3.6 WAN accelerators

WAN1
server name	wan1.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.110.11
Operating System	Windows Server 2019
Installed components	Veeam Cloud Gateway
vCPU	4
RAM	8 Gb
Disk	40 Gb, OS disk
Disk	200 Gb, cache disk

WAN2
server name	wan2.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.110.12
Operating System	Windows Server 2019
Installed components	Veeam Cloud Gateway
vCPU	4
RAM	8 Gb
Disk	40 Gb, OS disk
Disk	200 Gb, cache disk

As explained previously, WAN accelerators are optional components, but any service provider should consider their deployment. Veeam Cloud Connect licensing enables the use of WAN accelerators at no additional cost for service providers, and most of all, their presence allow a service provider to offer a complete solution to those customers owning Veeam licenses with WAN acceleration enabled (Enterprise Plus, but also Enterprise if the target of a job is Cloud Connect).

The 200 GB size for the cache disk is just a suggested starting point, used here as an example. Depending on the amount of customers assigned to a specific WAN accelerator and thus the total amount of managed data, the cache should be then increased to guarantee optimal performance to all customers connecting to a given WAN accelerator. Please refer to Veeam User Guide and Best Practices to learn how to properly size the WAN accelerator cache.

Finally, the use of multiple WAN accelerators is a good design solution in terms of High Availability (HA). Even if only one WAN accelerator can be assigned to a given customer, the presence of additional servers eventually allow to quickly reconfigure all customers linked to a failed WAN accelerator to use another one.

Another common design choice is to dedicate one WAN accelerator to each customer requesting it. In this way, WAN accelerators can be spin up “on demand” only for those customers in need to use them, and can be offered as a premium option. Also, with this design a customer is not impacted by eventual problems happening at the WAN accelerator of another customer, since there’s no sharing of WAN accelerators in this case.

Both design are supported by Veeam Cloud Connect: in the case of shared accelerators, we recommend to not overload them. A maximum of 4 tenants linked to the same WAN accelerator is suggested. On very slow links with high latency this ratio can be increased up to 20:1.

WAN accelerator networking

Additional firewall rules are required to correctly deploy and manage WAN accelerators:

Proto	Source	Port	Destination	Port	Description
IPv4 TCP/UDP	WAN_accelerators	*	Domain_controllers	53 (DNS)	Allow accelerators to use internal dns
IPv4 TCP	VBR_Server	*	WAN_accelerators	6160	Veeam Installer from VBR to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VBR_Server	*	WAN_accelerators	6162	Veeam Transport from VBR to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VBR_Server	*	WAN_accelerators	6164	Veeam WAN Control from VBR to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VCC_gateways	*	WAN_accelerators	6165	Gateways transfer data to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VCC_gateways	*	WAN_accelerators	2500-3300	Gateways transfer data to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VBR_Server	*	WAN_accelerators	2500-3300	VBR transfers data to WAN accelerators
IPv4 TCP	VBR_Server	*	WAN_accelerators	49152-65535	Veeam RPC from VBR to WAN accelerators

WAN accelerator deployment

The deployment and configuration of a WAN accelerator component is a simple and quick process. When starting the wizard to deploy a new WAN accelerator, select the corresponding Windows server and accept the default values. If needed, you can increase the number of streams in a second time to increase the utilization of the WAN accelerator:

3.10: Choose a server to install WAN accelerator

The cache is placed in a dedicated disk, so any disk consumption problem will not affect the OS partition:

3.11: Configure WAN accelerator cache

After the configuration of the two WAN accelerators is completed, they will be both listed in the corresponding section of Veeam Backup & Replication and be ready to use.

High Bandwidth Mode or not?

High Bandwidth mode should be selected if there are tenants connecting using links faster than 100Mbps. In a dedicated deployment, this choice is done individually depending on the link of the single tenant connecting to the WAN accelerator. On shared deployments (where multiple customers will connect to the same WAN accelerator) we suggest to enable the High mode and operate in so called Mixed Mode: the WAN accelerator will be able to receive connections in both High and Low mode, while if you choose Low mode, this will be the only mode available to tenants.