Could anyone shed some light on helper appliances under the properties of object storage repo in VBR 12, image below.
According to description it should help with health check operations and if trying to configure it, it offers me a list of our Managed Servers (all Windows VMs). What is considered close network proximity with object storage? Just a good network latency or should the appliance be deployed in the same bucket? It's a bit confusing...
The helper appliance becomes helpful if you use public cloud object storage such as Azure or AWS.
Having an helper appliance in their cloud environment allows you to run a health check without egress costs.
For on-premise object storage appliances, I recommend to have the helper appliance as close as possible to the object storage appliance. We need to read data from the object storage when we do the health check. The better network connectivity (bandwidth, latency) you have between the helper appliance and object storage, the better performance you will get.
