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pauliem
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Single box Veeam solution?

Post by pauliem »

I have been using Veeam for a number of months and I now have a project where we have to virtualize many old systems running Sco Unix. Currently these systems backup on to tape and are taken off-site every night and the customer wants to retain that setup.

The problem is that I need to run VMWare, the legacy guest OS and a guest to run Veeam all from one box, not have a separate machine running Veeam backing up this VMWare server. We need to retain the ability to be able to take away a full backup every night off-site.

Any suggestions on how or where we I can send the backups for this system? A cheap network enabled drive? USB Passthough? (I have read that this is very slow).

Any suggestions welcomed!
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hello Paul,

I wouldn't recommend using USB Passthrough, as it won't provide you with a decent performance rate as you might have already seen from the other topics. You may want to use rsync to move and sync your backup files on the remote site.

Also could you please elaborate you problem, as I didn't quite get what you want to achieve:
The problem is that I need to run VMWare, the legacy guest OS and a guest to run Veeam all from one box
Do you want to use Veeam Backup to backup VMs running on VMware Server located on the same machine Veeam backup server is installed on?
pauliem
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by pauliem »

Essentially I want to be able to give the customer a setup much like they have now - a single server backing itself up to a tape or other removable media (hard drive).

I want to run Veeam backup on the same machine as the VM that is going to be backed up - then be able to take that backup away and bring it back at a later date, so that it can be overwritten again (like a tape rotation). I'm trying to avoid using Hyper-V but it does seem to be easier in this situation just to take a backup and put it on to removable media.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Paul,

Thanks for clarifying. I wouldn't recommend doing so, because having backup server and the application you want to backup with this server on the same VM, won't let you use application-aware processing as well as VMware Tools Quiesence. The backup job will be timing out when VM freeze happens (because Veeam server will be unable to process API calls being "frozen").

The only way to backup this VM is to disable Veeam VSS or VMware Tools Quiesence, thus meaning you will have a crash consistent backup file for your VM. I bet this is not what you want to have in the end.

In other words, to have a consistent application backups, you need to have at least two machines: one for backup server, another one for the application.

Hope it helps!
pauliem
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by pauliem »

Sorry - I did not make completely clear. I am fine with having a seperate VM to run the backups, but I do not want to have 2 machines to backup 1 very small VM/application.

So my idea is to have the legacy app in one VM.
A seperate Windows XP/Windows 2003 VM to run backups.

But I need to be able to send the backup to removable media. Make sense?
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Well... in this case why don't you want to install Veeam backup server as well as other backup application which copies the backup files to tape into one VM? You may use a local drive or any NAS device/shared folder as a destination for Veeam backup jobs, so that your other backup software could send those backups to tape.
pauliem
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Re: Single box Veeam solution?

Post by pauliem »

Just replying to say that I have this working now. Backing up to a QNAP NAS which then copies the Veeam backups to an external USB drive on a nightly schedule. These can be taken off-site while the NAS remains in place. Seems to be working very well so far.
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