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Acronis Backup 12.5 On Prem - Using Internal VM Host Cluster Raid Array Space to Store Backups

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Hello

We have a customer with the following Acronis Backup 12.5 On Prem requirements;

Back Up Scope
•    Need to backup a VMware clustered environment of 6 hosts on main site (and 3 hosts on DR) 
•    All hosts are connected to a SAN (both at HQ and DR) 
•    All hosts have internal storage.
•    All hosts has two 14 physical core processors (12 physical CPUs, 2 per server)
•    Data to backup 6 TB at most (Full)
•    Network bandwidth limitation (50mbps) between HQ and DR
•    Backup window 18:00-07:00am

Requirements
•    Backup of virtual servers and leverage the use of the available internal storage of the hosts
•    Backup should be replicated to DR
•    @ DR backup to be moved on tapes (DELL TL2000)
•    We need to get to clearly define RTO, RPO and retention period based on available resources
•    Encryption of data in transit (between HQ and DR site)
•    Encryption of tapes
•    Scalable to future requirements 

We have two questions..

Q1: How best to manage and configure Acronis backup to make use of the internal raid array storage across the ESXI Hosts? One suggestion was making use of Cyber Infrastructure??

Q2: The client would like a high availability secondary management console on the DR site, incase he loses the HQ. Please could you direct me to documentation on how to set this up and "sync" the DR and HQ Management consoles?

Many thanks in advance

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Hi Chris,

Q1: To leverage the local storage available on host there are the following options available:

If the 6 ESXi hosts in cluster all have internal storage which cannot be shared natively (e.g. it's not vSAN storage or analogue), e.g. there are 6 separate storages, then one option is to have Agent for VMware (Windows) installed on a Windows VM on each of the hosts and setup backup storage on local VM disk, where local VM disk is backed by the internal storage of each host. These agents should then replicate their backups to some central location in DR site (for example an SMB share).

If there is clustered storage pool accessible from all hosts in the cluster, then you can create a separate Windows/Linux VM which will host the network share accessible over SMB and backed by this clustered storage, so all Agents for VMware will be sending data to this storage over SMB.

In other words all depends on how the internal storage is organized/what are options to access it from backup agents side. 

Q2: Here the possible options will depend on what's required to be managed in the DR site, since from the above description it looks like that there will be only backups placed in there and thus in case of loss of the HQ site, there will be not much to manage in DR site.

In case it's planned to have some VMs running on DR site, they can be managed (backed up) by a separate instance of Acronis Management Server (AMS), which runs independently from the original HQ one, e.g. there is no practical need to sync up the HQ instance of AMS and the one in DR site, since they will be managing different set of resources. There is no such feature yet in Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 which would allow to sync up 2 separate AMS instances (no clustering for AMS at the moment) - it's planned for future releases, however in your specific scenario this feature doesn't seem to be required.

In total it should be x2 AMS instances: one in HQ site, with backup agents (Agents for VMware) connected to original production vSphere (vCenter) + second in DR site, with backup agents connected to vSphere in DR site.

Also one option to consider is to have cloud-based AMS in "Cloud Management" mode, where the backup agents are running in HQ + DR sites, but managed from cloud.acronis.com (AMS hosted in Acronis datacenter). In this case the AMS instance will be independent from sites failures.

Thank you.