Network backup and other ?s

[theflakes]

We are evaluating Veeam presently with intent to buy real soon. I have a few questions for any experienced Veeam users that have the time to respond.

I'm using the network mode to backup and seeing about 33MB/sec throughput on full backups and changed data when not backing up white space; white space goes considerably faster. Is this within the expected performance. We use Equallogic iSCSI SATA storage with three vmware ESXi servers in an HA cluster. Each ESXi server has three 1Gb connections into the iSCSI SAN using jumbo frames and MPIO. I have flow control on the air-gapped iSCSI network enabled and all the the other best practice tweaks. Everything is connected via 1Gb copper. I'm assuming this is decent speed as it is faster than what I'm getting with VMware's VDR appliance presently. I'm using best compression and deduplication as well as the backup server has eight CPU cores.

Most of our VMs are small application servers which will not be a problem backing up with Veeam. I have only two VM servers I'm concerned about; a file server with ~600GB of storage used and an Exchange 2007 server with ~300GB of storage used. Would anyone experienced with using Veeam be concerned over using Veeam to backup these servers? I'm looking to displace the need for BackupExec as much as possible or altogether.

To use the Veeam VSS will I need to remove or do anything with the already installed VMware Tools VSS?

How are you all handling backing up the Veeam backup store to tape? I'm assuming my tape use is going to increase a good bit due to the all the Veeam backup files being changed every day. Are you all backing up the Veeam backup store to tape every night, once a week, ...

Also how would restoring an accidentally deleted OU in AD be done? I've seen the video on how to restore the entire AD DC VM which was slick, but I'm not sure how you'd restore individual AD objects if necessary. Would you restore the entire DC and then just initiate an authoritative restore on the OU that was accidentally deleted?


thanks,
Brian

[Gostev]

I'm using the network mode to backup and seeing about 33MB/sec throughput on full backups and changed data when not backing up white space; white space goes considerably faster. Is this within the expected performance. We use Equallogic iSCSI SATA storage with three vmware ESXi servers in an HA cluster. Each ESXi server has three 1Gb connections into the iSCSI SAN using jumbo frames and MPIO. I have flow control on the air-gapped iSCSI network enabled and all the the other best practice tweaks. Everything is connected via 1Gb copper. I'm assuming this is decent speed as it is faster than what I'm getting with VMware's VDR appliance presently. I'm using best compression and deduplication as well as the backup server has eight CPU cores.

Network backup mode generally provides worst performance (plus loads your production LAN and ESX hosts)... I recommend to avoid it. Better performance can be achieved by using vStorage API SAN or Virtual Appliance processing modes. There is stickied thread with some tips on how you can potentially get nearly 3x better performance with Equallogic in vStorage API direct SAN access backup mode.

Most of our VMs are small application servers which will not be a problem backing up with Veeam. I have only two VM servers I'm concerned about; a file server with ~600GB of storage used and an Exchange 2007 server with ~300GB of storage used. Would anyone experienced with using Veeam be concerned over using Veeam to backup these servers? I'm looking to displace the need for BackupExec as much as possible or altogether.

File server is definitely not a problem, no matter of size backup will fly. Exchange will be slower than average server, because transaction logs make a lot of disk blocks dirty, so there are a lot of blocks to process during incremental backup for our product, which reduces the incremental backup performance. Aside of slower performance, there are no problems with backing up Exchange - if you search this forum, you will find that most Veeam customers are doing this with great success.

To use the Veeam VSS will I need to remove or do anything with the already installed VMware Tools VSS?

No need to do anything, we will disable VMware Tools VSS automatically if Veeam VSS is enabled in the job settings.

How are you all handling backing up the Veeam backup store to tape? I'm assuming my tape use is going to increase a good bit due to the all the Veeam backup files being changed every day. Are you all backing up the Veeam backup store to tape every night, once a week, ...

Unless you have a mandatory requirement to do tape backups every day, I recommend doing them once a week for now. The upcoming version 5 of our product will have additional backup mode: "forward" incremental, making it daily tape backups friendly. So, you will be able to copy full backup to tape once a week, and for the rest of the days copy only small, daily incremental backup file to tape.

Also how would restoring an accidentally deleted OU in AD be done? I've seen the video on how to restore the entire AD DC VM which was slick, but I'm not sure how you'd restore individual AD objects if necessary. Would you restore the entire DC and then just initiate an authoritative restore on the OU that was accidentally deleted?

The upcoming version 5 of our product will provide ability to do this in similarly slick manner as well however, please note that item level restore functionality will only be available in the Enterprise Edition of our product, and you need to hurry up if you want to get a free upgrade to it.

[theflakes]

If I use virtual appliance mode can you point me to the specifications for the VM I'd need to use. Also does running VMware player in a VM cause any issues for doing singe file restores and such?


thanks and you've sold me on Veeam especially with version five's features,
Brian

[Gostev]

If I use virtual appliance mode can you point me to the specifications for the VM I'd need to use.

Default VM configuration with 4 vCPU is fine, don't change anything else. Don't remove CD-ROM. Don't change HDD to IDE.

Also does running VMware player in a VM cause any issues for doing singe file restores and such?

Please note that VMware Player is only needed to restore guest files from OS other than Windows. For Windows file level restores, there is built-in functionality - you do not need to start the multi-OS file level restore wizard.

VMware Player is a pain to make working inside VM, so instead I always recommend to have a separate Veeam Backup install on physical computer (your desktop or laptop - whatever you use as admin console), and use this install solely for those multi-OS file level restores (via "Import Backup" on main toolbar).

And again, since I have already started selling you future ( ), with v5 VMware Player will not be required for multi-OS file level restores, instead we will run the FLR appliance on ESX host you designate.