Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices
Welcome to the Veeam® Backup & Replication™ Best Practices.
This guide is intended to provide best practices for Veeam Backup & Replication. It is not meant as a full documentation or detailed explanation of the features. Please refer to the Veeam Help Center for these kinds of documents.
The best practice guide is intended for professionals in search of answers and suggestions to different topics. It may be a design idea, the best way to use a given feature, pitfalls to avoid, and so on. In general, this information has been developed, collected and updated by the team of Veeam Solutions Architects working in the field together with Veeam users. They don’t explain the theory, but the practice.
Be aware that a best practice is not the only available answer. It will fit in the majority of cases, but can also be totally wrong under different circumstances. Make sure you understand the implications of the advised best practices or ask someone who does.
If in doubt, reach out to Veeam professionals in our forums.
How to use this book
IF you are an old-time reader of this guide, you may have noticed that we have moved around many pages, and created a completely new structure. The basic idea is to resemble the same workflow that a Veeam architect will follow when designing a new Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure:
1-Assess: first, you start by surveying the environment you need to protect. You collect data, ask for technical and business requirements, SLA’s, RPO and RTO and all the other information that is needed to design the solution;
2-Design: with all the information that has been collected, you start to design the solution, by involving all the needed Veeam components, each with their characteristics, strengths and limits, and you will also learn how to properly size them, with security always in mind;
3-Build: once the environment has been designed, it’s time to build it. An architect can build it themself, or pass the instructions to other teams to proceed with the deployment. Here, you will see useful information and tricks like configuration options, registry keys, hints and so on;
4-Operate: when the environment is ready, it’s time to use it! Here, you will learn how to properly configure the different jobs available in the software and how to restore data.
5-Secure: when you have been through all the other stages, its time to make sure your have as little risk as possible. This section covers basic security principles that would help reduce risk and give extra confidence in your project. When you are here, you should always go back to the start to ensure you have achieved your objective. We have assumed you will iterate naturally and from time to time fine tune to reach your goal.
Finally, there are some additional sections for specific topics.
Each section will also link to the help guide for more information on the basic installation of that particular component.
We hope you will find the information collected here useful. Thanks!
The Veeam Solutions Architect Team