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nfshirley
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Design assistance required

Post by nfshirley »

Hi All

I am looking for some Veeam design (for want of a better word) assistance.

We have 3 Hyper V host servers and 1 VMWare host server (don't ask) with a combination of around 70Tb of data all located in a server rack in Building A.

We have a second building on the same business park (lets call it Building B) that is connected to building A via 1Gb Laserlink creating one network.

We would like to locate the backup repository in Building B to help minimise risk and allow for a sort of offsite backup!

I was looking at purchasing a Synology NAS with around 200TB of space, but having read (lots) on this forum, it looks like the best option would be to buy say a Supermicro serverwith 60 disk bays which could provide the same repository space.

My questions are these:

a) am I correct in that the Supermicro server running Windows Server 2012 R2 with 36x6TB drives will probably be a better repository than a Synology NAS?
b) how does Veeam see this network ie local or WAN, or just slow LAN and therefore will I need to configure the backup as offsite and use WAN acceleration (and if so, what is needed)?
c) would it be better to have a backup proxy in this configuration and if so, do I need one in Building A and building B?
d) If I need a backup proxy(s) would these be better physical or virtual servers?
d) I presume that I will definitely need a Veeam backup server whatever - which is ideally a physical server rather than a virtual server is this correct?
e) If I need both a Veeam server and a Backup proxy server in Building A, could this be one server?

Any help, guidance, opinions are most welcome and if there is anything that I have missed / not thought about / obviously not mentioned, feel free to shout.

I really would like to get this right as it will be a considerable investment.

Many thanks

Neil
foggy
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by foggy »

nfshirley wrote:a) am I correct in that the Supermicro server running Windows Server 2012 R2 with 36x6TB drives will probably be a better repository than a Synology NAS?
Correct.
nfshirley wrote:b) how does Veeam see this network ie local or WAN, or just slow LAN and therefore will I need to configure the backup as offsite and use WAN acceleration (and if so, what is needed)?
WAN acceleration is definitely not required here, it is useful on links under 100Mbps. You just need Veeam data movers on both ends (proxy and repository) for optimal data transfer between buildings.
nfshirley wrote:c) would it be better to have a backup proxy in this configuration and if so, do I need one in Building A and building B?
d) If I need a backup proxy(s) would these be better physical or virtual servers?
For Hyper-V, by default data processing is performed by an on-host data mover, while for VMware you'd better have proxy server on each host for faster VM data retrieval (am I understanding right that VMs reside on host's local storage?).
nfshirley wrote:d) I presume that I will definitely need a Veeam backup server whatever - which is ideally a physical server rather than a virtual server is this correct?
e) If I need both a Veeam server and a Backup proxy server in Building A, could this be one server?
Veeam B&R management server can be either physical or virtual, it doesn't really matter. It also can play the proxy role and in this case be installed either on one of the Hyper-V hosts or on a VM residing on VMware host or on a separate server as well. I'd recommend to take a look at architectural part of the user guide (VMware, Hyper-V) for better understanding.
nfshirley
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by nfshirley »

Thanks for the reply Foggy.

The Hyper V VMs reside on a mix of local storage and a SAN.

The VMWare VM's reside only on local storage.

Q. What is required for a data mover?
foggy
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by foggy »

Data mover is a component that runs on each proxy and repository (except CIFS) server, including Veeam B&R server itself.
nfshirley
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by nfshirley »

Again thanks Foggy, much appreciated.

You did ask "am I understanding right that the Vms reside on hosts local storage?" - does it make a difference if the Hyper V VMs disks are located on a SAN?
nfshirley
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by nfshirley »

So, having read further from your posts and the architectural design I am concerned I wont be able to make this work.

The Hyper V VMs are stored on a mixture of local disks and a HP P2000 which the host is attached to directly via 10GB iSCSI.

The VMs are quite intensive on the host and so I think the on host backup will be overly intensive and so we would need a off-host backup proxy, but we would be unable (I think) to get the off host backup to talk to the VMs disks stored on the HP P2000 direct iSCSI - what do people do to get around this?
foggy
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by foggy »

For that you would need to connect an off-host backup proxy to the storage (the same way the host is connected to it).
nfshirley
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by nfshirley »

Hi Foggy

So having two devices (namely the Hyper V host and the Veeam Off Site Host backup proxy) accessing the VHD or VHDX files at potentially the same time is not an issue?
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Re: Design assistance required

Post by foggy »

Yes, since proxy accesses VSS snapshot of the LUN, not the LUN with actual VHD's.
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