Migrating from Symantec/Veritas, Ran into a snag.

[kspare]

We are working on converting all our customers over to veeam, but ran into a snag with one customer.

They have 2 REALLY large vm's (5tb and 6tb) , they only need to be backed up once a week, right now they backup to tape only. Everything else gets backed up to tape daily.

We are looking at putting in a nas to do all the backups and then use veeam to duplicate to tape for offsite storage once a week.

The problem we are running into is that we don't want to have to backup those big vm's to disk just to push them to tape.

Looking for suggestions to for this as it's our road block to getting rid of Backup Exec .

[wishr]

Hi Kevin,

Unfortunately, direct backup to tape is not yet possible, so in any way, it is required to have a "temporary" storage location before you'll be able to move the backup to tape. You can take a look at that thread for additional information.

Regards,
Fedor

[tomnewman]

There is a way to achieve what you want using a Files to Tape job if most of the 5/6 TB is normal data files (as opposed to something like an SQL or Exchange database.

We do this with a file storage server that has a total of about 11TB of data.

This is organised on three virtual hard drives. The first contains the OS, the second contains critical data (2TB) and the third contains non-critical data (9TB)

We backup the first two as normal VM backups to NAS then secondary backup to tape (excluding the third virtual hard drive). The contents of the third virtual hard disk are backed up monthly with a File to Tape job, takes about 14 hours.

[Dima P.]

Thanks Tom.

Kevin,

The problem we are running into is that we don't want to have to backup those big vm's to disk just to push them to tape.

You can use file to tape for direct backup from these servers but that would be a file level backup and not operating system backup. Will that work in your case? Cheers!

[kspare]

We just bit the bullet and bought the required hard drives. The servers are for our offsite backup and full of millions of small files. It would be very slow. Our testing is going well. Pretty impressed and quotes to all our customers are going out!