Two VDP Appliances Backing Up The Same VMs

[970170]

Hi,

So my goal is to have weekly backups go to one VDP appliance, and monthly backups go to another VDP appliance, on a separate datastore.  I am stuck on VDP v5.1.1 for now since I can't upgrade my vCenters yet.  What I am trying to do is protect my backups from a datastore failure and/or VDP OS corruption - both of which have already happened in the past.

My question is, will I be able to just deploy a 2nd VDP appliance and tell it to back up the same VMs that are already being backed up by the 1st VDP appliance?  I'm wondering what the complications would be, i.e. if the 2nd VDP only runs a monthly backup, will it be smart enough to get all the changes from the previous monthly backup or will it pick up the CBT files from the last daily backup from the 1st VDP appliance?

Thanks!

[Paul11 · Accepted solution]

You can do the backups in this way with 2 VDP appliances and the CBT will be handled correctly. The monthly backup will take more time due to the higher number of changes. Only look at the starting time of the backups, they should'nt run parallel.

Paul

[970170]

So just so I'm clear, the VM directory will maintain 2 separate sets of CTK files (I've never seen this before)?  Have you tried this yourself?

Thanks!

[Paul11]

The VDP is working with timestamps and is looking for changes since the last backup-time. So every VDP will always get the changes since the last backup which was done by itself. Other backups don't change the timestamp in your VDP, so you can be sure that everything is done correctly, even when more appliances are doing backups of the same VM. Doing backups of one VM in parallel may be will also work, but i have never done this because of the high IO-stress so i would avoid such a situation by using differnt times for weelky and monthly backups.

[970170]

Just wanted to close the loop, everything works as expected.  Thanks!

[vikrant_kamboj]

can anybody tell me . where the vm backup will be stored can i change it to my selected backup server on network  . we are using vsphere data protection 5.5 .