Surebackup/VirtualLab design advice

[Cragdoo]

Hello

I'm looking at setting up Surebackup for our production backups (about 60-70 VMs). Reading through the setup of virtual lab am I right in thinking best design would be to have a dedicated host (with suitable storage) for spinning up the virual lab /VMs ?

[foggy]

Craig, generally, virtual lab does not require provisioning of additional resources. Unless you're going to spin up the entire farm at once, you can deploy vlab on any existing host having some spare resources. Also, you do not need storage capable to hold all the verified VMs, VMs in the lab run directly from backup files and there's no need to restore them to the production datastore.

[Cragdoo]

Thanks Foggy

Typically I would be looking at spinning up all the VMs in a relatively short period of time, hence my thinking around a dedicated host to stop overloading the production hosts.

[chrisdearden]

Hi Craig,
you can dedicate resources , but it depends on how busy your production environment is. If you were to have a host with some fast disk to hold the redirect datastore that would help , but you will also have to tune the surebackup job to ensure that you can pull data out of vpower fast enough.

What is your network setup like ? with that many VM's to test ( assuming you want to test them nightly ) , it may be easier to have a generic lab which doesn't test networking side (Vmtools only ) - if your VM's are in many different vlans this can sometimes be the only way. You can always build additional application stack specific vlabs to replicate some of the more complex network topologies.
With a little tweaking you shoudl be able to test 5 concurrent VM's at a time , so dedicating a whole host to it might be overkill. Feel free to PM/ Email me for more info.

[Cragdoo]

Thanks Chris

As a service provider we do tend to have many VMs within different VLANS, so just a quick power on , check services/ping should suffice, but would be interested in any articles or whitepapers around best practices for configuring Surebackup in this scenario. We'd also be looking to offer customers sandbox environments for patch testing etc. I'm guessing the faster repository the more number of VMs we could spin up.

[chrisdearden]

How have you got your backup jobs organised - are they by client ?

[Cragdoo]

That's something we need to look at , we're talking between 50-60 different customers.

[chrisdearden]

with 60-70 VM's , each in their own VLAN?

[Cragdoo]

no 50-60 customers, ranging from 1 to 12 VMs each, and a dedicated VLAN per customer.

[sanjeev.narula]

I am looking to setup Surebackup and researching on the hardware requirements to make sure it performs well. I am looking at setting up the lab on one of these hosts:
On one of the production hosts
Host Veeam VM is running on
On a separate non production host

I could not find much information on it to help me decide which one I should choose. I understand it may depend upon how many VMs I want to test but I did a quick test and found that the lab reserves the resources on the host which is nowhere mentioned. I am wondering what would happen if the required resources are not available, does it just slow down things or will it fail the job completely. Also, I would like to know if I need to have big enough datastore available to fit the VMs or the VMs are mounted on the backup repository.

Thanks

[veremin]

I am looking at setting up the lab on one of these hosts:

It depends on how busy your production host is. If it's typically overloaded, then, the additional host sounds like the best option.

Also, I would like to know if I need to have big enough datastore available to fit the VMs or the VMs are mounted on the backup repository.

The VMs to verify are executed directly from backups. However, you might need some space to store redo logs that will be written during SureBackup process.

Thanks.