On-Demand Sanbox From Soup to Nuts

[Zew]

Hey guys,

I had a question around On-Demand Sandbox, as this is a feature we need in our environment. Turns out the latest updates broke a Lync Feature in my enviro, and a different vendor update broke plenty of our devs hard working webparts in SharePoint. I am def loving Veeam as it has saved my bacon a couple times already and proven to be very resilient. Though there are a couple gotchas to deal with.

Now I want to utilize On-Demand sandbox, but need a couple things cleared up before I try to implement it.

I have read the FAQ's under virtual-lab section: http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-re ... 33-15.html

Totally awesome how to handles the network traffic. Then I watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwaw9ORd9B8
and @ 1:40 the demonstrator mentions that the VM is booted with a R/O copy of the VMDK and all changes are wriiten to a cache file on the Veeam server.

This leaves me with a lot of questions:

1) what specs would the Veeam server have to allow a fluent run of like 5-6 different servers that need to work together to provide functionality?
Ex. SharePoint Front End and a DB server. Or Exchange and Lync.. or all of them together?

2) with the masqueraiding, I'm assuming this is also handled by the Veeam server as a virtual router... How much traffic would be handled by this and what resource implications would there be?

3) We currently run Veeam as just another VM with standard specs (2 CPU's @ 1 socket per core with 4 Gigs of Memory).. Would it be better to host this server on a standalone piece of hardware? Or should I simply up the specs on this VM? I like knowing I can migrate the server should I ever need to for any reason, but feel it might have better performance if it was on its own hardware, with dedicated Nics.

4) We use a VNXe3150 for our SAN, currently with NFS for our production ESXi servers and their underlying VMDK's. Would I need to change this to VMFS5 over iSCSI to utilize Veeam v9's EMC based storage snapshot and recovery technology?

5) Do I have to install virtual-lab as another installation to my B&R v8 install, I couldn't seem to find and On-Demand Sandbox option anywhere?

I hope to hear your great input, and Thanks for creating such an amazing product!

[Zew]

Bump, is there a On-Demand Best Practice guide?

[foggy]

1) what specs would the Veeam server have to allow a fluent run of like 5-6 different servers that need to work together to provide functionality?
Ex. SharePoint Front End and a DB server. Or Exchange and Lync.. or all of them together?
...
3) We currently run Veeam as just another VM with standard specs (2 CPU's @ 1 socket per core with 4 Gigs of Memory).. Would it be better to host this server on a standalone piece of hardware? Or should I simply up the specs on this VM? I like knowing I can migrate the server should I ever need to for any reason, but feel it might have better performance if it was on its own hardware, with dedicated Nics.

Veeam B&R itself is typically not involved in SureBackup/On-Demand Sandbox process in terms of resource consumption. VMs are started on your production host if it has spare capacity or a dedicated host, if required. Running VMs in virtual lab does not require much resources, as they are not serving production workload. What is more important though, is having a fast disk to hold the vPower NFS datastore.

2) with the masqueraiding, I'm assuming this is also handled by the Veeam server as a virtual router... How much traffic would be handled by this and what resource implications would there be?

Traffic between production and isolated network is routed by a proxy appliance.

4) We use a VNXe3150 for our SAN, currently with NFS for our production ESXi servers and their underlying VMDK's. Would I need to change this to VMFS5 over iSCSI to utilize Veeam v9's EMC based storage snapshot and recovery technology?

No need to change, NFS will be supported as well.

5) Do I have to install virtual-lab as another installation to my B&R v8 install, I couldn't seem to find and On-Demand Sandbox option anywhere?

Another Veeam B&R installation is not necessary. To set up a sandbox, you need to create new application group, stuff it with VMs you want to be available in sandbox, and create new SureBackup job with this application group and "Keep the application group running once the job completes" check box selected.

[Zew]

Thanks for the info Foggy!

I'm assuming the all changes written to the cache file (as mentioned in the demonstration) is located on this vPower NFS store? Or locally to the Veeam Server somewhere, like FLR?

[foggy]

Right, vPower NFS datastore, located on the repository by default, but can be any Windows-based server.