I was recently brainstorming a way for our company to move 10 TB (27+ VM’s) to an offsite data center on a 50 Mbps pipe. This is work in progress but I dig writing about trying new things. I will leave the company name out of course and I’ve “blurred” any tell-tale information on my print screens.
Phase I = Proof of concept & Replica Seed Job Executed onsite.
Constraints: We have to keep servers and business running. We have no way to move virtual disks over that pipe to data-center. We do not have the ability to increase bandwidth. )
I modeled current offsite plans and purchased Synology DS718+ Mirrored with a couple of 10 TB drives which I will call the suitcase to be hand delivered to datacenter. Utilized Veeam Backup and Replication method of seeding the “suitcase”.
The first job to run is the replica seeding job. It’s time consuming but it gets all the servers on the suitcase. Basically a normal backup job to the suitcase.
Next I followed directions of pretending I was offsite and running a Replica job off the suitcase to a test ESXI host that is built off the seed (think of it as a simple restore)
Now that the replica was on my test offsite, I reseeded changes with a subsequent backup run of the backup job…
Overall this should work. A Big backup runs to capture all VM’s. Send the Suitcase repository out, Setup connections from my Veeam Server to the new datacenter and proceed with repopulating the backup seed. However, after seeing results, am thinking that skipping reseeding the suitcase backup job straight for a Replica Mapping to save time. Stay tuned!
Phase II in my next Post!
Reference:
Ryan Messier 