As we continue on Module 3 of the Veeam VMCE v9 Study Guide its time to look at VBR prerequisites, the many deployment scenarios available for VBR and finally what upgrade options we have when upgrading Veeam Backup & Replication to version 9. One of the benefits of deploying Veeam Backup & Replication is that you can make it as simple as you want, or as hard as you want 
Veeam makes it very easy to deploy VBR and adapt to any size of environment. To help break down the scenarios Veeam provides three different types of deployments for VBR; Simple, Advanced and Distributed
Simple Deployment
Basically in the simple deployment we are looking at having only once instance of VBR setup and installed on either a physical or virtual machine within our environment. In a simple deployment we have basically one server, the Backup Server, which hosts all the roles and components we need to backup our environment. The Backup server at this point would host the following components
- Veeam Backup Server – for management
- Backup Proxy – for moving data
- Backup Repository – for hosting our backups.
- Mount Server – for restoration
- Guest Interaction Proxy
Interesting tidbits about Simple Deployment
- All components are installed automatically
- The Backup Repository is determined by scanning the volumes of the machine in which we are installing. The volume with the greatest free disk space is used with a “Backup” folder created on it.
- Only used if you are evaluating VBR, or have a small number of VMs you need to protect
- Suggested to install on a VM (but not required) as it would give you the hot-add backup transfer option.
Advanced Deployment
Advanced Deployment is the way to go if you have an environment of any size to back up. In these cases we can’t put all the load on the Backup Server as it would be too much for it to handle. In this deployment model we have the following components
- Backup Server – Our control plane
- Backup Proxies – Data mover components on separate servers to handle the transfer of data.
- Backup repositories – Separate servers containing capacity to store our backup files, VM copies, and replica metadata
- Dedicated Mount Servers – again, separate components in order to efficiently perform application and file level restore back to original production VMs
- Dedicated Guest Interaction Proxies – separate components allowing us to efficiently deploy runtime process in our Windows VMs.
Interesting tidbits about advanced deployments
- Allows us to easily scale up and down to environments by adding more or less components.
- Backup traffic can be dynamically distributed amongst proxies.
- Good setup to begin replicating data offsite by deploying proxies in both local and remote sties.
- Provides HA to our backup jobs by having the ability to allow jobs to failover to other proxies if some become unavailable or overloaded
Distributed Deployment
The distributed deployment is used in cases where environments are spread out geographically with multiple backup servers installed across many locations with the backup servers themselves being federated using Enterprise Manger. This way jobs can all be managed centrally, as well as providing an easy way to search for and find files across all sites. This deployment model contains the following components
- Multiple Veeam Backup Servers for each site
- Multiple Veeam proxies for each site
- Multiple repositories located at each site
- multiple mount servers and guest interaction proxies at each site
- Veeam Enterprise Manager Server
- Optional Veeam Backup Search server to streamline search processes.
Interesting tidbits about the distributed model
- With Enterprise Manager installed, we are able to provide flexible delegation operations to users within the environment to perform restores
- Centralized license management
- All the benefits of the advanced model
Upgrading Veeam Backup & Replication to v9
If you have ever had to upgrade an instance of Veeam Backup & Replication you should know that it is a pretty simple product to upgrade – with that said, you should always do your due diligence – backing up your SQL database and Veeam configuration is always a good idea – as well as ensuring you have completely been through all of the release notes.
There are a few limitations and concerns you might want to pay attention to when looking to upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication v9
- Supports a direct upgrade from version 7.0 Update 4 and 8.0
- If you have any Windows 2003 servers acting as backup infrastructure components within your current configuration, they will need to be removed before the upgrade as they aren’t supported – this will cause the upgrade to fail.
- The first time you connect to your newly upgraded backup server with a client backup console, they will be prompted to apply the update to their console as well.
- The Console cannot be downgraded
- The first time you login after the upgrade Veeam will prompt you to update all of the other backup infrastructure in your environment such as proxies, repositories, etc. These are upgraded in an automated deployment by the Veeam Backup Server.
