VEEAM advise please

[DavePa]

This has probably been asked a hundred times before but I'm not wanting to hijack somebody else's thread or resurrect an old one. We are about to implement VEEAM and all of my costings have been based around the following:

 

 

• 2 sites
  
• 3 servers being backed up. These are dual CPU HyperV hosts so I am buying 6 licences
  
• 3 servers being used for backup - these are dedicated for backup and not used for anything else. 2 are at the larger site with the other at the smaller site
  
• Site 1 backup goes to site 2
  
• Site 2 backup goes to site 1
  
• The 3rd backup server holds a copy of all backups and is in a different part of site 1 as far away from the other backup server as possible!
  

 

By doing this I have each site backed up to the other and an additional copy of both sets of data on another server that is 100yds from the other copy

 

No NAS being used, all storage is HDD storage on the servers themselves, these are relatively slow HDD (I think 7.2k from memory) but each server has 10tb of space. I'm hoping to 'seed' the backups by taking the backup servers to the sites they will be backing up and doing an initial backup before moving them to their eventual locations.

 

Questions:

 

 

• Does this make sense
  
• Is it feasible to do this with VEEAM
  
• Have I missed anything (other than the sheer amount of work that will be required to do it!)
  

 

Once I've actually purchaed the licences I can speak to VEEAM but I'm hesitant to ask them until that point - if it won't work then I may end up going with a different solution. I'm not looking for a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this, only trying to establish that it can be done and makes sense

[Steve21]

When you say 6 licenses are you not using the essentials licensing? You get it much cheaper, but it's max of 3x 2CPU licenses.

 

In terms of the backups you'd be a lot better to do the backups locally, and then use the WAN link etc to do a copy over, as it won't mean the jobs stick running for ages affecting your server/snapshots etc.

 

Steve

[mikkydoos]

Whats the link between the 2 sites?

 

Veeam incrementally backups up your VM's. Once you've done the initial backup its remarkably light on bandwidth.

 

Like @Steve21 says, you can also set up copy jobs. You backup once then schedule a copy job to replicate that backup to another server, rather than running the backup again.

 

I do 3 of my mission critical VM servers this way in half an hour, including the copy job (all over the LAN however). Run them at night. Should be pretty quick. Your VM's aren't that big (?).

 

Not a lot of work either. Veeam is pretty intuitive.

 

 

Also, I would ring Veeam before you buy it. That what their sales dept is for. And trial it.

 

You'll be impressed. Its great

Edited November 11, 2016 by mikkydoos

[DavePa]

@Steve21 I did consider essentials but we are already at the max and there is no upgrade path to the 'full fat' (full cost more like!) product so as my costings on the backup and retention were approved that's the way we are going

@mikkydoos It's currently a 30mb link - not brilliant. I've asked about migrating to a 100mb link but the cost means it may not happen

 

I'm planning on putting backup server1 and hyperv1 in the same rack on site1 and doing the initial backup before moving backup server1 to site2 in order to do the incremental backups. Same idea with backup server2 and hyperv2 at site2 - do the initial backup locally and then move the server to the other site.

 

The only park I'm not sure on is whether to make the backup server3 a copy of the others or a fresh backup. I suspect that it where the 'replication' part will come in

[DavePa]

We've now got our Veeam software and licences so ready to go. Step 1 is to read the quickstart guide...oh wait, there doesn;t seem to be one, only a 952 page manual! Gah, better not print that out! Oh well, looks like I'm about to find out how intuitive it is