Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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smakked
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Looking for Advice - VMWARE backups

Post by smakked »

HI Guys

Looking for best advice for out backup infrastructure.
Currently using Veeam but it is getting slow and messy. I have taken this over form someone else and to me it looks messy.
What i want to know what would be the best type of backup for my environment, Reversed vs Incremental backups, Synthetic vs Full backups.

We have around 230 VMs some are big near 2TB in size. and the rest and most are 60 - 80 gig in size.

Currently have 5 proxys spread across 3 clusters in VMWARE, all backup infrastructure is away form production. We have some fast storage for backups on a SAN and some on 4 QNAP NAS's and a custom Built Nas Running 2012R2, total backup size is around 30 TB.

SO looking for advise and best practice in which way to do all this. Veeam is very new to me so any help appreciated.
foggy
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Re: Looking for Advice - VMWARE backups

Post by foggy »

Adrian, welcome to the forums.

Let's start from why do you consider your backups slow. Do you meet your required backup window? What is the typical processing rate for your jobs and what is the bottleneck stats for those you're not satisfied with? There're too many variables in your environment, so it's better to go job by job if all of them are using different targets and backup modes. There's no ideal setup for all the cases, but if we get more details about your configuration, we could probably come up with some advises on how to improve this or that processing stage.
smakked
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Re: Looking for Advice - VMWARE backups

Post by smakked »

HI foggy.

Yes backups are going over the window we have set, which was overnight. Bottle neck is dependent on what repo the job is going to from the looks of it. Like i said previously i have taken this over from some one else and want to get it in order. Most of the VMs are small windows installs but we have 5 over 4 TB and 1 over 10TB (Exchange). The small ones don't seem to be the issue as they complete in time, until they do a full synthetic which seems to take a long time.

I have been researching and am looking at doing a full backup once a week and incremental every other day, currently they set for Incremental with full synthetics to happen once a week. Even looking at reverse incremental.

The Veeam App server is a stand alone machine and has 3 standalone proxys, and we have 3 more proxy in VMware one in each of our clusters., Another issue we are running into is storage running out all the time, but i think this is because Jobs are failing leaving left overs or retention is not working?

On the Fast SAN storage it averages about 90MB /sec and on the other NAS about 30 -50MB sec.

Another thing to note is i am not sure how many VMs is recommended to have in a single Job , some have 30 VMs in a single Job.

If you want more info let me know.
foggy
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Re: Looking for Advice - VMWARE backups

Post by foggy »

smakked wrote:Bottle neck is dependent on what repo the job is going to from the looks of it. Like i said previously i have taken this over from some one else and want to get it in order. Most of the VMs are small windows installs but we have 5 over 4 TB and 1 over 10TB (Exchange). The small ones don't seem to be the issue as they complete in time, until they do a full synthetic which seems to take a long time.
Synthetic activity is very I/O intensive, so this is expected, especially on low-end NAS models. Btw, how do you add your target storages to the Veeam B&R console (what type of repository do you use)?
smakked wrote:I have been researching and am looking at doing a full backup once a week and incremental every other day, currently they set for Incremental with full synthetics to happen once a week. Even looking at reverse incremental.
Active fulls could help in case synthetic takes too long. Note that reverse incremental will put higher load on the target storage each day (however less load on the day synthetic full was scheduled previously at).
smakked wrote:Another issue we are running into is storage running out all the time, but i think this is because Jobs are failing leaving left overs or retention is not working?
This should not be the case. Please note that with forward incremental mode, you always have more restore points than the configured retention defines, due to how it works.
smakked wrote:On the Fast SAN storage it averages about 90MB /sec and on the other NAS about 30 -50MB sec.
Again, bottleneck stats and detailed configuration of a specific job (including utilized target storage and backup transport mode) could help us decide on whether something can be improved.
smakked wrote:Another thing to note is i am not sure how many VMs is recommended to have in a single Job , some have 30 VMs in a single Job.
Typically, it is recommended combine VMs created from the same template (running the same OS, the same apps) into one job to get better dedupe rate between them, so a good practice is to group Windows boxes together and Linux boxes together and not both of them in one job. Another concern is newly added VMs, which you probably want to be automatically picked up by the corresponding job without the need to update it. In this case backing up by datastore (or some other VM container, like folder) would certainly be a better option. This is also relevant for environments with vMotion.
veremin
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Re: Looking for Advice - VMWARE backups

Post by veremin »

Also, what is the capacity of the given devices? Given the difference in available storages, it stands to reason to use

- fast SAN as a primary repository that will hold just few restore points and guarantee fast restore operations in case of disaster (short retention, backup jobs)
- NAS devices as secondary repositories to hold the required retention (long-term retention, backup copy jobs)

Thanks.
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