Hardware Advise for First Veeam Deployment

[Alan_ORiordan]

Hi

I have read up on Veeam Backup and Replication but not had any practical use in a real world environment. One of our clients is looking to virtualise their environment in their upcoming hardware refresh to aid disaster recovery failover. I had a webex demo with a Veeam agent yesterday who suggested our original plan to have an LTO-6 tape drive connected to the Host server (ESXi 5.5 Essentials via passthrough) and have a VM on the same machine being the master,proxy and repository was not a good idea for performance and restore ability should the host server fail.

We will have the following hardware in our environment:

ServerA - Currently purchased (HQ Office)

2 x Dell PE R720XD (2 x E5-2690 @ 2.9 Ghz, 128GB RAM, 3.6TB of HDD space in RAID 10) - (Windows Datacentre License)

This will contain seven VM's including a VM domain Controller, application servers, SQL 2008 R2 box, Exchange 2013 - 30 mailboxes.

ServerB - Not yet purchased (HQ Office)

This will only hold three Linux/Oracle machines and be a failover machine should Server A fail - (No Windows License anticipated)

Server C - Purchased (HQ Office)

We have a physical Domain Controller (PE R320) (1x E5-1410v2 @2.8Ghz 4C, 8threads, 8GB RAM)

Server D - not yet purchased (DR Site)

Similar to the above Hosts in spec but only to hold replicated VM's

My Question is:

Will we be able to use the physical DC for any or all Veeam Backup Repository,Proxy, Master roles with connected LTO-6 or should we perhaps split them up onto the second lightly loaded Linux Host machine (Windows license permitting). The DC does not yet have enough local storage to hold the backup copies and RAM?, as this role was not anticipated at the time of purchase!

The total size of VM's to be backed up will be approximately 1-1.5TB.

I appreciate the time spent to help a Veeam Noob

Thanks

[foggy]

Alan, welcome to the Veeam Community forums. Judging on the size of your environment, I do not see any issues in using that physical server for all-in-one Veeam B&R deployment. However, you can always add virtual proxy servers to split the load and consider selecting an appropriate backup target for your backups.

[Alan_ORiordan]

Alexander

Thanks for confirming installing Veeam on a DC is supported.

If we were to add two more 3TB SATA disks in RAID 0 to create a 6 TB drive would that be fast enough storage? The PE R320 only has a four disk chassis and two are used for system. I am just trying to keep the extra expense down for the customer as they probably weren't expecting it.

My thoughts on a failure on RAID 0 is that even if it occurred the backups would be on tape pr the machines would still be replicated while the Array was repaired/restored.

[foggy]

If we were to add two more 3TB SATA disks in RAID 0 to create a 6 TB drive would that be fast enough storage?

If it allows to meet the required backup window, then it can be considered an acceptable storage.

[Alan_ORiordan]

But we won't know until we've committed to the hardware purchases? I appreciate there could be other bottlenecks such as network speed between the two so it's hard for you to say for sure but are you aware of other small deployments where SATA disks are used for the backup repository

For licensing if the DC is the Veeam backup server but it accesses two dual socket host machines how would it be licensed?

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam B&R server requires license keys for all physical sockets on the source hosts you're going to backup/replicate VMs from.

[foggy]

I would say SATA disks are pretty common among our smaller customers (you can search the forum for "SATA" to find examples of other deployments).