Planning and Preparation

Infrastructure of Veeam Backup & Replication depends on the business needs and resources of your company. Before you install Veeam Backup & Replication, make sure that your backup infrastructure meet product hardware recommendations and system requirements. For more information, see these sections:

Before you deploy Veeam Backup & Replication, consider the following tips and recommendations that may help you design your backup infrastructure:

  1. Define protection scope.
  2. Define RTO and RPO goals.
  3. Select Veeam Backup & Replication features that you will need.
  4. Plan how many copies of your data you need to store (3-2-1 rule).
  5. Design Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

Step 1. Define Protection Scope

Define how many machines you need to protect and the amount of disk space the machines use.

After defining the protection scope, calculate how much of the total amount of data is actually changing on a daily basis. This information is required because of the mechanism of how Veeam Backup & Replication creates a backup chain. At the first run, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a full backup file; at the second and further runs, Veeam Backup & Replication creates an incremental backup file that contains only the blocks that has been changed since the last backup. As a result, the daily change rate has a significant impact on the backup window and the storage capacity needed to store the backups. As Veeam Backup & Replication creates image-level or block level backups, you need to know the daily change rate on the block level. For VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, you can use Veeam ONE to measure and generate a report on the daily change rate of VMs.

As a result of this step, you can make a list of machines to be protected, including the data on which of the machines contain databases, which of the machines host business critical applications, and how much of the total amount of data is changing on these machines on a daily basis. This information will help you in further steps of deployment planning.

Step 2. Define RPO and RTO

When you make a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you must define two important parameters: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Planning and Preparation 

Define a list of your workloads grouped and organized by how fast they must be recoverable. Divide the list into categories. The higher the recovery priority, the lower the RTO will be required relative to the rest of your workloads.

Step 3. Select Veeam Backup & Replication Features

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.

 

RPO: Seconds

RPO: Minutes

RPO: Hours (<24h)

RPO: Hours (24-48)

RTO: Seconds

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) (for VMware vSphere)

Replication

 

 

RTO: Minutes

 

Snapshot Orchestration (for VMware vSphere)

Backup

Backup Copy

RTO: Hours

 

 

 

Tape Devices Support

Apart from backup and replication options, the RTO also depends on the method of recovery and recovery verification. Veeam Backup & Replication offers a number of recovery options for various disaster recovery scenarios, including Instant Recovery, image-level restore, file-level restore, restore of application items and so on. For details, see the following sections:

  • Restore: performing restore from backup files to the original or a new location.

Step 4. Plan How Many Copies of Data You Need (3-2-1 rule)

To build a successful data protection and disaster recovery plan, we recommend that you follow the 3-2-1 rule:

Veeam Backup & Replication provides integration with various types of repositories. Select where you want to store your backup files. For the full list of supported backup repositories, see Backup Repository, Tape Devices Support, Storage System Snapshot Integration.

To plan the required space on repositories, you may also need to analyze for how long will you store the backups. Veeam Backup & Replication provides short-term and long-term (GFS) retention policies to effectively store the backup files.

Step 5. Design Veeam Backup & Replication Infrastructure

Veeam Backup & Replication can be used in virtual environments of any size and complexity. The architecture of the solution supports on-site and off-site data protection, operations across remote sites and geographically dispersed locations. Veeam Backup & Replication provides flexible scalability and easily adapts to the needs of your virtual environment.

Note

Consider general security recommendations and recommendations for hardening specific backup infrastructure components when designing Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

Before you install Veeam Backup & Replication, familiarize yourself with common deployment scenarios and plan your backup infrastructure layout. For details, see Deployment Scenarios.

The easiest way to start is to deploy a Veeam Backup & Replication server, one dedicated server for a backup proxy and one repository. While you keep adding backup jobs, add more proxies and repositories. Each backup infrastructure component has its own specifics and requirements that are described in the following sections of this guide:

Also, note that in most cases, it is recommended to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager and Veeam ONE on separate servers.

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