Opinions

[gingerdazza]

Hi people.

I am running a Veeam trial at the moment and liking most of what I see. We are a vSphere house with the following

2 data centers (active/active)
Some services highly available through geo-separation between DCs. But not all.
10 Production ESX 5.x Hosts (5 in each DC)
2 Non-Production ESX 5.x hosts (1 in each DC)
1Gb network including between DCs
HP EVA SAN 4400 in each DC attached over 4GB FC
Considering replacing EVA with 3Par or Nutanix next year
Using about 8-9TB of VM storage in each DC

The vast majority of our VMs have very flexible RPOs. We really only need weekly backups for most as they are largely role based, rather than hosting data.
Our retention demands are also low - we're really only looking to protect the build/service when backing up the VMs. There may be a couple of exceptions to this.

So here are my current thoughts:
1. Have server in each DC backing up 'local' VMs.
2. Veeam B&R server to be its own repository. Likely to be a HP DL380 Gen9 with 2xCPU, 64GB, 12xLFF 4TB 7.2k HDD, with FC card.
3. Use daily forward incremental with weekly synthetic full for prod VMs. Monthly Active Full. Retention perhaps 14 points.
4. Use weekly forward incremental with monthly synthetic full for non-prod VMs. Retention perhaps 7 points.
5. Two B&R Repositories on each B&R server (standard volume for active backup jobs, and Windows 2012 R2 deduped volume for backup copy jobs from other B&R server)
6. Use FC for Direct SAN backups for now. If we go Nutanix it would be hot-add or NBD over 10GbE.
7. Backup window hopefully 6 hours daily.
8. Setup pull replication jobs for any VMs needed in site failure, and from these create failover plan.

Are the B&R servers a good fit and spec?

We are starting a SQL project too, where 2014 AAGs will be virtualised. I've seen various reports of issues about backup these up on Veeam, and I would be nervous about the frequent potential for stun and failover caused by Veeam snapshot based backups of higher I/O SQL servers. Especially for intra-day TLog backups. So, we might remain on our current HP Data Protector agent based backup to disk for SQL.

Any thoughts on any of this? Comments welcome.

[foggy]

Hello, the overall setup looks pretty solid. Your Veeam B&R servers have good spec, however only actual tests will show whether they are capable of the required backup load, given the defined backup window.

Please review this thread for discussion about backing up SQL AlwaysOn groups.