The number of Transporters to be deployed depends on the hardware you are using, as well as the amount of machines and locations your virtual infrastructure includes.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication you can also ensure protection of your virtual environment in a multi-tenant mode. This way, one product copy will allow you to manage up to 1,000 isolated tenants such as branch offices, customers, business units, and other entities.
In multi-tenant mode, tenants can access the self-service portal while offloading various tasks from the service provider or so-called master site. If this is your case, you should install a Transporter at a master site and at least one Transporter at each remote site.
With Director installed in the head office, you can successfully coordinate backups across the Transporters in other locations.
Local Virtual Environment
For small (10-50 VMs) and mid-sized (50-100 VMs) virtual environments, deployment of a single Transporter that is a part of a full solution may be sufficient.
By default, one Transporter can simultaneously process 6 source disks during backup, replication, and recovery jobs. In case jobs contain more than 6 source disks, the disks will be queued and processed once the Transporter gets free.
For large virtual environments, it’s better to deploy several transporters to distribute workload evenly. For example, if you have a large VMware infrastructure, the number of Transporters should correspond with the number of ESXi hosts you have. Keep in mind that every Transporter uses a VM.
Virtual Environment Distributed Between Two Sites for Backing Up over WAN
If you need to transfer data off-site using encryption and compression, it is recommended to install an additional Transporter at a target site. This way, the Transporter on the source site will perform compression and encryption before transferring data over WAN, and the target Transporter will perform decompression and decryption prior to writing it to the target site. Also, by deploying a pair of Transporters, you will enable AES-256 traffic encryption and network acceleration between them.
Large Virtual Environment Distributed Among Several Remote Locations
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can provide data protection for thousands of VMs by applying a scaling approach.
For large virtual environments that have VMs on several remote sites, it is recommended to deploy multiple Transporters to distribute workload evenly, improve data transfer speed, and optimize network traffic. Keep in mind, that you should deploy at least one Transporter at each site, and if any of these sites have heavy workload, you can always add more Transporters.
When deploying several Transporters, you may choose to specify which one will read data from a particular source server and which one will be used to write data to a target server. By default, the product distributes Transporters based on their proximity to a source or a target server.