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Setting Up Backup Infrastructure

In this article

    Before you can perform data protection and disaster recovery tasks with Veeam Backup & Replication, you must plan and set up your backup infrastructure. The backup infrastructure architecture may vary depending on your virtual environment and backup strategy. A typical backup infrastructure consists of the following components:

    To set up the backup infrastructure, you must perform the following actions:

    1. [Recommended] Specify credentials. You can specify credentials for accounts that you plan to use to connect to backup infrastructure components, VM guest OSes and other objects in the backup infrastructure. For more information, see Managing Credentials.
    2. [Recommended] Specify encryption passwords. You can set up passwords that you plan to use for data encryption. For more information, see Managing Passwords for Data Encryption.
    3. Add servers. You must connect to the backup server all virtualization hosts and servers that you plan to use as backup infrastructure components. These include off-host backup proxies, backup repositories, WAN accelerators and so on.
    4. Assign roles of backup infrastructure components. You must assign corresponding roles to servers that you plan to use as backup infrastructure components.
    5. Specify network settings. You can set up network throttling rules, manage data transfer connections, enable network encryption and specify what networks must be used for data protection operations. For more information, see Managing Network Traffic.

    In addition to its primary functions, a newly deployed backup server performs the role of a backup repository. For this reason, the backup server is added to the list of backup repositories by default. This means that immediately after installation you can connect virtualization hosts and Microsoft Windows/Linux servers, configure and run necessary jobs. The backup server will be used as the backup server and backup repository at the same time. Source Microsoft Hyper-V hosts will be used both as virtual infrastructure servers and backup proxies.

    Such scenario is acceptable only if you plan to protect a small number of VMs or perform pilot testing. For a full-fledged backup infrastructure, you must configure dedicated backup infrastructure components: off-host backup proxies, backup repositories and so on. The distributed backup infrastructure deployment will be organized around the backup server that will function as the point of control for administrative tasks and job processing. Data processing tasks will be offloaded to dedicated backup infrastructure components.