Veeam Backup Design Question

[Apok]

Hey all,
I'm hoping you guys could share some ideas around what you think is the best topology design to use for our new Veeam Backup... I really just want to make sure its built correctly the first time.

Production Setup
4x ESXi7 Hosts
vCenter 7
160 VM's
50TB of storage between 2x FC based SAN's

Backup Hardware
1x Host (Dual Socket, 384GB Ram)
NetApp 10Gbe iSCSI based SAN with 60TB

DR Setup
3x ESXi7 Hosts
vCenter7
iSCSI Based SAN with 250TB
1GB Link between HO and DR site

As for backup retention they’re after
Daily x 30days
Monthly x 12
Yearly x7
They also want a couple of the business critical servers Replicated periodically to DR.

So my questions really pertains to what is the best backup design to achieve what they want..
• I was going to setup the Veeam Backup Server on the DR cluster
• The biggest question I have is around how to setup the HO Backup server/proxy. I’m not sure if 1 proxy will be enough to process all the VM’s in a single window… So I don’t know if I should setup that server as a ESXi Host as well and run multiple VM’s as Veeam proxies?
• For the retention requirements dailies should be fine to sit on the HO local backup storage and the monthly/yearly on the DR backup storage, but the questions is what’s the best way to setup the jobs.

For the backup jobs do I create the daily jobs with a 30x restore point (weekly synthetic full) config and then setup copy jobs of them to DR storage with a GFS setup of something like
 Keep Weekly Backups for 4 weeks
 Keep Monthly backups for 12 months
 Keep yearly backups for 7 years

Thanks in advance for looking and providing feedback

[PetrM]

Hello,

1) It's definitely a good idea to deploy Veeam B&R on the DR site as this kind of deployment allows failover plans to work seamlessly and without any manual complex operations even in case of disaster on production site.

2) It depends on number of concurrent tasks you're going to run. I'd suggest to refer to this page on our help center for proxy server requirements and this section of our best practices guide contains some useful tips for proxy sizing. One more suggestion would be to leverage our storage integration with NetApp to speed up backup and replication processes and reduce impact of backup activities on the production environment.

3) It's hard to say which retention strategy is the best because it should be defined by requirements of your business process and depend on desirable RPO. Basically, the plan above seems to be reliable. Maybe you could also take a look at this restore point simulator and that estimator tool to get solid estimations for the required repository space.

Thanks!