Backup Infrastructure with Veeam B&R v6.

[zidtugraz]

Hi all,

We're currently evaluating Veeam Backup & Recovery v5 with VMware vSphere 4.1 We are thinking about an infrastructure with VMware vSphere 5 (probably Q1/2012) and Veeam Backup & Recovery v6 (Q4/2011?). We are using an iSCSI-based shared, redundant storage backend (HP LeftHand aka HP P4000).

When we started planning the backup infrastructure (Veeam B&R v5, vSphere 4.1) we were thinking about setting up several backup storage nodes (e.g., four or six nodes). These storage nodes would, essentially, consist of industry standard hardware on which VMware ESXi with virtual machines containing HP LeftHand VSA is installed. I.e., the physical storage can be provided as (redundant) shared iSCSI storage in the VMware environment (network RAID-10). We thought that, in order to use the CPU power, every storage node would also contain a virtual machine that contains the Veeam B&R software. The backup software would have LAN access to the vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts (one 1 Gbps NIC), LAN access to the (remote) iSCSI storage devices (two 1 Gbps NICs), and local access to the local backup storage (through the vSwitch).

With this approach, we could provide a redundant backup infrastructure, where backup is almost reduced to "backup appliances" consisting of standard hardware with LeftHand VSA and Veeam B&R. Up to now we thought that this approach should work quite well. (Any comments on this?)


Now, Veeam B&R v6 introduces load balancing and backup proxies. Unfortunately, I could not find detailed information about the architecture of this solution and its components. Can anyone briefly point out what the components (backup proxy, backup server) are used for and if the architecture outlined above would still work with v6?


Thanks in advance,
Josef.

[Gostev]

Hi Josef, detailed information about the architecture will be made available closer to v6 release. You architecture will work fine, in fact, you can still deploy v6 in the v5 manner if you want to, and don't leverage the new components of distributed architecture at all. Thanks.

[mcrampton]

Question regarding this strategy. Would you need an additional Veeam License for each VM running B & R? Or can you deploy Veeam on as many servers/VMs as you want inside your environment with the license?

[chrisdearden]

Question regarding this strategy. Would you need an additional Veeam License for each VM running B & R? Or can you deploy Veeam on as many servers/VMs as you want inside your environment with the license?

Veeam backup is licensed on the number of CPU sockets in the ESX servers you want to protect - you can deploy as many Veeam servers as you like.

[mcrampton]

Great, thanks.

[MB-NS]

Hello,

I'm also looking for information on backup proxies and repositories. I found the following article and am very interested in the possibilities, if the article is accurate :

Backup proxies can also be distributed over the network, closer to the source of data. The same goes for repositories, which can be placed closer to backup targets. Having repository proxies can also help avoid a performance choke point at the target, also known as target saturation. This design also reduces the amount of network chatter between source and target replicas.

Source : http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.c ... ication-6/


1- will they be available in Standard Edition ?
2- can we expect the following behavior : if I want to backup over a WAN link, will the local (near to source) proxy performs source-deduplication, and the remote one (near-to-target) performs the full synthetic backups ?

[Gostev]

1. Yes
2. Yes

[MB-NS]

Great ! I love this product
Thank you