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When version 6 of Veeam Backup & Replication was released, there were scores of new and improved features! In fact, I had a blog post last year enumerating 72 of them! We are now on version 6.1, and while the features keep rolling in, an astute user pointed something out to me at a recent in Chicago related to proxy configuration for both backup and replication jobs.
In many situations, the automatic proxy selection is fine. In fact, it is recommended as a safe default configuration. But the reality is that us IT professionals are all tinkerers and want the knobs and dials to do what we need to do.
The backup proxy is an architecture component that sits between data source and target and is used to process jobs and deliver backup and/or replication traffic
The tip at the Veeam User Group was related specifically to replication proxy selection in that you can have multiple proxies identified in both source and target locales, with multiple proxies available in each. One of the cool new features is that you can now have proxy-to-proxy communication between sites. This is really important in situations where limited bandwidth is in use. The proxy-to-proxy communication will compress the traffic, as when you inject virtual disk contents into vSphere (or Hyper-V) host you can’t put data efficiencies in place. The best example is to read an expanse of disk and see that it has 1,000,000 zeros. You would have to pick those up and move all 1,000,000 zeros over the WAN to the remote host. With proxy-to-proxy communication, the near-side proxy can pick up that data profile and just tell the remote proxy to write out 1,000,000 zeros and the remote proxy will do that at LAN or SAN speeds.
That being said, it’s really important to select a proxy (especially for replication jobs) that uses source proxies and target proxies in their respective locations. By default, the Job Settings screen will use default configuration as shown in the figure below: 
The option is in place to deselect automatic and have an explicit list of proxies in both source and target locales while still having multiple proxies to choose from. For example, in my environment, I have five Veeam proxies. Two of them are on the source side and are configured for the replication job as shown below:
In the target site, there are three proxies. When there are multiple proxies in each site, where the job is configured for explicit selection across the inventory in each site as shown in the figure below: 
By configuring the proxy selection this way, you can select the most granular configuration. Automatic selection is fine for most, but if you want to fully configure how the replication jobs run, this setting can easily allow you to do so.
How have you configured replication jobs with this level of granularity? Share your strategies below.
Availability, performance and intelligence by proxy,
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