Bind VM backup to proxy on same host - virtual appliance

[Philip.N]

I've been trying to find documentation on how to bind the proxy so it only handles backup of VMs that are on the same host as the proxy itself when transport mode is virtual appliance. The reason why is simply that it takes up to 10 times longer for us to do backups of af VM over the network to a proxy. We want to have as short a backup window as possible. From what I've observed we will get this if the proxy only handles the VMs on the host that the proxy is also on because it goes directly through the hypervisor.

My environment has 5 VMware hosts with 1GB connections. Veeam B&R version is 8.0.0.0.2084. All 5 hosts are in the same ip subnets and on the same VLANs. Veeam backup server and proxies are VMs. I have 1 backup server and 5 proxies - 1 on each host.

Host1 - Proxy1
Host2 - Proxy2
Host3 - Proxy3
Host4 - Proxy4
Host5 - Proxy5

I want to avoid proxy2 on Host2 to do backups of VMs on Host1, Host3, Host4 and Host5.

How do I bind - or prioritize - the proxies so they only handle backups/restores of VMs on the same host as the proxies are on?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Shestakov]

Hello Philip,
The easiest way is to set the proxy servers explicitly in the backup jobs options. So you just choose which proxies are used for the particular jobs.
By the way, even default proxy selection does great job. With the default proxy selection algorithm (i.e. when the key is not specified), direct SAN and hotadd proxies are preferred over network mode proxies. NBD proxy is never selected if there is at least one available direct SAN or hotadd proxy.
Thanks!

[foggy]

Using the EnableSameHostHotaddMode registry value could be even easier.

[Philip.N]

Shestakov, thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately I will not use your suggestion because if I have a backup job with VMs spread over many hosts that are migrated often - and by many IT admins - then defining the proxy in the backup job will not work at all. Right now we have default proxy selection and it does not work well enough when backing up using hotadd. I want to only use hotadd/virtual appliance and only on the VMs on same host as proxy.

[Philip.N]

foggy, thanks for your suggestion. This is exactly what I was looking for. I searched and found the steps for it:

REGEDIT EnableSameHostHotaddMode mode.
a. Create a VM proxy on every host in your VMware cluster where backups occur
b. On the server where the Veeam Backup & Replication console is installed open ‘Registry Editor’
c. Navigate to the key:
HKLM\Software\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\
d. Create a new DWORD
name: EnableSameHostHotaddMode
value: 1

[foggy]

Yes, the steps are correct. Don't forget to restart Veeam Backup Service after specifying the registry value.

[dellock6]

Philip, is the shared storage block or NFS?
If it's NFS (and in case I'm writing it for people in the future looking this thread) I strongly suggest to use 2 as the value for the registry key:
0 = any available proxy is used regardless being local or remote to the processed VMs
1 = preference is given to local proxy. If a local proxy is not deployed or not available when the VM has to be processed, job is failed over to a remote proxy still using hotadd
2 = preference is given to local proxy. If a local proxy is not deployed or not available when the VM has to be processed, job is failed over to a remote proxy using network mode

Remote hotadd against NFS has huge issues in VMware, that's why we have value 2 to failover to network mode when using a remote proxy (one that is not in the same host as the processed VM).

[Philip.N]

@foggy: Thanks!

@dellock6: Thanks for the information. It's NFS so I will go ahead and just change that to 2 and observe for a few months.

[Friedrich95]

is this also applicable for guest interaction proxy?

[foggy]

What exactly? Could you please clarify the scenario in mind?

[Friedrich95]

i did the same trick to make the bind the proxy so it only handles backup of VMs that are on the same host, i worked like i charm but i wasn't able to this for the guest interaction proxy. my backup proxy is also a guest interaction proxy and i would like to force each guest interaction proxy to only handles application aware backup of VMs that are on the same host.

[foggy]

But why do you need that? Guest interaction proxies do not hotadd VM disks.

[Friedrich95]

i thought it was possible to do application aware backups without the need for the data transitions between the Hosts, our goal is to minimize network load as possible.

[foggy]

Guest interaction proxies do not perform backups themselves, they are used just to communicate with the processed VM to prepare it for backup.