Veeam Search, MS Search Server, resources required?

[Frosty]

Until today I have been running VBR 5.0 Enterprise 64-bit on a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM with 4GB vRAM and 4 vCPUs.

In order to get Application Item Restore working I have had to install various IIS components and Veeam Enterprise Manager.

Last of all, I would like to have the ability to use Veeam Search for some of my backup jobs (probably just on a few of my main file servers), and I see that I will have to install MS Search Server 2010 as a prerequisite.

Just wondering: I have ~20GB of free disk space on C: ... is there any way of calculating how much disk space and/or RAM and/or CPU resources will be consumed by this Veeam Search functionality?

[Frosty]

As a quick follow-up to that: I see in the product release notes that its recommended that Search Server be installed on a separate machine. That's not an option for me right now. However we do have a new Intranet project kicking off in a few months and no doubt we will need a Search Server to underpin our new Sharepoint portal. Would I be better to wait for that and offload search features to the Intranet Search Server? I don't want to compromise the integrity/performance of my VBR server...

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Stephen,

It depends on many variables, catalog crawl is quite resource intensive task that can consume significant chunks of server CPU, thus affecting backup performance, see our F.A.Q. topic for more info.

As for the catalog folder size, then it depends on the files you're going to index, the more VMs you index the larger catalog folder will be. Besides, catalog data also relies on your retention policy settings.

That said, if you have an opportunity to move this server to a separate machine in the future, please do.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

Hi Stephen, how many VMs are you backing up?

[Frosty]

In total we have 25-30 VMs backed up nightly. Of those, maybe up to 5 would benefit from being indexed (the main file server, a media files server, etc). I see the benefit being where a user comes to me and says "File AAAA is missing, it was there last week, can you restore it for me?" and I could quickly determine which backup held the most recent version of that file. I wouldn't want to index all my VMs, that's for sure.

[dkvello]

I Really wish Veeam would have chosen something more resource-friendly than having to do a Sharepoint-rollout just to do search.
It really is a pig of a solution.

[Gostev]

In total we have 25-30 VMs backed up nightly.

Then good news - with v6, you will not need to have Search Server at all to use guest file search capabilities. Moreover, as you may have already heard - in this specific scenario that you have provided above, all restoring that file will take you is a single click right in those search results.

[Gostev]

It really is a pig of a solution.

If you have another, less pig candidate that can provide reliable, scalable, proven indexing and search engine (with API, and free edition available), then I am all ears.

Basically, we have looked at some of the market leaders in archiving, and this is exactly what they are using. Of course, we could build our content indexing system, but this is not our business - we'd rather focus on delivering you the best VM backup solution

I do however appreciate that requiring Search Server might be an overkill when you only have a handful of VMs to search through, which is why we are removing Search Server as a mandatory requirement in v6.

[Frosty]

That sounds really good Gostev ... thanks ... its not an urgent requirement for me, so I can happily wait for v6 and see how it fits in with my modest needs.

[dkvello]

If you have another, less pig candidate that can provide reliable, scalable, proven indexing and search engine (with API, and free edition available), then I am all ears.

Basically, we have looked at some of the market leaders in archiving, and this is exactly what they are using. Of course, we could build our content indexing system, but this is not our business - we'd rather focus on delivering you the best VM backup solution

I do however appreciate that requiring Search Server might be an overkill when you only have a handful of VMs to search through, which is why we are removing Search Server as a mandatory requirement in v6.

The obvious one would be http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

[Gostev]

Thanks, but Java and Tomcat do not fit our .NET and IIS application very well... too many different platforms, interop issues, etc.