Using two different VDR appliances to back up the same VMs

[MarcusSmith]

Hi,

     I have VDR backing up most of my VMs right now. I am in the process of experimenting with some disaster recovery scenarios using VDR. I would like to set up a new appliance, backing up the same VMs, but with a destination offsite. My question is, would it cause any trouble to have two different appliances backing up the same VMs?

The reason I ask is because I was looking at the notes for last years VMworld session on VDR, and it mentioned, in regards to a troubleshooting scenario in which you would create a new appliance in addition to your current appliance, not to let the two appliances back up the same VMs.

If it is unsafe to do this because of the likelyhood that both appliances might back up the same VMs at the same time, I could schedule the backup windows at different times to avoid this.

Anyone have any ideas?

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

I would create a second local vDR appliance and your remote vDR and test against a test VM. The two vDR appliances will have their own CBT files for each VM so they should be able to work together but I would go through some testing to see how well they work across the WAN. Make sure you can transfer enough data to accomodate daily data change.

[MarcusSmith]

Cool. I have tested backing up and restoring a test vm from my production environment to the hardware i plan to use in the remote site, and it went well. I just needed to make sure it wouldn't cause problems to back up the same vms with two different appliances. Looks like i should be good to go then.

Thanks

Sent from my iPad

[DSTAVERT]

A couple of things to consider. vDR can store many point in time copies in a very small space. Recovery can be slow and I would suggest that this will increase as time goes by. I would consider other solutions for things like Domain controllers and perhaps other critical services. Being able to quickly bring up domain controllers and other most critical services will relieve pressures for recovering other services.

Each VM disk write requires two ESXi writes. One to the VMDK and the second to the CBT file. Two vDR appliances, two CBT files, three writes. It may be noticeable. Make sure your storage devices have spare IO capacity.

[ldelloca]

Hi,

remember not to start two different jobs on the same VM at the same time, invoking two snapshots of the same VM for backup does not sounds good to me.

Regards,

Luca.

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Luca Dell'Oca

SayIT SA