I would design it like this.
Install Veeam Backup & Replicion on the third server. This will be your Backup & Replication Orchestration server. I would opt for a 4th server or cloud storage, but I'll come to that next.
The first server will be your primary production server. I don't know anything about physical locations, but this can be in location A.
The second server can be your failover server. I don't know what kind of disaster scenario's you are protection against, but this van be in location B.
If you are planning for protection against physical disaster like fire, flooding, severe storms or theft of the server I would place the failover server in another location. If it is a production location that cannot function when the building is gone it mostly don't help anything to bring the IT online in another location in a few minutes. In this case I would balance load over both servers and be sure to keep at least 50% resources free on both servers. This way you make best use of the available hardware and gaining performance profits until one of the servers fails.
The third server can be in the same location too. This way your restores in case of hardware failure or ransomeware can be performed with maximum performance. Add a fourth server in another location or use cloud storage and create an immutable backup copy on that server. That way at least one copy of your backup storage is untouchable by disaster or malicous actors. Best is to use the 32110 rule explained on many places.
Again. We don't know anything about the company or the environment you are trying to protect. What are the RPO/RTO requirements of the various IT systems you are running? Try to identify the company IT crown-jewels. What is most important and how much data can the company accept to loose? Is this 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour of maybe even 1 second? Next is how much time is there to perform a recovery? Is 1 week after a server failure acceptable of do you have 15minutes to have everything back up and running? These parameters also determine, in some ways, how to design your production environment. If you cannot affort downtime, you might design for high-availablity with replicating storage and multiple servers. What "disasters" are most likely to occur that need protection against? Are you located in a location that has frequent tornado's grounding buildings or floodings filling up buildings with meters of water? All such things determene how you should design your production, but also you DR enviroments.
Install Veeam Backup & Replicion on the third server. This will be your Backup & Replication Orchestration server. I would opt for a 4th server or cloud storage, but I'll come to that next.
The first server will be your primary production server. I don't know anything about physical locations, but this can be in location A.
The second server can be your failover server. I don't know what kind of disaster scenario's you are protection against, but this van be in location B.
If you are planning for protection against physical disaster like fire, flooding, severe storms or theft of the server I would place the failover server in another location. If it is a production location that cannot function when the building is gone it mostly don't help anything to bring the IT online in another location in a few minutes. In this case I would balance load over both servers and be sure to keep at least 50% resources free on both servers. This way you make best use of the available hardware and gaining performance profits until one of the servers fails.
The third server can be in the same location too. This way your restores in case of hardware failure or ransomeware can be performed with maximum performance. Add a fourth server in another location or use cloud storage and create an immutable backup copy on that server. That way at least one copy of your backup storage is untouchable by disaster or malicous actors. Best is to use the 32110 rule explained on many places.
Again. We don't know anything about the company or the environment you are trying to protect. What are the RPO/RTO requirements of the various IT systems you are running? Try to identify the company IT crown-jewels. What is most important and how much data can the company accept to loose? Is this 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour of maybe even 1 second? Next is how much time is there to perform a recovery? Is 1 week after a server failure acceptable of do you have 15minutes to have everything back up and running? These parameters also determine, in some ways, how to design your production environment. If you cannot affort downtime, you might design for high-availablity with replicating storage and multiple servers. What "disasters" are most likely to occur that need protection against? Are you located in a location that has frequent tornado's grounding buildings or floodings filling up buildings with meters of water? All such things determene how you should design your production, but also you DR enviroments.
Statistics: Posted by JeroenL — Sep 01, 2025 8:58 am
