Yesterday, I wrote up a set of questions we have gotten around the new iland DRaaS solution with Veeam Cloud Connect Replication (VCC-R). Today, I’d like to continue that list, but focus more on the networking and technical topics which were hot during the recent webinar.
Without any further ado – Networking:
What is the default network appliance included with VCC-R? iland bundles in the native Veeam networking appliance, standard. iland can provision internal networks to this appliance along with external IPs
Is Client VPN or Site to Site VPN supported by the Veeam network appliance? No – if you need this functionality should utilize and a Cisco ASAv license provided by iland, or utilize your own 3rd party virtual appliance.
How would I access a 3rd party firewall such as the ASAv at the DR location? The firewall would be accessed via a Public IP designated as the management interface of the firewall.
Is WAN acceleration supported? No, iland does not recommend Veeam’s WAN acceleration appliance – we would recommend upgrading your available WAN Bandwidth. This recommendation comes from our extensive experience leveraging the VCC technology, as well as the costs and savings of running the WAN appliance.
Can I run Live VMs such as a domain controller or ASAv? Yes – and you would be billed for on-demand public cloud resources they consume, running in our enterprise-class environment. Typically, a domain controller costs just a couple hundred a month.
With a setup involving an ASAv or 3rd party Firewall appliance, would the Veeam Network Appliance exist as part of the solution? No – the ASAv or 3rd party Firewall would provide all networking in this scenario, and there would be no Veeam Network Appliance present.
Now, let’s talk about the repository:
Is the DRaaS repository separate from the standard VCC Backup repository? Yes, customers looking for the ability to replicate and spin-up machines would need a VCC-R repository in addition to their VCC backup repository. Backup and Replication are separate services.
If I am doing both backup and replication, how many connections to iland do I need? You only need 1 connection to set things up with iland. iland will setup two repositories which will be available once the connection is established – 1 for backup and 1 for DR. These can be scaled independently and ring-fenced from each other.
Should I be wary of another provider offering Backup and DR from the same Veeam Repository? Yes – iland has separate services for these separate products for the following reasons:
- For Recovery, VMs need to be spun up on Enterprise Grade Storage, and iland would like RTOs to be as aggressive as possible. As such, we store all our VCC-R jobs on Nimble Encrypted Accelerated storage, where it can be quickly spun up. Others store it together with backup workloads, so it has to first move to better storage, and then spin up – costing significant time in the failover process.
- For Recovery, VMs at iland sit within Enterprise Grade CPU and RAM Clusters – and can be spun up immediately for great performance. With other solutions in the market, the your VMs may be on a lower grade of hardware, or may need transferring to another cluster at the time of failover.
- Backup requires less performant storage and network – and iland passes that savings onto our Backup customers.
And, a few more technical questions:
Is encryption in-transit and at rest supported? Yes – all data passes between the source location and service provider via an encrypted SSL connection. Data is then encrypted at rest on iland’s Storage network.
Does the product support de-duplication and compression? De-duplication and Compression is supported in transit.The Destination repository will however need to be sized to take into account the full thick provisioned VMDK sizes + any restore points.
Is partial failover supported with this solution?Yes – you can failover specific groups of VMs to iland. VMs can communicate back to on premise VMs via the SSL connection – which simulates a Layer 2 Connection.
Can a customer test non intrusively? Testing can be performed at any time. Production machines will remain running, however replication will be halted during any test.
Is failback an option? Failback uses the same mechanisms of failover to provide you with the ability to failback to your on premise environment.
And finally – why iland?
- iland has straightforward pricing, based on GB of storage neeeded – and no hidden fees
- We include our exceptional 24×7 phone support for every customer
- If you’ve read all of this FAQ, you already know – we know our Veeam VCC-R DRaaS!
- Contact us to get started with iland DraaS with Veeam Cloud Connect Replication.
