AWS FSX as Performance Tier

[Kazz]

Hi,

We are currently offloading our Veeam Backups to Wasabi as most of our environment is on prem. As servers get migrated to VMC on AWS we are loosing our SOBR feature as support to offload without a performance tier will only be available in Veeam 12.

Our VMC tenant is limited to 50TB ( 5 hosts ) and it's not enough to use some of that storage for performance tier. Trying to purchase storage from VMC partners got us nowhere as vendors seem to only sell storage if the VMC tenant was purchased from them.

Looking at native AWS services FSX may be a solution. Could someone please confirm our theory would work?

If we get FSX storage and present it as an SMB share to Veeam running in VMC, could it be our performance tier while we are on Veeam 11?

Please let us know if there is a better way of getting VMs out of VMC to Wasabi using Veeam?

Thank you

[HannesK]

Hello,
general about NAS shares as repository: they are slow and expensive. Slow, because merges / synthetic full are almost impossible. So active full backup is required, which makes it expensive.

About AWS FSX: I don't have experience with that, but expect the same as the general NAS "issues".

I would use an EC2 Linux machine with XFS.

Best regards,
Hannes

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
I have seen that you can present an iSCSI from the NetApp ONTAP FSX to any instance, if that is correct, double check with AWS, then you can leverage either a Windows VM, or a Linux VM on VMC and presenting this FSX over iSCSI, format it with ReFS, or XFS, and that should handle good merges and all.

I have not tested it, neither I am aware QA, but as it is really an ONTAP, but in the cloud, I guess it should just work, will discuss with Hannes and team.

Tell us if you can do iSCSi, please. I saw on the site it is possible.

[Kazz]

Hannes,

Are you saying to spin up an EC2 instance with XSF and make it in to a backup repository for Veeam B&R running in VMC?


Jorge,

Are you suggesting to present NetApp ONTAP FSX to a Veeam guest in VMC via iSCSI format it as ReFS and turn that drive in to a performance tier ? I don't think I can present ONTAP FSX to VMC hosts.

Thank you.

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Yes, I was suggesting connecting ONTAP FSX iSCSI to a Guest VM, Linux or Windows, and format it to your like.

[cdevans01]

The VMware Cloud Flex and ONTAP FSX option can both provide storage natively to the VMC cluster as well - new feature this year. Its deployed via the VMC console. Think its presented as a NFS datastore.

[gummett]

Hi Kazz,
There are 4 different Amazon FSx services* now, primarily for NAS workloads. As Hannes and Jorge point out, block is generally a better option than NAS with Veeam, and this is indeed possible with FSx for NetApp ONTAP as it supports iSCSI. You get an HA pair of virtual ONTAP filers, either in 1 Availability Zone or stretched over 2 (like a MetroCluster). Simply specify how much throughput and SSD capacity you want initially (throughput can be scaled up and down, SSD capacity can only be scaled up currently).

As (I assume) you would only want a short retention in performance tier you will need enough SSD capacity for around a week of backups. FSx for ONTAP's 'Capacity Tier', while excellent for many use cases, won't be appropriate here.

For details of presenting FSx for ONTAP into VMC, please see this article

Having said that, it's likely to be more cost-effective to do as Hannes suggests and use one or more Linux VMs with EBS storage. It's well documented and tested.
With regard to design, Dustin and I went into lots of details and made recommendations in this white paper (just be aware the pricing is out of date!).

Of course all of this will be a temporary solution until V12 arrives. I tested VMC direct into S3 using a V12 beta, and easily saturated the NSX Edge router! I discussed it briefly in my VeeamON session... [24:47]

*I also cover Amazon file services in that session [17:41], along with lots more on Veeam + Amazon S3!

[dalbertson]

How much capacity are you thinking you will need? That really will determine which way to go.

[Kazz]

Hi dalbertson,

Looking to start with 5TB and over time expand to 15TB.

gummett, I did see that V12 will be able to offload directly to an S3 compatible storage, but we don't want to lose the performance tier.

There is another problem, our VMC is linked to an AWS account that was set up by a vendor in error. I am learning that this can only
changed by a VMC support team.