VM or physical server for Veeam Backup?

[me123]

Assuming FC4 SAN (HP EVA) with about 10 ESX hosts and 40-50 VMs. Which backup scenario will give the best performance: Veeam installed on a VM or Veeam installed on a physical server connected to the SAN?

Thanks.

[Gostev]

I would definitely go for physical server for environment of your size, and given you have ability to perform VCB SAN backup on FC4 (which is recommended by VMware as best possible backup method). This way you will get MUCH better performance, fully LAN free backup that does not touch production ESX hosts, and ability to grow your virtual environment without worrying about backup in future.

For larger environments, you are really not saving much by putting backup application in VM on ESX host. Backup processes are fairly resource-consuming, so Veeam Backup will load ESX host pretty heavily. Then, all backup I/O will go through ESX I/O stack (terabytes of data!), instead of being fully offloaded to storage layer as with VCB SAN mode. All this will definitely be affecting production VMs, and in the end you will find yourself having to add extra ESX host (which are WAY more expensive than cheap regular server, plus the cost of VMware license).

[me123]

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it.

[glennsantacruz]

Gostev -

Considering technology changes in the past 9 months, do you still stand by your above response? We are faced with the same question (and are actually in the beginning of testing physical versus virtual Veeam.

[Vitaliy S.]

Glenn,

Yes, that's right. You will get much better performance using vStorage API SAN mode with physical Veeam Backup Server, however if you'd like to install Veeam on the Virtual machine, judging by the customer feedback, Virtual Appliance mode is doing a great job, so I would consider trying it also.

Thank you!

[Gostev]

The deciding factor is whether you are 24/7, or 16/5 shop with big backup window. Backup VM will load the host and network connection to backup target heavily, which in turn may affect production. Remember that we are talking about 4 vCPU VM running at 100% load, and doing heavy network I/O to backup destination storage for a few hours. This is exactly why VMware recommends offloading backup activities to backup proxy server for ESX hosts running intensive workloads.

By offloading backup activities from ESX to physical backup server, you effectively allow your ESX host to run more VMs. Because ESX server typically costs much more than regular server (especially given VMware license cost), having physical backup server generally provides for lower TCO (in addition to multiple technical benefits). I bought myself quad core server for lab for under USD 600 over 1 year ago, I can imagine they are even cheaper now.

Additionally, consider the fact that Virtual Appliance mode is based on VMware SCSI Hot Add functionality, which is pretty new concept and is not as mature as direct SAN backups from physical proxy yet (quite polished with many years of VCB usage).

[nhilhorst]

[merged]

Hello,

I'm writing a business case to convince our management to buy Veeam Backup and Replication. Part of the business case are the costs.
I don't know if Veeam has to be installed on a physical server or on a virtual server. I need an answer on this question to know which costs I have to put in the business case.

Thank you for an answer.

Kind regards,

Niels

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Niels,

Both configurations are fully supported, however my final recommendation depends on the setup you're going to have/currently have. Please take a look at the posts above for more details.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

I do have something to add now to my 1 year old post above, too.

With v5 and vPower capabilities, there is now additional (and big) reason to go with physical server for Veeam. Specifically, to be able to restore critical VMs while your production storage is down, and run them directly from backup storage via Instant VM Recovery until you have your production storage fixed. Keep in mind that with virtual backup server, your Veeam Backup VM will die along with all other VMs in case of production storage outage, making any restores impossible. Thanks.

[joshuastaylor]

[merged]

We're currently running Veeam on a Dell PE2950. It is locking up daily due to hardware issues. We have 3 ESX hosts with 12 x 2.4GHz cores and 96GB of ram, running around 40 VMs and utilization is around 30% on each host. I would like to just virtualize the backup server. What would be the disadvantages of doing this? I've heard performance can be a problem but we have the overhead.

[J1mbo]

Think of the worst-case restore scenario. And also any requirement to write backups to tape.

[severt]

[merged]

Hi,

We backup to a Qnap TS-459U-RP+ NAS.

We have a VMware host running with 3 VM's.
For testing purposes I created a new VM with 2008 R2 and installed Veeam on it.
But if that VM or in the worst case that host dies I have no software/settings to use to restore anything.

Is there a way to replicate the Veeam installation to a dedicated server, or is there a better way to handle this?
To be honest, I think it's a waste of power to run a dedicated computer just for Veeam Backup.

What should I do?

Thank you,
Dennis

[ManuG2k]

[merged]

Hi all,
on next month I will have this situatiuon:

- 2 server HP DL380 G7 with ESXi 4.1 U1 (each with 36Gb, 2x cpu);
- Shared storage HP P2000 G3 SAS (12x HD SAS 300 Gb 15K rpm);
- 1 server for storage backup HP DL180 G6 (1x Cpu, Ram 8Gb, 8x 2Tb HD SAS 7.2K rpm);
- vSphere Essential Plus license for 3 host's;
- Veeam Backup & Replication v5 for backup;

I would like some advices on the backup server.
I think I should perform a "physical" installation on server HP DL180 G6, with a partition for the operating system (Windows 2008 R2 + Veeam Backup) and a partition where to backup all the virtual machines.
Is it better to install ESXi on the backup server for a faster backup of itself ?

What do you recommend?

Tnx in advance
Manuel

[foggy]

Manuel,

It is not actually clear what do you mean by "faster backup of itself".
For fast backup of VMs on a shared storage, you should set Veeam B&R as a physical server and use Direct SAN mode for your backup jobs to retrieve data directly from it.

Thanks.

[J1mbo]

Is shared SAS storage supported with vmware? If you haven't already ordered this I'd be more inclined to look towards an NFS server solution instead of that, as it will be much easier to connect to additional ESX(i) hosts in future. Also Veeam have complimentary Essentials(+) bundles which may be of interest to you.

But separate server for Veeam backup is preferable to my mind, not least because that would simplify (greatly) the 'worst case' restore scenario and connection of a tape device or other external media for off-site storage. If you can afford it, I'd suggest RAID-10 for the backup server disk configuration, since this is by far the fastest RAID level for small writes (the disks will be working hard when performing synthetic fulls, for example).

Hope that helps!