Veeam and Dell Vrtx

[nire]

Hi everyone,

We are currently looking to replace our "legacy" backup environment (backup exec) and I am blown away by the Veeam software.

After extensive browsing through the user- and evaluation guides for Hyper-V, I am still not 100% sure how to put everything together.

Our situation:
Dell Vrtx
3 blades
Windows 2012 Hyper-V Fail over cluster
24 VM's spread evenly over the 3 blades (including exchange, sql server and active directory)

Since there is no option to directly attach the storage to another physical host, an off-host backup is out of the question.
My question, what would be best practice considering my environment? I have read about Veeam taking volume snapshots. How would this impact storage capacity? Where is the volume snapshot stored (where would I need storage capacity?) Is this a snapshot of the Cluster Shared Volume? In my case, the CSV disks come up as Reserved in the device manager on the blade. I can access the volumes through the means of a Mounted Volume. Would Veeam take a snapshot of the Mounted Volume?

Thanks.

Nils

[s_t]

Hi Nils,

the DELL VRTX provides a shared SAS Storage for your Blades, but only through a shared RAID Controller (shared PERC) - so there are no such features as storage snapshots and not the possibility to use an off-host proxy, as you already said.

If you add your Hyper-V Hosts to Veeam, it will automatically install an on-host proxy to your Hyper-V Hosts, so this component on your Hyper-V Blades will do the proxy tasks (fetching data from the storage, compressing them and sending the data to the repository role).

You can install the Veeam console itself on a virtual machine inside your Cluster, or better - if you have a physical server as backup target and Veeam Repository role, which I would recommend - to the physical backup server, so you are able to do restores also if your Hyper-V Cluster is down.

It is correct that the CSV disk is not directly accessible, it should not, and Veeam can handle CSV access quite well - "it just works"
Please do not experiment with raw access to the underlying disk.

During Backup, Veeam will trigger a snapshot/checkpoint of your VM (and also trigger an application-aware VSS inside the VM if configured), fetch the now frozen data from the Hyper-V host, and releases the snapshot afterwards.

[nire]

Sebastian,

Thank you for taking the time to respond and confirming my initial thought.

Veeam it is then!

Nils