I'm new to this & about to buy Veeam (VBR) for my ESX4 environment. Have 3 hosts with about 30+ small Linux VMs with 2 TB HP LeftHand iSCSI SAN with 1TB usage. Plus some standalone hosts with DAS for data store.
Have tested VBR on a standalone server with direct SAN connection using MS software iSCSI initator - Works well. Planning to use a HP PL DL 380 G5 with plenty of disk space as the VBR server.
1) Do I need a hardware iSCSI HBA ? Think most if their HPs have built-in iSCSI offloading NICs?
All this equipments are collocated in a Datacenter. After reading your real word use of VBR I’m planning to replicate the entire VMs to our office connected to DC via 100Mbps p2p fibre.
As a simple DR site i'm planning one host with plenty space & performance @ our London site replicating VMs & keep them switch off
Hi Regi, I was under impression that the only benefit of having hardware iSCSI HBA is slightly better performance. Because you have very small number of VMs to backup, this probably won't matter much... you can always upgrate to hardware HBA at any time later, if your environment grows. Thanks!
Also I’m planning to deploy Exchange 2010 with 150 users & SQL 2008 server on VMs. Currently running on physical servers & backup using BE 2010 with agent to tape autoloader.
Can I use VBR to do the same?
You can backup these to disk with Veeam Backup, and use BE2010 to copy the backup file to tape. This is how most customers are doing this. Integration can be automated (once finishes, Veeam Backup job will invoke Backup Exec tape copy job automatically through scripting). We have a guide avaialble through our support describing how to set this up.
