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tomtom
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Backup to NAS without passing HDD Backup Server?

Post by tomtom »

Hello,

I am new to Veeam B&R but so far I like the simplicity of the program. But I have a question in respect of the write throughput of the B&R server.

I set up B&R 9.5 on a Windows 10 machine that connects to an ESXI server. I started a backup via Powershell script to a CIFS (SMB) share on a Synology NAS.

Everything is fine but I noticed that all data of the VM is read by B&R and written temporarely on the local hard disk of the B&R server before passing the data to the CIFS share.

Why is this neccessary instead of writing directly to the share? And is there a possibility to change this "write cache" to the RAM?
I want to prevent the SSD in the B&R server from fast wear&tear and when every backup will be written on the SSD this a huge amount of data.
foggy
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Re: Backup to NAS without passing HDD Backup Server?

Post by foggy »

Hi Tom, looks like you're using the network transport mode and all data is read from the datastore by the default proxy server (installed as a part of Veeam B&R) prior to be then sent to the repository. If you want to avoid that, set up a virtual proxy server VM on the host for hotadd transport mode to be used and present target CIFS share to it. With this setup, data will be retrieved via the ESXi storage stack and sent directly to the storage.
tdewin
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Re: Backup to NAS without passing HDD Backup Server?

Post by tdewin »

Could you clarify, did you point the backup directly to the CIFS share or are you backing up to the default backup repository?

If you did set it up to backup directly to the CIFS share, the data should flow through a proxy server (if you did not set up any additional proxies the backup server) and than through the gateway server (if you did not set up a manual gateway server, probably the same as your proxy server) to the CIFS share. If you see write activity, might it be that you are running out of RAM which force the system to page out ?

If you did not set it up to backup directly to the CIFS share, modify your backup job to backup directly to the CIFS share
tomtom
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Re: Backup to NAS without passing HDD Backup Server?

Post by tomtom »

Thx for your statements. To clarify, I did install a Win10 VM on ESXI Host with only B&R installed on this particular VM.
For backups I use the StartVBR-Script provided by Vladimir Eremin to do a backup (German https://www.veeam.com/blog/de/veeam-bac ... shell.html).
In this script there is a possibility to define a $Directory. I use a UNC path like \\10.10.10.10\backup where the user account has read/write access to.

So installing a virtual proxy server on another VM will not help me as far as I understand the script because I cannot define such a server.
The Win10 VM has enough RAM left during backup but in the Windows activity manager I can see that there is a lot of HDD traffic on this VM during a backup.

Would it help to use net use fo the UNC in Windows that the share is X:\ and define the $Directory as X:\backup?
foggy
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Re: Backup to NAS without passing HDD Backup Server?

Post by foggy »

Ok, thought your backup server is physical. Anyway, data is retrieved and processed by the proxy server, so you cannot avoid it going through the proxy. If you feel local disk activity on the VM is unreasonably high, feel free to ask support for verification.
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