Best install 4 Veeam on Server 2012 R2

[Kareem]

Hi there,

I have got the following situation, i have purchased licenses to back-up my hyper-v clusters of which i have two.

i have got a HP Proliant server 16GB Ram and equipped with 10K SAS 900 GB Disks, Raid 50 which leaves me with approximately with 10TB hard-disk space.

Now because this is my first encounter with Veeam, i wonder what the best approach will be to install Veeam.

should i install it directly on this server and make back-ups to the local storage, or
would it be better to create a virtual 2012 R2 machine on this host on which i install Veeam and give this machine a D:\Partition with the rest of the space that is left of the 10TB
Or create a virtual 2012 server with the Veeam install and give it access to the 10TB hard-disk space on the host via a network Share

what is the best practice in this case and what is the smartest thing to do, i hope that the smartest and the best are the same solution!

thanks all for your time in trying to figure this out with / for me

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Kareem,

What is your source storage that is used for hosting production VMs or HP Proliant is your production server?

You can install Veeam B&R right on the hyper-v host or this HP server. Physical or virtual deployment doesn't matter, as all required components (on-host proxy) for Veeam backup will be deployed on your production hosts in any case. For better performance rates it is recommended to use off-host proxy server (via hardware VSS providers), that's why I wondered what's your source storage.

Thanks!

[nmdange]

Installing Veeam on a VM would give you some flexibility as you could backup the VM, move it to different hardware, replicate to a DR site, etc. You will want to use the host as your backup repository as you'll get better performance than copying the data into a VM. Do NOT use the host as an SMB share repository, you want to add it as a Windows repository!

[Kareem]

Thanks you both for your answers.

Source storage are the local SAS disks on my host server.

I have created a VM on my host Server and gave it all 10 TB of disk space as it local storage, i also created 2 partitions of 200 GB for a local SQL database and one for NFSDataStore.

it should work great, first test run is tonight.

regards,

[Vitaliy S.]

I have created a VM on my host Server and gave it all 10 TB of disk space as it local storage, i also created 2 partitions of 200 GB for a local SQL database and one for NFSDataStore.

If you're referring to SQL database used by Veeam, then it will never grow to this size, the usual size of this DB is less than 10 GBs. Keep in mind that only configuration data is stored there. On a side note, did you give 10 TB of disk to a VM and use this VM as a repository? Did I get it right?

[blithespirit]

Hello Kareem, you say you have 2 X Hyper-V clusters, how many nodes in each cluster, is the Proliant part of a cluster or seperate. Is the storage in CSVs on the clusters? How many VMs are you planning to protect. Maybe we could help a little more if you gave us an idea of your topology. As an example it may pay to use your host as an off-host proxy with Veeam being part of your clustered VM's. Are the clusters on the same network/location. As Vitally mentioned your Veeam SQL DB need not be very large and there could be a more efficient way for you to set up the software specific to you.