If you have been following my blog over the last little while you will know that I have faced a few challenges with Veeam in terms of setting up remote jobs (backups across the WAN). Well, I think I finally have some good news.<\/p>\n
I was originally trying to do full Veeam backups of ESXi VM\u2019s across the WAN meaning I was trying to perform a \u201cnormal\u201d Veeam backup across the WAN. I had managed to do this with a particular customer\u2019s VM under Veeam 6.5 and I thought the same process would work for others but I kept hitting roadblocks. At first I thought it was something to do with changes in Veeam 7.0 but it turns out to that it was far more complicated than that. As I indicated in earlier posts, the customer that I was really having problems with had fairly large VM\u2019s with a lot of changing daily data, at least in one VM. Trying to back them up in a \u201cnormal\u201d fashion across the WAN usually failed miserably and yet things seem to work okay with the other customer. It turns out that, 1) I was labouring under a misconception about the best way to perform Veeam backups across the WAN and, 2) it was just sheer dumb luck that backups for the first customer (the one started under 6.5) actually worked!<\/p>\n
Now that I have gone through many more hoops at both <\/em>customers as well as sorted through issues with Veeam support it seems that I may have some answers.<\/p>\n First and foremost, if you want to perform Veeam backups across the WAN you should be using Backup Copy Jobs<\/strong> as an adjunct to your \u201con LAN\u201d Veeam job and NOT try to target a direct job out over the WAN (unless, of course, you have massive big pipes). The reason for this is that the Backup Copy Job is actually a backup of an existing <\/strong><\/em>backup and not an actual backup of a running VM itself. What this does is backup the last completed backup of a VM and it runs between the Veeam server and the Veeam repositories and does not impact the running VM. The end result is a fully intact and verified copy (hence the Backup Copy <\/em>moniker) of your backup in your remote repository. This is particularly nice as it puts no load on your production VM or the hypervisor host. This can be particularly important if you have a busy VM and it gets impacted when a snapshot is taken or removed during busy operational periods.<\/p>\n Secondly, if you are serious<\/em> about all of this then you want to upgrade your Veeam license to Enterprise Plus so that you get the WAN accelerator feature. Backup Copy Jobs are currently the only<\/em><\/strong> jobs that actually use the WAN Accelerator and from what I\u2019ve seen it can make a very large difference in the amount of data that is actually transferred across the WAN. I originally thought the WAN Accelerator worked with all types of Veeam jobs, including Replication, but that is incorrect. I have been told that Veeam is considering how the WAN Accelerator feature might be enabled for other jobs but, for now, only Backup Copy Jobs leverage the capability.<\/p>\n I have happily running Backup Copy Jobs, now, and the remaining hair on my head is safe from being torn out any further. My thanks to Michael Strine at Veeam Support for helping to get me pointed in the right direction and for patiently working through the whole process with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"