Veeam at scale: from tape to several hundred VMs on three continents
An international in-store media group replaced tape with Veeam across Europe, the United States and Australia, with immutable copies, offload to object storage and its own dashboards.
Context
An international in-store media group runs several hundred virtual machines and a number of physical servers across sites in Europe, the United States and Australia. Its backups still relied on an old tape system.
Constraint
The sites differ widely in network links and storage. Disk and cloud storage have a budget, backups must resist ransomware, and auditors expect proof that restores work.
What we did
- Replaced tape with Veeam Backup & Replication on every site, with local repositories, proxies, and jobs selected by VMware tags.
- Made local copies immutable wherever the hardware allowed, and offloaded backups to object storage through scale-out repositories with Object Lock.
- Replicated ESXi virtual machines on site where a site needed faster recovery.
- Built custom dashboards on the Veeam API to follow every job across the three continents.
- Used those dashboards to redefine the backup windows, then adapted retention to lower both on-premise storage and offload costs.
- During a coast-to-coast datacenter move in the United States, re-tuned repositories and jobs after failures, with WAN accelerators and new compression settings.
- Documented each site and wrote a runbook for adding a new one.
Result
Tape is retired. Every site has immutable copies, and one dashboard shows the state of every job. Backup windows come from real job data, and retention now matches what storage and offload cost.
Stack
Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere and ESXi, QNAP iSCSI repositories, Wasabi object storage with Object Lock, the Veeam API, WAN accelerators.