We're currently weighing our options between moving to the cloud or staying on-prem for our infrastructure. Meanwhile, I have a pressing question regarding our Veeam setup. We have three ESXi hosts managed by a vCenter, all running local storage without a SAN. Recently, we faced a tough situation when we lost three drives in a RAID6 setup, and without hot spares, I had to restore our VMs from backups after one host failed. Thankfully, our Veeam server was safe since it wasn't on that same host, but it made me think: is there a way to replicate the Veeam VM to the other hosts? The goal is to ensure that if the host running Veeam goes down, we can quickly bring up a replicated VM to start restoring our services. I do regularly back up the Veeam configuration to our backup server, which holds all our backups as well.
4 Answers
It's actually not necessary to replicate the Veeam VM itself as long as your backups are being stored offsite somewhere. What we do is keep a copy of Veeam's standalone backup Extract Utility on our DR PCs. If things go south, you can restore the Veeam VM from the backup files to a working host and proceed from there. Alternatively, set up a dedicated DR PC with Veeam Community Edition. Just remember to document any cloud credentials you use for your backups.
Losing three drives is rough! It’s true that RAID isn't foolproof, but there are countless ways to back up running VMs to another host for redundancy. You'll just need to dig into which methods meet your unique needs.
You definitely want your backups safely stored offsite. As for replicating the Veeam VM, yes, it can be done! Also, planning for shared storage and a dedicated backup server is a smart move.
From what I know, Veeam does recommend running it on its own hardware for best results. That way, you can utilize it to restore VMs or leverage instant recovery features. Since you aren’t using shared storage, replicating it to another server or site is definitely the way to go.
Exactly, we have a dedicated Veeam host and repository for that purpose.
We've got our backups offsite with Wasabi, and I'm figuring out how to back up the config over there. If we stick to on-prem, I definitely want to implement a proper DR setup.