Veeam Backup Disk Configuration

[J1mbo]

Hello, new user here I now need to get Veeam Backup in via a dedicated Windows server (1x quad, 8GB, Win2k8 x64), populated with 6x WD RE4 (SATA) 2TB drives running on Perc-6i w/256MB BBWC.

System doesn't have EFI BIOS and RAID controller cannot divide composite RAID into separate LUNs, hence these options:

1. RAID-5, with 2 LUNs, 1x 100GB for system and remainder for backups (~8.7TB)
2. RAID-6, with 2 LUNs, 1x 100GB for system and remainder for backups (~7TB)
3. 3x RAID-1 LUNs, 100GB partition on the first for system then the remainder striped using Windows Disk Manager to create the backup volume effectively RAID-10 (5.2TB).

Plan is to use reverse incremental backups, backup set is 2TB (raw, today).

I presume this will present quite a random IO workload as time progresses and the de-duplication effectively scatters the backups, and with that in mind I my gut feel is to use the RAID-10 implementation even though it's messy, to avoid the 6-IO write penalty of RAID-6 or the potential rebuild risk of RAID-5. Of course one can't ignore the capacity difference! The server itself will be streamed to tape weekly.

Any thoughts or experiences, especially using SATA drives with RAID-6 with Veeam Backup, would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

[J1mbo]

For the benefit of the search, I went with a 'hybrid' RAID-10 implementation built using Windows striping across hardware mirrors (just had to convert them to dynamic disks first, in Windows disk manager).

It seems to be working very well thus far

[tjalbrecht]

I am new to Veeam and this is my first post. I have read through the documentation, but I could not find any recommendations based on my hardware. I have an HP DL 180 server, with 12 - 2TB spindles to be used for backups. I plan on installing Windows 2008 R2, then Veeam on top of that. My question is regarding best practices for installation:

Should I put the entire set of 12 spindles in a RAID 10, then create a partition for the OS/Veeam, and use the rest for backup?
Should I put 2 spindles in RAID 1 for the OS/Veeam, then place the remaining drives in a RAID group?
Should I do something entirely different?

I hope someone has worked through a similar configuration and could guide me on my quest to use this new backup software. I am very excited!

Thanks,
T.J.

[Joachimsa]

We have just bought a new Synology RS3412RPxs with 10 x 3TB disks and 2 x 10gbe interfaces and i like to get some inputs on how to create the raid on that before we start to use if for backup.

Currently we backup up about 3TB data from from a vmware farm with 6 hosts and about 200 virtual machines. We are running 7 concurrent jobs because of the big numbers of VM's and because it takes a lot of time just to process the job before is actually start tranfersing data. In the past we have been using a 6 bay Readynas Ultra but performance have been awful after a while. And destination is allways a bottle neck. The source SAN is a Netapp FAS3240 with about 100 x 15K disks. Transport to vmware hosts is multiple 10gbe NFS.

for the new system disk space is not an issue, so we like to get performance as good as possible.

So the question is how do we setup the raid?

Raid5/6 i think will not give great performance.
1 Large Raid 10 with all 10 disks.
5 x raid1 raid sets. 1 Raid set for each backup repository, and only 1 concurrent job.


Also what is best performance for for backup mode? Reversed incremental or Incremental? We would like to hold data as long as possible.

Veeam server is running on a VM with 8 core windows 2008 R2 server with 8gb (hosts have AMD 6182SE cpu's) and we plan to mount the disks from the synology with a software iscsi initiator.

Someone got any inputs?

[Vitaliy S.]

Here is another existing topic with a similar question > NAS RAID level

Also what is best performance for for backup mode? Reversed incremental or Incremental? We would like to hold data as long as possible.

Generally, forward incremental backup jobs are a bit faster because of the 3x less I/O operations on the target storage.

[johndoe123123]

How do you prefer the provision the spindles on your backup server?

If I have 14 spindles -- is it best to make 2-3 arrays of raid 5 in windows (software), achieving 70MB/sec write capability per array of thereabouts?

Or is the Veeam software setup and intelligent enough to handle each individual spindle as a backup media/tape and do so in a sane manner when all sorts of things might occur -- such as a disk failure?

The second mode of thought treats the media more like individual tapes -- the only real benefit I can see is virtually unlimited write performance, online limited by bus speed.

Thoughts?

[dellock6]

Hi,
Veeam solely relies on the underlying windows disk configuration, no way to stripe writes among different disks, so you would for sure need to configure striping or other raid levels at least in Windows OS. About the configuration, please have first a look at the linked thread about processing mode and the impact on I/O performances, that is the starting point to decide which RAID configuration is best for your needs.

Luca.