Frequently Asked Disaster Recovery Questions (FAQs)

You must be using Veeam v10 or later to backup your VMware servers and be sending a copy of your backups to S3 compatible object storage.

Our SaaS automation platform for DR builds a dedicated on-demand bare-metal environment, complete with 25Gbps NFS storage, firewall, networking, VPN and routing. The automation then performs full restores of your Veeam backups from your object storage bucket(s) to your dedicated physical host(s) in our Bare Metal Servers

Cloud IBR provides recovery of VMware, Hyper-V and agent-based physical server backups that were backed up with Veeam and stored in an S3 object storage bucket, either backed up via Direct to Object Storage with v12, or Scale-Out-Backup-Repository (SOBR) offloads with v10 or later. For Hyper-V and agent-based backups, we perform a fully automated Instant Recovery with Veeam. These servers will require you to assign an IP address to them via their console, as Veeam Instant Recovery will not recover them with an IP address.

Most organization’s recoveries are completed in less than a few hours, but can take longer, depending on how large your backups are.

Cloud IBR is designed to use Read-Only keys to perform restores from your object storage. Read-Only keys work with object storage buckets used with “Direct to object storage backups” in Veeam v12 as well as with Scale-Out Backup Repositories (SOBR) created by Veeam v10 and later, that do not have Encryption enabled at the SOBR level. For SOBR’s that have Encryption enabled, Veeam requires Read-Write access to the bucket when adding it to the Cloud IBR Veeam server, which we chose not to support in the initial launch. You can confirm if you have an encryption key assigned to your SOBR by opening the properties of your SOBR and checking your configuration as shown here. To work around this limitation, simply make sure you have enabled encryption on each of your backup jobs by editing each job, click the Storage section, click Advanced button, select the Storage tab and check “Enable backup file encryption”, as shown here. You can then safely disable encryption for the SOBR, as having encryption enabled in both locations does not provide any additional benefit, since the data offloaded to object storage will already be encrypted once you enable encryption on each backup job.

You can begin using the service for recovery, immediately upon signing up.

Cloud IBR recovers all of your backups to VMware ESXi hosts with up to 4TB of RAM and up to 25TB of 25Gbps NFS storage. You can request to raise the storage amount if you require more. At the start of each recovery test, we automatically choose the highest performing servers available from PhoenixNAP’s inventory. To confirm Cloud IBR can handle recovering your environment, sign up for the free 30-day trial using the veeam30 promo code and run as many recovery tests as you want within the 30-day period to see if the service meets your requirements!

All customers will receive a 30-day free trial account, ensuring that Cloud IBR is the appropriate recovery platform for your business. Both Monthly and Annual Subscriptions can be cancelled at any time which will prevent future billing.

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If the server have been recovered, but data is missing, this typically means your data has not been backed up properly. If any servers were not restored at all, look under the section “Skipped Servers / Encrypted Backups” in your Cloud IBR recovery, to see if any backups were found but were skipped due to being outdated or due to a missing or incorrect Veeam encryption key provided during your onboarding.

There are several methods of remotely accessing your restored environment:

• Use the OpenVPN client to connect individual users to your recovery environment.
• Connect to your Veeam recovery server via RDP
• Connect to your ESXi host(s) console via https.
• Connect to any of your servers via the port mappings you created in the Cloud IBR dashboard.
• Connect your headquarters and branch offices to your recovery environment via IPSEC tunnels with the Gold subscription and higher.

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There is no time limit on how long you can keep your environment online after performing a recovery. Keep in mind that your credit card will be charged for hourly usage of the recovery infrastructure, so if you intend on keeping the environment running long-term after an actual disaster, contact us for long-term pricing options.

This screenshot shows the monthly usage fees for an account that ran two disaster recovery tests, one in Ashburn, VA with 128GB of RAM and one in Phoenix, AZ with 512GB of RAM, for a total of $10.58 for the two tests, which ran for two hours each.

Backblaze is a leading S3 Object Storage provider, with over two billion gigabytes of data storage under management. The company currently works with more than 500,000 customers in over 175 countries. Backblaze is a Veeam Ready Partner, certified by Veeam for their Object with Immutability integration with Veeam Backup & Replication software.

Wasabi provides simple and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over the world. It enables organizations to store and instantly access an unlimited amount of data with no complex tiers or egress or API fees, delivering predictable costs that save money and industry leading security and performance businesses can count on. Trusted by customers worldwide, Wasabi has been recognized as one of technology’s fastest-growing and most visionary companies. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi is a privately held company based in Boston. Wasabi is a Proud Partner of the Boston Red Sox, and the Official Cloud Storage Partner of Liverpool Football Club and the Boston Bruins. Wasabi is a Veeam Ready Partner, certified by Veeam for their Object with Immutability integration with Veeam Backup & Replication software.

