Based on the analysis of your RTO and RPO, you can define your protection plan and select which features are the most suitable for your business needs. It is a common practice to divide servers and applications into categories and use different protection functionality for each category based on SLA (service level agreement). You can take the following table as a reference:
Related content:
What Backup type do you need? Watch this video to learn the differences between backup types (image-, volume- or file-level backup) and where to configure them in the software.
Deduplication, Compression & Encryption - What's the difference? Watch this demo to learn more about deduplication, compression and encryption, as well as how these play into your disaster recovery plan.
Moving forward, we'll review these additional components and concepts in more details.
Backup Copy Job
Backup copy allows you to create several instances of the same backup data in various locations, whether on-site or off-site. Backup copies have the same format as those created by backup jobs but with separately defined retention.
In this video you'll learn how to create a Backup Copy Job:
Suggested resources:
Replication
Veeam Backup & Replication creates an exact copy of the VM in the native VMware vSphere format on the target host. Veeam Backup & Replication maintains this copy in sync with the source VM. Replication provides minimum recovery time objective (RTO) in case a disaster strikes because VM replicas are in a ready-to-start state.
When replication is used among multiple sites, the backup server should be deployed in the DR site to allow failover plans to work seamlessly, even in the case of the complete loss of the primary site. In this case, the scale-out model should be used, so that data traffic for backups stays in the primary datacenter, while only management and replication traffic flows between the two datacenters.
This will require placing a Proxy Server at other locations to source the data properly and efficiently.
Watch this video to take a deep dive into what data replication is:
Suggested resources:
Continuous Data Protection
Continuous data protection (CDP) is a technology that helps you protect mission-critical VMware virtual machines when data loss for seconds or minutes is unacceptable. CDP also provides minimum recovery time objective (RTO) in case a disaster strikes because CDP replicas are in a ready-to-start state.
CDP constantly replicates I/O operations performed on VMs. To read and process I/O operations in transit between the protected VMs and their underlining datastore, CDP uses vSphere APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO) that gives an option not to create snapshots. Because CDP is always on and does not create snapshots, it allows reaching a lower recovery point objective (RPO) compared to the snapshot-based replication — near-zero RPO which means almost no data loss.
Continue by watching this quick demo to learn how to create the Continuous Data Protection policies, as well as how to schedule and specify policy and use retention options. Alternatively, read about CDP configuration here.
NAS File Share Backup
You can easily backup and restore content of various NAS file shares such as SMB (CIFS) path, NFS path, storage snapshot folder, or VSS snapshots.
When specifying a cache repository for file share backups, you should utilize the backup I/O control to enable more File Proxy threads per file share.
Suggested resources:
Tape Backup
You can archive the following data to tape: VM backups, NAS backups, Veeam Agent backups, Physical machine backups, Backup repositories. Tape servers are dedicated components responsible for transferring data between data source and tape device. Continue reading in this blog article Backup Tape Storage Best Practices.
NDMP
If your NAS device supports the NDMP protocol, you can back up data from it to tape. To do this, you need to add the NAS device as an NDMP server.
NAS Filer
You can also add an enterprise NAS system as a NAS filer to the inventory of the virtual infrastructure. In this video we'll describe this process step-by-step:
Backing up with Agents and Plug-ins Agents
Veeam Backup & Replication lets you deploy and manage the following Veeam Agents on computers in your infrastructure:
- Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows
- Veeam Agent for Linux
- Veeam Agent for IBM AIX
- Veeam Agent for Oracle Solaris
- Veeam Agent for Mac
To manage Veeam Agents on computers in your infrastructure, you must add computers that you want to protect to the inventory in the Veeam Backup & Replication console and deploy Veeam Agents. In Veeam Backup & Replication, protected computers are organized into protection groups.
Agent Backup Job
The backup job is intended for protected computers that have permanent connection to the backup server, such as standalone servers and failover clusters.
Agent Backup Policy
The backup policy is intended for protected computers that may have limited connection to the backup server, such as workstations, laptops and so on. You can choose to create Veeam Agent backups in a backup repository, cloud repository, network shared folder or on a local storage of a protected computer.
Suggested resources:
- Veeam Agent Protection Groups
- Veeam Agent Management Guide
- Veeam Agent Backup Jobs and Policies
- Supported Veeam Agents and product usage scenarios
Plug-ins
Veeam Plug-ins for Enterprise Applications extend the functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication and allow you to create native application-level transactionally-consistent backups of SAP HANA, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. These plug-ins allow your database teams to have additional control and integration over backups of their applications.
A machine protected by both Veeam Plug-in and Veeam Backup & Replication will consume a license only once. For example, you have an Oracle server that you back up using Veeam Plug-in. You also back up this server using image-level backup functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication. In this case, only one license will be consumed.
Now watch this demo to learn how to manage workloads at scale by leveraging Protection Groups or continue reading in the User Guide.
Cloud Agents
Read this blogpost to understand exactly when agents are needed for cloud backup, how do they integrate with cloud services and how do they work.
Suggested resources:
If you need more help getting started, you can post your question in the comments section below or contact us at any time and someone from the Customer Success team will be there to assist you.
Continue to Step 4.2. Additional deployment considerations