Virtual appliance, iSCSI target + external backup?

[gshaw]

Was just wondering if this idea might work...

If I put Veeam as a virtual appliance and attach an iSCSI target using the Windows initiator going to something like this...

http://go.iomega.com/en/products/networ ... rtner=4725 or http://www.readynas.com/?p=3660

I'd still need a way to backup the files to an external media, be it tape, SATA caddy, USB drive etc. Being that Veeam is sitting in a virtual machine I can't direct attach those devices so would probably have to use another PC \ server elsewhere for this.

I don't think I could attach a 2nd session to the same iSCSI storage from another Windows box but if I shared the mapped iSCSI drive (or folders) from within the Veeam VM I could then pull the VBK files on schedule (say once a week on a Sunday) to the removable media of choice.

Or is there a more elegant way of doing this I haven't thought of?

Unfortunately I haven't got the luxury of an external site otherwise I'd just use the NAS appliances' native replication features or just install a DR ESX host and use Veeam replication (which would be a lot better from a technical point of view but doesn't fit with our single site as it stands)

[Vitaliy S.]

Gerrard,

As far as shared storage is concerned then you can achieve what you want with the help of Failover Cluster Manager -> Cluster Shared Volumes. Another thing that comes up to my mind is network share. Is the software you going to use able to pull data from network shares/mapped drives?

On top of that, it is actually possible to connect external media drive to a VM via USB Passthrough capability.

Hope this helps.

[gshaw]

Was just going to use a Robocopy script on a spare PC with removable SATA caddies doing something like this once a week at the end of the month...

Code: Select all

robocopy \\veamNAS\backups e:\ /S /XF *.vrb 

Which should take the folder structure from the Veeam data store but only copy the VBK full backup file and ignore the increments, which would leave me with a full archive of the latest backup state.

Could do a CSV to allow multiple access although it does start complicating matters, sharing the iSCSI Veeam data store folders from the Veeam server should achieve the same end result, not the most elegant solution but should work?

Ideally I'd be able to copy straight from the NAS appliance but as far as I can tell they're very much "all or nothing" and I don't want to be taking all the increments as I doubt it will all fit onto the capacity of a single HDD (max 3TB)

Edit: just thinking about it, with the VRB on USB if I needed to re-import in case of disaster will it be looking for the increments or will Veeam just treat it as a single file as is.

[gshaw]

Edit: just thinking about it, with the VRB on USB if I needed to re-import in case of disaster will it be looking for the increments or will Veeam just treat it as a single file as is.

Sorry, meant VBK... a single VRB wouldn't get me very far

[Vitaliy S.]

Could do a CSV to allow multiple access although it does start complicating matters, sharing the iSCSI Veeam data store folders from the Veeam server should achieve the same end result, not the most elegant solution but should work?

I've tried sharing the same iSCSI datastore, but I failed to configure synchronization for both machines, meaning that the folder create from one machine didn't show up on the other one.

Edit: just thinking about it, with the VBK on USB if I needed to re-import in case of disaster will it be looking for the increments or will Veeam just treat it as a single file as is.

You can import a single VBK file, no need to have a full backup chain in order to perform a restore from a VBK restore point.

[sdengscherz]

Hello gshaw,


i'm running nearly exactly the same setup at the moment:

- esx 4.1 cluster with 3 physical hosts attached to an hp 2312 msa (iscsi)
- veeam vm in the cluster writes backup to an iscsi target (iomega ix4-200d nas)
- physical server pulls the latest vbk (i use reverse incremental) from the iomega nas iscsi target over the veeam vm through a windows file share and copies it on a locally attached usb hd which is replaced/rotated daily

i've tried usb pass-through on one of the esx hosts to dicht the physical "backup-proxy" and copying the vbk directly from the veeam vm to the external usb drive; however i only got about 6 mb/s which was inacceptable.

i'm looking for a more elegant way to archive the daily vbk files to an external storage.


does anyone have recommendations or examples?