What happens existing VDP 6.0 backups if you need to re-deploy the appliance...Can you still recover previously backed up VM's?

[chrismetro3000]

All,

So perhaps this has already been answered somewhere else and if so could you point me in the right direction please?  Basically the situation is the following.  I have 2 sites ( primary and DR) and have deployed VDP 6.0 at the primary location and configured backup jobs successfully to local datastores at the primary site.  Restores work great as well.  I have also configure the storage array to perform mirroring at the array level in a stretched cluster configuration.  So the question is if something were to happen to the VDP appliance at the primary site ( accidentally deleted or got corrupted) would I be able to deploy a new appliance and re-index all the previous protected VM's jobs or would all of that information be lost and I would have to completely start from scratch?  My concern is if something were to happen to the primary site and I only had the replicated LUN's at the DR site then how could I conduct a restore of the VM's the original VDP appliance had done for the previous months?  Seems like the purpose to me of VDP is to ensure you have and can retain backups of VM's for extended periods of time and should be able to restore them at another location in the event of a disaster but so far it's not clear how to do this.  Many thanks in advance for suggestions or location of methods to retain all previously backed up jobs

[vdp4life]

I think a lot of people are in this boat. I can share my story and how we decided to move forward.

Originally we had a similar scenario where we would replicate the LUN the vdp was using. It was disastrous because when we did test lun restores on DR, vdp would get corrupt (note this was vdp 5.5 .. maybe things got better). So we went a different model and just rely on VDP to replicate itself to another VDP in DR. You can still restore all the VMS and worse case just create new backup jobs in DR and because of the Dedupe, you won't need to transfer all the data back. The software is pretty smart in that way.

Hope this helps.

[chrismetro3000]

Thanks for that advice and yes it seemed a little strange that something designed to help with backups had this single point of failure but good to know from your experience in the real world.  So that said when you say you replicated itself do you mean you configured VDP replication of the Guest image ( the VDP appliance itself) or did you select "replicated backups " I am fairly new to VDP but so far 6.0 seems pretty straight forward to restore VM's and even individual files but again this is only in the same environment while everything is online...naturally when we may really need it like a disaster situation is what concerned me.  I know there are 3rd party products out there like Zerto and Veeam but since we are already licensed for VDP I figured I would see if it fits

[vbrowncoat]

VDP supports replicating backup data to one or more other VDP appliances. That way in a disaster where your primary (or even primary and secondary) site isn't available you could still do recoveries as needed. Does that make sense?

[jhunter1]

I second GS's recommendation. Use VDP's built in replication - much more efficient, more reliable, encrypted, and very flexible (1:1, 1:N, N:1). Replication jobs can also be configured to use a retention policy different than the backup job. For example, you could tell the local VDP appliance to retain daily backup data for 30 days and then replicate that backup data maybe once per week or whatever and retain that replicated backup data for 6 months.

[vbrowncoat]

If you don't want to or can't use replication (I'd love to hear more about why) another option is outlined in this blog post from jhunter@vmware on recovering a replicated VDP appliance.

[chrismetro3000]

Thanks all for your suggestions and ideas.  Like I said new to using VDP so love the real world experience feedback and right now I do not see why I could not utilize replication either so I will take a crack at it and thanks again everyone for the help!!!

[chrismetro3000]

Guys,

Just 2 final quick question here.  I created a secondary VDP at the remote site and started using the replication wizard to configure the new job.

1.     What are the differences between "replicated backups" VS "guest Images/Application Backups"?  I assume I would most likely want to select guest images and that the replicated backups option is if the VDP server I was on already had replicated data and wanted to save that somewhere else?

2.      When I get to the "destination" information what do you put in for "Path:"?  ( is that a path to some local folder in the OS of the destination VDP? Specific datastores? )

Thanks in advance again!!!

[vdp4life]

Application Backups are for Exchange/Sql server backups. If you really just want to do VMs, then guest images > Select Clients individually should suffice. Replicated backups if if you wish to replicate data that has already been replicated to the target. Nice way to do a daisy chain of replication for extra redundancy.

Destination depends on how the target is setup. You can create custom paths with individual user permissions on the target. I'd read the docs for this since creating the custom path requires some CLI. Without it, you replicate to the root path.

Hope this works out for you.