The requirements are to keep six months’ worth of backup files at the disaster recovery site and have the ability to restore the VMs to any given day within two months and any given week within six months. Immediate copy (mirroring) mode with 62 days of retention meets the requirement of restoring to any given day within two months. Keeping 26 weekly GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) restore points ensures the restoration capability for any given week within six months, as 26 weeks correspond to approximately six months.
When restoring VMware thick provisioned VMs, and the physical proxies used for restoration have access to the Fibre Channel datastores, the default transport mode used is Direct Storage Access. This mode leverages the direct SAN (Storage Area Network) access for performing data operations directly between the datastores and the proxy servers, bypassing the need through the ESXi host, which optimizes the performance and reduces the load on the network.
To restore the folder to its original location without losing the original files, you should use the 'Keep' function. This functionality ensures that the original files remain untouched while the restored files are placed alongside them, avoiding any loss or modification of the existing data.
The best way to achieve the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of six hours, given the 50 Mbps bandwidth and 500 GB of data generated in that interval, is to use backup copy jobs with a copy mode set to "immediate copy" and enable WAN acceleration. Immediate copy ensures that the data is copied as soon as it is created, which helps in meeting the strict RPO requirement. WAN acceleration optimizes data transfer by reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over the network, thus making it feasible to transfer 500 GB within the available bandwidth constraints.
To restore a file on a Windows VM hosted on vSphere where the Veeam mount server cannot connect to the VM through the network, leveraging VMware Tools with VIX (VMware VIX API, which allows commands to be run inside VMs) would provide the fastest restore method. Since VMware Tools are installed and up to date, using the Veeam file restore wizard to restore through VIX does not require network connectivity and allows direct file restoration on the VM. This minimizes any intermediaries and avoids the complexity of other options, making it the quickest method for achieving a fast restore time objective (RTO).