Comprehensive data protection for all workloads
Post Reply
myrandomuseraccount9
Novice
Posts: 3
Liked: never
Joined: Mar 09, 2020 6:46 pm
Full Name: C M G
Contact:

Backup Strategy Advice

Post by myrandomuseraccount9 »

Hi Veeam Community!

I am hoping to get feedback on a new backup strategy I am planning to implement and wanted to see if anyone has recommendations on how to optimize my strategy.

Background information:
We currently backup from our on-prem Windows server to a NAS located in a remote office, using CIFS over a network share. Some the issues we are dealing with are painfully slow backup speeds (5-20Mbps), periodic backup failure due to network connectivity issues (i.e. timeouts, file not found, etc) and more recently a couple of corrupt backup files (only found when testing with SureBackup).

To help with some of these existing issues, here is our new strategy:

--- Mounted 10 TB NAS over NFS to our ESXi Hosts. This NAS is located in a remote office.
--- Created new disks on VM that use the NAS for storage (Actual OS and normal disks run off on-prem SAN)
--- Formated disk to use ReFS, per Veeam recommendation
--- Created new Backup Repository in Veeam to point to the newly created ReFS disk, which is physically stored on remote office NAS. Remote NAS stores .vmdk of disk that hosts backups.
--- All daily backups are sent to this disk, using 14 retention points
--- We also have a backup copy job that sends backup copies to a cloud repository every 14 days, using 26 restore points
--- With the combination of 14 retention points on the NAS and 26 retention points in the cloud repository, I should be able to restore anytime in the backup 14 restore points, and have archival backups with the additional 26 restore points, going back 1 yr. I was told this takes up less total storage than keeping full backups quarterly with traditional GFS, and achieves the same goal of GFS over a year
--- Note: The reason we are pointing backups to a disk/folder on the NAS and not locally is because we don't have enough local storage to store the backups. We have about 6TB of backups, but only 2 TB free locally and 10 TB available on remote NAS.

Disaster recovery scenarios:

--- If a single VM fails or needs file recovery - We will use the Veeam server to pull backups from the NAS repository
--- If *all* servers are down and infrastructure needs to be rebuilt - We will create a new VM from scratch, download/install Veeam, restore from backup configuration file (which is saved on remote NAS and not on local infrastructure that is down), attach .vmdk to new VM (This vmdk was on remote NAS).
--- This should get me a VM that has the vmdk, which holds all of the backup files (.vbk, .vbm, .vrb). I should be able to use Veeam to restore these backups
--- Worst case scenario and both of my sites are down, I can restore backup copy jobs from cloud repository

I have tested this out to the extent that I can. I was able to confirm that I could install Veeam, import config file, load vmdk from NAS into new VM, access Veeam backup files from new machine. I didn't test this as far as actually restoring the VM, because I didn't want to mess with production VM's

Does anyone see any holes in my backup strategy? Any recommendations or considerations I should have?

Thanks!
HannesK
Product Manager
Posts: 14287
Liked: 2877 times
Joined: Sep 01, 2014 11:46 am
Full Name: Hannes Kasparick
Location: Austria
Contact:

Re: Backup Strategy Advice

Post by HannesK »

Hello,
mounting an NFS share over WAN sounds quite "radical" to me, but if you have a stable and fast connection, well :-)

yes, I have also seen similar scenarios like yours for BCJ to save disk space. that was before REFS / XFS block cloning became popular. if you cannot use block cloning, then your option is a valid way.

Best regards,
Hannes
myrandomuseraccount9
Novice
Posts: 3
Liked: never
Joined: Mar 09, 2020 6:46 pm
Full Name: C M G
Contact:

Re: Backup Strategy Advice

Post by myrandomuseraccount9 »

Thanks,
I'm interested in why you think using an NFS mount is "radical" :) . I currently use a CIFS network share, which I think is even more unreliable. Would you say there is a significant stability improvement when using iSCSI? Any other protocols that you would recommend? My repository can do CIFS, NFS or iSCSI
HannesK
Product Manager
Posts: 14287
Liked: 2877 times
Joined: Sep 01, 2014 11:46 am
Full Name: Hannes Kasparick
Location: Austria
Contact:

Re: Backup Strategy Advice

Post by HannesK »

the point is "over WAN". NFS is fine :-)
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: tyler.jurgens and 232 guests