In this tutorial, we will see together the installation and configuration of the Veeam WAN Accelerator feature in version 9.5.

Wan accelerator technology is specific to remote jobs: backup jobs and replication jobs. As an integrated feature, Veeam WAN Acceleration does not add complexity to the backup infrastructure and does not require agents. On each Veeam Backup & Replication WAN Accelerator, creates the VeeamWAN folder containing the following data:

Note : WAN acceleration operations require a lot of resources. When creating a WAN Accelerator, allocate the appropriate CPU and RAM resources to the Microsoft Windows machine that you plan to use. It is recommended to assign this role to machines with 8 GB of RAM and above. Otherwise, the WAN acceleration process may fail.

 

Before you begin, be aware that this feature is only available (in full version) Enterprise Plus edition; If you have Enterprise Edition you will only be able to use the WAN Accelerator feature with a Cloud Connect repository.

In order to have a comparison of all the features, depending on the edition, you can go here.

Extrait des éditions Veeam 9.5

The installation scope of this tutorial:

• Veeam 9.5 Enterprise Plus
• WAN Accelerator target server: Windows Server 2016 (64Gb RAM)
• WAN Accelerator source server : Windows Server 2016 (96Gb RAM)
• Bandwidth : WAN 100Mbit/s

 

Install and configure WAN Accelerator

Declaring the target server in Veeam

• Connect to the main Veeam Backup & Replication server, go to the BACKUP INFRASTRUCTURE, select Managed Servers, and then Add Server

• Select server type

• Enter the name/ip of target server

• Choose/create credentials

• Here you have a summary of what will be installed, click Apply

• You will have the view on the progress of the installation of the target server

• Click Next then Finish

 

Install WAN Accelerator on target server

• Connect to the main Veeam Backup & Replication server, go to the BACKUP INFRASTRUCTURE, select WAN Accelerators, and then Add WAN Accelerator

• The installation wizard opens, select the target server (the one we added in the previous step) and then Next

• Here, we will define the cache size to assign to the target server. Be careful this step is important (see info below)!

You must have enough free space for the global cache data. It is recommended that you provide 10 GB for each type of operating system that you want to back up. By default, Veeam Backup & Replication allocates 100 GB of global cache.

Example: If you back up the following machines:

• 1 VM that is running Microsoft Windows 7
• 3 virtual machines running Microsoft Windows 2008 R2
• 2 virtual machines running Microsoft Windows 2012 R2

You will back up VMs with 3 different OS types, so you must allocate 30 GB for the global cache on the target WAN Accelerator.

More details on the sizing of the WAN accelerator cache here

• Here you have a summary of what will be installed, click Apply (We see that the transport role already exists, it was installed in the first step)

• You will have the view on the progress of the installation of WAN accelerator on the target server

• Click Next then Finish

 

Install WAN Accelerator on source server

To install WAN accelerator on the source server, the procedure is pretty much the same.

• Connect to the main Veeam Backup & Replication server, go to the BACKUP INFRASTRUCTURE, select WAN Accelerators, and then Add WAN Accelerator (you’ll notice on the right side that we see the WAN accelerator that we added to the previous stage).

• The installation wizard opens, select the source server, then Next

• Here, we will define the cache size to assign to the source server. Be careful this step is important (see info below)!

When you run a remote job through WAN accelerators, Veeam Backup & Replication analyzes the blocks of data that will be targeted and calculates the digests for those blocks of data. The data is stored on the source WAN accelerator, in the VeeamWAN folder on disk with the most available disk space.

It is strongly recommended to provide sufficient disk space on the source WAN accelerator to store the data. The amount of space required depends on the capacity of the source VMs. For 1 TB of capacity, you must provide 20 GB of disk space. For example, if you plan to back up 10 VMs with a capacity of 2 TB, you need to allocate 40 GB of disk space for the source WAN accelerator data.

More details on the sizing of the WAN accelerator cache here

• Here you have a summary of what will be installed, click on Apply (We see that the transport role already exists)

• You will then have the view on the progress of the installation of WAN accelerator on the source server

• Click Next then Finish

 

The two WAN accelerators are well installed, we can see the 2 objects in our Veeam Backup & Replication interface

 

Hope this article has been helpful to you. In a future article I will explain how to create a Backup Copy Job using WAN accelerator!