Can a WAN Accelerator be a VM or should it be physical?

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Looking to add in WAN accelerators to our Veeam setup. Does it matter if these are VM's at the source and destination site, running within the same cluster of VM's it's going to be backing up, or do they need to be physical? Does physical offer any advantages?

Case 00974171

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Also, how do we estimate how much space will be needed for the global cache data?

[Gostev]

Hi, Jonathan. Yes, WAN accelerator can be a VM and I see no benefits of having it physical in v8, or having this VM run in the same cluster with the protected VMs. As far as total cache size, there is a formula for estimating one available in the WAN Accelerator component System Requirements. Thanks!

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

A few more questions...

The document you linked states...

"Source WAN Accelerator requires 20 GB per 1 TB of source data to store digests of data blocks of
source VM disks. Disk space consumption is dynamic and changes as unique VMs are added to (or
removed from) to jobs with WAN Acceleration enabled."

So is that the raw size of the VM's on my datastore within VMware? For instance, add up all the used space on my LUN's then use that for the source data amount?

"Target WAN Accelerator requires global cache size as defined by user (fixed amount). Disk space is
reserved immediately upon selecting WAN Accelerators as a target one in any job."

What does it mean "as defined by user (fixed amount)." I don't know how a user would define this on their own.

Thanks!

[foggy]

So is that the raw size of the VM's on my datastore within VMware? For instance, add up all the used space on my LUN's then use that for the source data amount?

Correct.

What does it mean "as defined by user (fixed amount)." I don't know how a user would define this on their own.

Here's a good thread on that, please review.

[PTide]

Hi,

What does it mean "as defined by user (fixed amount)." I don't know how a user would define this on their own.

In addition to what's been already said about global cache...
Basically, it works in the following way: Total Target WAN Accelerator Cache Size = ((# of Source WAN Accelerators) * (Size Configured in the Target WAN Accelerator Properties)) + 20 GB per 1 TB of Backup Data Handled by WAN Accelerators.

Please refer to this article:

The global cache size is specified per source WAN accelerator. That is, if you plan to use one target WAN accelerator with several source WAN accelerators, the specified amount of space will be allocated for every source WAN accelerator that will be working with the target WAN accelerator and the size of the global cache will increase proportionally.<...>

Please let me know if that helps.

Thank you.

[Gostev]

What does it mean "as defined by user (fixed amount)." I don't know how a user would define this on their own.

It is defined in the wizard when creating actual WAN accelerator:
http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... cache.html