Server spec for physical box

[gshaw]

I'm looking at trying to find a better replacement for the HP DL180 that was originally going to be our Veeam server and as part of trying to find something quieter I'm looking at the ML110 series so we can keep it away from the server room if possible.

The DL180 had an E5620 CPU and 8GB RAM, ML110 more likely something like an X3430 or the newer Xeon E3-1220 (or something similar). So would be a single-Quad CPU and 4 or 8GB RAM. Would that be sufficient to run Veeam for around 10-15 VMs as a physical server? Was then going to use the 4 internal bays on RAID5 to give around 5-6TB of storage on 2TB SATA disks and back off to tape weekly as an off-site backup \ archive.

[Gostev]

Sure, that's more than sufficient for a few TB of VMs.

[gshaw]

Great, that gives me a few more options

Now just need to see if the ML110 is capable of running with a RAID card without running every fan in the system at full speed like the DL180 does

[gshaw]

Just reading around a bit further and found this...

Finally, one thing often overlooked is the backup target. If you’re pulling data at 60MB/sec, can you write the data that fast? Since Veeam is compressing and deduping on the fly, it can have a somewhat random write pattern even when it’s running fulls, but reverse incrementals are especially hard on the target storage since they require a random read, random write, and sequential write for ever block that’s backed up during an incremental. I see a lot of issue with people attempting to write to older NAS devices or 3-4 drive RAID arrays which might have decent throughput, but poor random access. This is not as much of an issue with fulls and the new forward incrementals in Veeam 5, but still has some impact.

Think it may have come from this forum at some point actually but search doesn't play nicely for me on here (seems a very low search limit before you get locked out for a minute or so?)

The info about RAID is what I'm interested in as I'd most likely have exactly the setup above with 4 x 2TB in RAID5. Is that likely to be a problem if using reverse incrementals? Forward is obviously easier on the storage but the multiple full backups on disk might prove an issue in terms of disk space

[ekranz]

[merged]

We're going to be purchasing a pair of servers to run Veeam. Right now we're looking at HP DL380G7 servers. My question is about the processors.

Our choices are AMD or Intel. In both cases, these are going to be dual socket machines, but the Intel chip has 6 cores at 3.4GHz, and the AMD chip has 12 cores at 2.5GHz.

Which is going to give us the best performance? More cores, or more speed per core?

Also, we are planning on loading up with 32G of ram in these boxes.

[Gostev]

Think it may have come from this forum at some point actually but search doesn't play nicely for me on here (seems a very low search limit before you get locked out for a minute or so?)

I think you will be able to achieve reasonable backup window with reversed incremental with the amount of data you are planning to backup (judging on your planned backup storage capacity).

[Vitaliy S.]

Which is going to give us the best performance? More cores, or more speed per core?

I believe clock rate is more important for better speed and performance rates. You may want to take a look at CPU requirements over here: veeam 4.1.1 to 5.0.1 Upgrade CPU Requirements

As regards the memory amount, then 32 GBs is more than enough. CPU resources is what we usually see as a bottleneck for the backup server.

[Gostev]

Actually, 4GB of RAM is plenty because our engine uses very little RAM.