Please see the Wasabi Knowledge Base article, for the simple instructions on how to configure Cloud IBR to recover the Veeam backups of your physical and VMware/Hyper-V virtual servers that you store in Wasabi’s immutable S3 compatible object storage.

Absolutely. Every recovery test you run with Cloud IBR provides a full report of your disaster recovery test, which is perfect for showing proof of recovery to your auditor, insurance carrier, customer, etc. By enabling the fully automated scheduled DR test, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly, you’ll always have an up-to-date report showing that you are recoverable, or letting you know when a change made to your production environment prevents a 100% successful recovery. You can review an example DR Recovery Report here.

Once you’ve recovered your servers in our infrastructure, you can RDP to the Veeam server that we built for you, to create and manage the backups of your newly built environment, just like you’ve always done in your production environment. For our Platinum customers, this service is automatically performed by our staff at no charge. When performing this on your own, make sure to add a new read-write key to the S3 repository in your Veeam console, so that the VBR has permissions to send new backups to your bucket.

Once you are running your production environment in our cloud infrastructure and you’ve configured backups as discussed above, you can schedule a switchback to your production environment at any time that is convenient for you. The process is simply the reverse of how we recovered you to our infrastructure. For our Platinum customers, the switchback is performed by our staff at no charge. When performing this on your own, and once you have your original production environment rebuilt, you will schedule a maintenance window to shutdown your recovery servers, perform a final backup to your Backblaze or Wasabi object storage, and then restore them to your newly built production environment using the Veeam server you’ve built in your environment. There are more costly options for replicating the data from our cloud to your hardware and performing a switchback in a shorter window, but the standard method described here is sufficient for most small businesses, as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) will be similar to the one you experienced when you recovered using Cloud IBR. Alternatively, if you’d like to leave your production systems running in our cloud long-term, please  contact us for long-term pricing options.

Our team provides support to all customers at no fee, for any issues or bugs directly related to our SaaS offering. Recovery assistance is available at a rate of $250.00USD/hour. As we grow our network of MSP’s, you will also have the option of selecting a local partner to work with.

No. This is because Synology Cloud Sync sends the backups to Object Storage in a format that is only readable by the Synology platform and not by Veeam. To recover servers with Cloud IBR, you can either create a Direct to Object Storage backup job in Veeam v12, or add the Synology to a Scale-Out-Backup-Repository (SOBR) that offloads backups to Backblaze, with Veeam v10 or later.

Both options require a Veeam Enterprise license. If you currently use the Veeam Community Edition, you can take advantage of our 30-day trial license promotion by signing up for Cloud IBR using promo code veeam30 to get a 30-day Veeam Enterprise edition trial license. We provide two pricing options for purchasing Veeam licensing:

Veeam Universal License (VUL): Click here to calculate your annual subscription fees.

Monthly Rental through Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program.

Please note that the VUL annual subscription allows you to open tickets directly with Veeam as per their Support Policy. For monthly rental licensing, our Platinum customers can open Veeam support tickets with us at no cost and Silver subscribers are billed $250.00USD/hour for Veeam support tickets.

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By design, Cloud IBR restores every server in the object storage bucket(s) that you specify in the Cloud IBR configuration, excluding any servers that haven’t been backed up within the last X days. The default is 7 days and you can change that to anything between 1 and 30 days. If you want to permanently exclude a server from your recovery environment, you can move that server to a backup job that backs that server up to any other object storage bucket that you haven’t added to the Cloud IBR config.

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The Cloud IBR automated recovery process provisions a /29 block of IP addresses. All 6 usable IP addresses are automatically assigned during the recovery to provide remote access into your infrastructure. One of the IP’s is assigned to a router, two are assigned to the management port on physical hosts and the remaining three are assigned to the firewall, which is used for your server port mappings that you specify in the Cloud IBR console during onboarding. If you require additional IP’s, you can purchase additional /28 or /29 blocks in the PhoenixNAP BMC console, after you perform your recovery.

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This error is generally caused by the read-only key not having the “list all bucket names” permission. Try creating a new read-only key for your Object Storage bucket and make sure to give the key the ‘Allow listing all bucket names’ permission and then adding the new key to Cloud IBR and running another recovery.

Error Adding Object Storage Repository BucketName – Failed to load S3 configuration: Invalid credentials for AmazonS3Compatible. See log file Satellite_PowerShell on server ibr-veeam-xxxx for details.

If you ran a Manual Shutdown recovery test and did not check the “Internet Access Allowed” option, you can manually enable outbound internet by opening an ssh connection to your Cloud IBR Firewall and performing the following steps.