Depends on the amount of data to replicate and performance of your storage. Keep in mind snapshot commit operation which is required at the end of the backup/replication job.

When doing replication...does it "pause" the VMs? I tried a few other backup/replication software and everytime it was doing a replication it would pause the VM and we wouldnt be able to access it.

No, Veeam backup jobs do not pause your VMs during replication/backup process.

[etsrad]

Thanks Vitaly, could you expand on the commit part a bit more? Are you talking about storage/space needs?

For example, HostA has 10 VMs totaling 1TB total, but the total space on the datastore (again, local disks), is 1.3TB, will jobs fail due to space issues?

[Vitaliy S.]

No, I'm talking about IOPs capacity, latency and write rate and the time it takes to commit the snapshot. Do you have a monitoring tool to check that?

[etsrad]

We presently don't, we were looking at VeeamOne but its pricey. HostA and HostB will both have SSDs in Raid 10 and 10kRPM drives in Raid 50, along with the hosts having 10GB networking.

[Vitaliy S.]

We have a free edition of Veeam ONE, so give it a try. As to answering your question about possible job performance, it's better to install the product and see what the bottleneck is going to be.