Veeam Backup & Removable Media (rotated drives)

[dtbullock]

This is a pre-sales question. As I understand the Veaam B&R product from the product description, it uses 'Backup Proxies'. I have a small customer who wants to backup a single vSphere server and take the backups offsite (approx 3 x VM's @ 80GB ea). Is there a removable-disk target scenario that's supported by a Veeam backup proxy, or would one use replication here instead? Customer only has 768kbps upstream on their ADSL internet connection.

Apologies if I've misunderstood the whole backup architecture :-O

[foggy]

David, this scenario is supported, you just need to specify a registry key value for the backups to be created on a newly inserted disk. Please review this topic for details.

[dtbullock]

OK, so just to check that I've got it right, the simplest scenario would be:

a) 'Veeam Backup Server' is installed to a spare Windows 2008 R2 Server guest on the vSphere host;
b) a USB controller is passed-through to that guest from vSphere;
c) in this case, the registry hack is applied *to the Veeam Backup Server*, rather than a Backup Proxy
d) in this case, a separate Backup Proxy is not needed, but even if we did, it's not necessary to apply the registry hack to the Proxy

??

thanks,
David.

[foggy]

Correct. The key is set up on the backup server and applies to all proxy servers.

[bunger]

OK, so just to check that I've got it right, the simplest scenario would be:

b) a USB controller is passed-through to that guest from vSphere;

thanks,
David.

Depending on how much data your VMs consume, the USB pass-through may be a killer. Even with ESXi 5, I am still seeing USB pass-through speeds less than USB 1.1. For my installs, that throughput is too slow for me to backup during a night. But if you only have a couple of VMs, you should be fine.

Bill

[dellock6]

An alternative to usb passthrough or usb-to-ethernet adapter (Anywhere USB from Digi work in 1.1 mode...) can be at the end to connect directly the USB drive to a physical Windows machine used as Veeam Repository, so you can get full USB speed.

[J1mbo]

An alternative...connect directly the USB drive to a physical Windows machine used as Veeam Repository, so you can get full USB speed.

I've just been experimenting with this to replace tape altogether - USB 3 controller then copy the veeam files to the USB disk at the end of the week. We don't backup directly to USB because it's just a single slow drive so backups, especially the synthentic full, would take forever, whereas sequential streaming should be OK.

Anyway, for those using Windows Server 2008 (not R2) - you need the Windows Dynamic Cache Service installed, otherwise copying to USB the Windows cache fills the entire system memory which is completely pointless and pretty much everything else will be paged, effectively stalling the server until the job eventually completes (and it will be, eventually). The server will be totally unresponsive, won't be able to RDP or even use console in my experience.

After some experimentation (8GB RAM in the host), having min of 1GB and max of 2GB seems to be working well and ensures there is plenty of RAM available for the SQL service and everything else.

[davidkillingsworth]

This is a pre-sales question. As I understand the Veaam B&R product from the product description, it uses 'Backup Proxies'. I have a small customer who wants to backup a single vSphere server and take the backups offsite (approx 3 x VM's @ 80GB ea). Is there a removable-disk target scenario that's supported by a Veeam backup proxy, or would one use replication here instead? Customer only has 768kbps upstream on their ADSL internet connection.

Apologies if I've misunderstood the whole backup architecture :-O

I have exactly this scenario for many of my customers.

I would like to backup to a NAS drive, which I am guessing is simple enough to setup. However, I would also like to somehow copy my backups that are stored on the NAS to a removable USB drive once a week so that we could take them offsite.

Does anyone have a hardware recommendation that would make this easy.

Are there any gotchas to consider when restoring from an offsite backup

[foggy]

I would like to backup to a NAS drive, which I am guessing is simple enough to setup. However, I would also like to somehow copy my backups that are stored on the NAS to a removable USB drive once a week so that we could take them offsite.

Does anyone have a hardware recommendation that would make this easy.

Actually, you do not even need the rotated drives scenario here, just use a simple script to copy the latest backup to an external device once a week. Also, if you just need to have two copies of backups (local and offsite), there are numerous existing discussions on how to perform offsite replication of backups, you can look through them to pick some ideas of what others do. Here is the couple of the most recent ones: Best backup setup for mirroring backup respository and v6 - How to have a local and off-site backup copy?

Are there any gotchas to consider when restoring from an offsite backup

You can always import the backup file to the Veeam B&R console and make it ready for restore. Otherwise, you can use a standalone utility (extract.exe) coming with Veeam B&R and allowing to restore VMs from any VBK file created by Veeam B&R, even without the product installed.

[Gostev]

Just to update, version 6.1 adds support for the above-mentioned registry key to the v6 backup repositories.

[dellock6]

Hi Anton, you mean it's no more needed to edit the key, but it will be an option inside the software?

[Gostev]

I mean the registry key will now work. It stopped working due to the architecture change and adding new style backup repositories in v6.

[sgatke]

Hi everybody

I have recently installed a trial version of Veeam B&R 6.1 in a simple Hyper-V environment.
Veeam is installed on a virtual machine with the backup target set to a mapped network drive (on a local Qnap NAS).
This seems to work very well. But, I would very much like to get the finished backup files copied to USB hard drives that I rotate once a week.
In other words, I would like to end up with the most recent backups on the NAS (and the present USB drive), and then have 4 or 5 weeks worth of backups on the other, off-site USB drives.

Our Qnap NAS has a USB connection which I plan to use. This drive is available using \\qnap\usb (or similar UNC path).
Do I use the Veeam Scheduled File Copy to acieve this? Is this at all possible, considering I rotate the USB drive once a week?
As far as I know, the Qnap USB device is always available using the same UNC path. I expect I can map the network drive as eg Z: and keep that mapping even though I exchange the disks.

Any tips or advice doing this?

Thank you in advance.

/Simon

[J1mbo]

Might be worth checking if the QNAP offers any 'offload' capability, to avoiding dragging everything across the network both ways, to perform the copy.

[sgatke]

Thanks J1mbo

I will try setting up the Qnap 'backup to external drive' function and see how that goes.