Best Practice for Veeam w/ DPM for offload to tape?

[Aurock]

We've just purchased Veeam for backing up our Hyper-V environment, primarily to reduce the amount of disk space and number of tapes consumed for backup. We have an existing DPM 2012 server with a SCSI attached ATL. The plan is to stop backing up VM's directly with DPM, and start backing them up with Veeam. Then DPM will back up the deduplicated & compressed output files from Veeam. (I know v7 will add tape support, but due to having just 1 ATL which is connected directly to the DPM server, this won't be of use to us.)

For the Veeam backups, I need a retention period of at least a week. The first requirement is that the backups are optimized primarily to be efficiently backed up to tape with DPM. Secondary optimization would be to keep the files as small as possible on the Veeam data store, to allow for longer retention of the veeam backups. Veeam is running on a Server 2012 system, so OS based deduplication of the storage target volume is an option, but since DPM effectively un-does the Server 2012 deduplication when sending the data to tape, it would only help with reducing disk space requirements, not tape consumption.

DPM writes to tape on a weekly basis. Ideally, that weekly tape backup would contain one full Veeam backup and a weeks worth of incrementals. I could probably do with just the Full backup if I had to, either due to space constraints or if getting just a week's data from Veeam is not feasible.

My initial thought is to have Veeam do incremental backups with a weekly full backup, with a 7 day retention period. Then DPM would backup the Veeam output files to tape once a week. While this setup is fairly simple, it seems like I'm missing some opportunities to make things more efficient. If anyone has suggestions for how I could better accomplish my goals, or sees any potential pitfalls with this setup, I'd appreciate some feedback.

Thanks!

[veremin]

From my perspective, you should be ok with the described scenario, though, you can schedule weekly synthetic full, and perform active full only once a month ( that’s what a variety of our customers are doing). You can also setup DPM actions as the post job activity, so that, once the Sunday active full has finished, DPM will copy weekly-worth backup chain to tape devices.

As to the size of backup data, extreme compression is likely to help you here.

Additionally, I would still recommend not turning a blind eye to Veeam tape functionality, especially, when we are talking here about copying to tape backup files that are produced by Veeam Backup and Replication. As you might imagine, we, in contrast, to DPM provide you with vast options of how Veeam backup data can be tracked, on which tape media do particular VMs reside on, what medias are required in order to restore certain VM, how copying/restore process should be handled, etc.

Thanks.