Veeam V10 Nas Backup Best Practice Guide

[jnap]

Hello,

I have a Netapp NAS storage with NFS and SMB shares i want to backup the best way possible with veeam10.
I have the VUL to do it, and also the backup storage to store it.
Now i want to implement it but i don't find any best practice guide like this one https://www.veeambp.com/ which is pretty good to help on design.

Is there any equivalent or maybe a scheduled update on veeambp with NAS backup design?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello, I assume our field folks simply don't have enough "practice" with this new technology yet to create "best" practices which is why it is not there yet. What is your source data size on NetApp?

[jnap]

Hello
Yes it's quite new and fresh
I have 60TB data to protect with 2:1 dedup/compress ratio (ratio without snapshots)
Our netapp is up to receive 100TB max

[Gostev]

Ah. That's actually very little data for our NAS backup engine, as it was designed for PB scale. So I would not worry about deployment nuances at all in you case.

[jnap]

I was not worried about deployment i m sure it will work but i was just wondering about some tricks or traps to avoid...
For example is it usefull to dedicate a proxy?
Specific sizing of the file proxy?
Where is the better place for the metadata repo?
What about the good usage of storage snapshots / vss options?

[Gostev]

1. With your data size you should be fine without the dedicated proxy, assuming your existing one is powerful enough.

2. Just add this role to the existing proxy if it has modern CPU. Beef up RAM if necessary according to system requirements, keep in mind you need to add up requirements from different roles together when running multiple roles on the same box.

3. It's always best to host metadata on a faster storage like SSD, but in your case it won't matter much.

4. It's always a good idea to use VSS or storage snapshots to avoid locked files. Please note that v11 integrates with NetApp files natively, and will orchestrate storage snapshots on its own.

[jnap]

Ok thanks for all these answers
So the main thing to drive the design is the source data size
Can the number of files be relevant?
We can have up to 5/6 milions files on one share..

[Gostev]

Not in your case, as that's relatively few files for us to work with... our scalability target for the first version was 1 PB and 1 billion of files.

I checked and the biggest existing customer I can see in the support big data has 45 millions of folders alone

[jnap]

ok, thanks for all your answers
so, let's roll

[Gostev]

Let us know how it goes! Obviously, the initial full will take quite some time in any case, but it is only needed once. So wait until that is done and the job gets into incremental runs before concluding that your existing shared proxy is enough or not (as a lot will depend on your daily change rate).

By the way, one good practice it to do the initial full over the weekend.

You can also add an extra proxy temporarily, just to help the initial full to finish faster. Just keep in mind that extra proxies may create a heavy load on the source storage and reduce its availability to end users, which is why it's best to do this over the weekend.

[jnap]

Hello,

Good to know if you want to use nas backup with veeam 10a: patch it
https://www.veeam.com/kb4050

We already hit some errors that "health check" can not repair so we have to patch.

Nevertheless, performance is good and implementation quite simple, specially if you compare to former veeam 9.5 ndmp tape backups

[Mildur]

Patch to Veeam V11 and you will get the double Amount of NAS Backup for 1 license compared to V10
V10: 250GB per VUL
V11: 500GB per VUL

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the feedback jnap! All the mentioned issues are addressed as well, so you are good to go with v11.

[jnap]

Hello
I will first finish migrating v9.5 infra to a fresh new v10 infra and then update inplace to v11

Yes i have just seen gostev post about the new licensing...

Thanks

[Gostev]

V11 also brings major performance improvements for NAS backup. Even if it was already industry-leading, of course the "v1" of NAS backup we delivered in v10 left us many opportunities for optimizations. So I would highly recommend everyone who uses NAS backup heavily to upgrade to v11 sooner rather than later.

[jnap]

Hello,

Still in my problems with nas backup with veeam 10a, patched with 10.0.1.4854_KB4050.
After support analysis, it seems that the main problem is because we use datadomain and they are not quite good supported with nas file backups... (fortunately we are migrating to Eseries for primary backup repo)
So, into the best practices, i think it could be good to know that if you use dedupe appliances like datadomain as primary nas backup jobs, you would have this "File handle is stale. Err: 5057" error.
It would be also good to know that there are 2 types of extents for nas backup:
- meta extent
- data extent

Thanks

[Gostev]

Actually, this functionality is not available in the version you're using. It was added in V11 only, specifically to address issues with backing up directly to slow targets. Although even with that configuration in place, performance will be nowhere near to what you can get with E-Series or most other raw storage, for that matter.

[jnap]

Hello,
Upgrade to v11 is now done!
I have now my NAS backup jobs going first to E-series and they are then backup-copied to DD.
With a large share (18TB and 80M files), i had this error during backup copy:

Code: Select all

21/12/2021 05:53:22 :: Failed to perform postponed backup repair Error: Agent: Failed to process method {NasMaster.TransformData}: Failed to read data from the file '[**] **:/**__Copy__1/086d0c6459534d8cb051da113e928c34/meta/03j0000000000000020-0000.vslice'. Offset: '16384'.
File handle is stale. Err: 5057

Is there still a problem with NAS backup copy to datadomain (considered as "slow backup target") with veeam v11?

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Julien,

Please provide your case ID for this issue. This is a technical issue so the case ID is mandatory according to the forum rules.
Also, please make sure you do not post sensitive data with your logs on public forums.

Thanks!

[jnap]

sorry, i have edited my post
I will also open a case but my main question was about datadomain compatibility with nas backup copy in V11...

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Julien, could you please clarify the exact version you've installed?
Seems the issue was fixed in 11a (just in case - you can check the latest versions here).
So if you've upgraded to 11a, I believe Support is required here.

Thanks!

[jnap]

Veeam version is 11.0.1.1261 , so 11a RTM & GA (build 11.0.1.1261)
case number is #05195292