Veeam with HP P4500 San IQ

[bgbGsy]

Hello all.

I have been using Veeam V5 with HP P4500 sans for about a year now. Due to limitations with the HP SAN IQ software, you cannot use multi-pathing with a physical windows box sharing LUNS with esxi servers (As documented by HP).

Therefore I run on a single 1gb NIC to the SAN from the physical windows box and get good results (Veeam V5). Of course round-robin multipathing and load balancing is fully supported to ESXi hosts to HP SAN boxes.

As I am now moving to V6 of veeam, do you think with the above scenario, it would be better to install a VM Proxy which would natively use the multipathing / load balancing of the underlying ESXi host? I would still use a physical windows box as the repository server etc.

Reading the veeam artical on direct SAN access it indicates that this is the fasest method, but with the change of arcitecture do you think that this is still the case when you have the above situations?

Thanks,
Brendan.

[dellock6]

Hi Brendan,
we use a LeftHand/HP P4000 cluster too, and we used on it both Veeam 5 and now 6.
My design with Veeam has always been uwins virtual servers. With V6 I deployed one Veeam Servers and 3 additional proxies, all on VMs. The proxies are configured for using hotadd mode + failover to network, and running multiple jobs is doing great on the new version of Veeam, since several proxies runs against different datastores, coming from different LeftHand nodes.
I know san is in theory the fastest method, but with the new distributed architecture you can reach high backup speed even with hotadd method, and at the same time saving big money on avoiding physical servers.

Luca.

[bgbGsy]

Thanks for that Luca, that confirms my testing so far. It is a shame that HP don't support load balancing from a windows host to VMFS Lun; maybe in a future software release.

I will still use a physical box as a repostiotry as I then want to archive to tape, which is what I am doing now.

Regards,
Brendan.