We have been using Veeam with a number of our ESXi and Hyper-V customers with great success.\u00a0 Frankly, backup is always a pain in the backside and Veeam makes backing up virtual environments just a little bit easier.<\/p>\n
One thing that I like about Veeam is the ability to easily manage remote backups \u2013 backups that route out to a remote site somewhere away from the main backup site.\u00a0 The thing I really like is how you set up the backup as a copy \u2013 Backup Copy in Veeam terms \u2013 and Veeam then copies completed backup passes out to the remote site.\u00a0 This leaves the main backup to do its thing without having to rely on the remote backup completing correctly.\u00a0 And, if you have the \u201cEnterprise Plus\u201d version of Veeam you can also take advantage of built-in WAN acceleration for your remote backups.\u00a0 Veeam can also be configured to coalesce remote backups (the Backup Copies) and create synthetic full backups at the remote site without any direct interaction with the Veeam server in the main site.\u00a0 All very cool stuff.<\/p>\n
I recently performed some DR recovery testing with two customers \u2013 one running ESXi and the other Hyper-V.\u00a0 I wanted to test out full system recovery from the remote site data following the upgrade to Veeam v8 at both customers.\u00a0 Neither customer has a massive environment by any means as one has a single physical server with a couple of VM\u2019s and the other has three physical servers with six VM\u2019s.\u00a0 That said, their recovery requirements are pretty much the same as any large organization, they need to be back up and running right<\/em> now<\/em>.\u00a0 My testing environment consisted of a small Dell tower server, my Win 8.1 laptop and a USB disk with the copy of each customer\u2019s remote datastore.<\/p>\n In each case I built out the Dell server as a \u201cmirror\u201d of their hosting environment so it was loaded with either ESXi 5.1 U3 or Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V role enabled.\u00a0 Once built I fired up my laptop and did the recoveries.\u00a0 I know there is a myth out there about Veeam and recoveries that says you must<\/span> have the Veeam database to perform recoveries and I want to state, categorically, that information is false<\/em>.\u00a0 All you need is the full backup chain from the Veeam datastore, nothing else is required.\u00a0 In my case, I simply pointed my new Veeam install at the USB disk, imported the full backup, set my restore options and then sat back and watched Veeam do its thing.<\/p>\n In both cases, Veeam pulled back the full VM with full fidelity, nothing was missing and it did so very quickly.\u00a0 And all of this was from the remote data (backup copies)which I found doubly impressive!<\/p>\n