Secondary Storage - DR Site

Hi @Shak thats a perfectly sound plan and crucially, will work. However if I may, I’d like to offer some advice to improve your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and potentially performance.

I would suggest replicas at your DR site, to be able to spin up your VMs much quicker than restoring from backups, as they’ll be uncompressed copies stored natively in Hyper-V or VMware (you haven’t specified), the performance of the VMs will be faster than reading from a backup.

You wouldn’t necessarily need to send your copy a second time and could seed your replicas from your backup copy job, you could then have certain VMs replicate more frequently for a lower amount of data loss (RPO).

Creating replicas enables the following benefits:

• Re-IP: If your DR site had a different subnet range you can get Veeam to automatically amend the networking for all your VMs as they boot! Saving DR reconfiguration time.
• SureReplica (VMware Only): You can perform automation testing to confirm core services are accessible and even script your own bits here. If you’re Hyper-V if you leverage backups as your data source instead of production you could still perform SureBackup on your original backup to validate that, giving a strong likelihood that your replicas or backup copy are good working sets of data.
• Failover Plan: Your business applications have dependencies, this could be active directory, DNS, a core SQL server etc. Failover plan let’s you pre-define the boot order for your VMs and boot delays between them, so all dependencies start in the correct order, saving troubleshooting time as DNS wasn’t ready when your applications started trying to sign in!

Finally if doing all this you could then also move your Veeam B&R server to your DR site and that way it’s not impacted by a primary site outage and is immediately ready to start your recovery processes instead of the Veeam installation steps you mentioned, again, positively impacting RTO!

These are just lessons from the field 🙂 hopefully this helps!

@MicoolPaul Thank you , that sounds like a plan. Let me go through it and I will have more questions 👍🏻

Sure no problem. Hope all works out.