Determining needed storage capacity of a repository

[PNWMtnBiker]

Hello everyone

I've been piloting Veeam at my place of work and we are right at the cusp of making a purchase therefore I'm getting a jump on planning a production design. We have VMWare and 180 VM's I'll be backing up.

I'm having a little difficulty determining how much storage I should plan for on my repository. I'm going with a fast / low retention primary repository copied to a second and third location which will have longer retention.

Would anyone have some tips on how to figure out appropriate repository storage?

[Gostev]

Hi, without knowing anything about the environment and typical workload, I usually recommend going with at least 50% of total VM size for the primary repository. Thanks!

[PNWMtnBiker]

That should easy enough to figure out actually.

Work load wise, it's file servers, application, web servers, SharePoint, SQL. Exchange currently but being moved to O365 potentially.

Hardware is Cisco UCS on NetApp SAN. I'm planning for the primary repository to have a 10Gbe connection and using a virtual proxies on each host utilizing hot add.

[Gostev]

Not necessarily that easy... I remember one customer who explained me his environment in the exact same way. It turned out, 90% of all data was in just two file servers holding JPEG X-Ray images (it was a hospital). As you can imagine, the backup size for the whole environment was about the same as the original data size

[PNWMtnBiker]

Ahhh yes, you make a good point, the type of data is equally important.

I did start on determining my total provisioned numbers and I came up with 20TB across the datastores.

Capacity Provisioned GB
2048 1799.74
2048 2637.58
2048 2955.3
2048 1367.56
2048 1542.08
2048 2271.5

SUBTOTAL 12573.76

Capacity Provisioned GB
1024.25 458.92
1024.25 858.57
1024.25 811.42
1024.25 426.28
1024.25 568.63
1024.25 605.04
1024.25 432.64
1024.25 582.91
1024.25 582.78
1024.25 731.35
1024.25 477.12

SUBTOTAL 6535.66

TOTAL 19109.42

[PNWMtnBiker]

I should add that I'm considering this for restore points, business needs could change this of course.

Primary: 1 week for everything
Secondary: 4 weeks for everything
Third: varying on the role of the vm, some less, some up to 6 months maybe more

[Gostev]

Remember to also consider change rates, as this will impact incremental backup sizes dramatically. Veeam ONE has an excellent report that will estimate the daily change rate on all VMs without actually tracking those changes (yep, dark magic), so be sure to use that as well.