Please advise for a small-company/single server backup

[avanlil]

Hi,

at the moment we're running 6 VMs (one of them SBS 2008, 2x Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server, 3x Linux) on a single server (DL380 G6, 2x Xeon QuadCore, 72GB). This currently uses on-board backup means of Windows, stores the data on a NAS via Gigabit LAN.

I'd like to setup a new enviroment, replace SBS 2008 with Exchange 2010 (25 mailboxes) and implement automated backups. I plan to use (server remains the same...):

- VMWare vSphere Essentials 5
- Veeam Backup & Recovery Tier A (for two CPUs)
- a rack-mount QNAP NAS with AES encrypted volumes (the one I'm looking at should do ~ 30MB/sec over Gigabit LAN, our VMs are all combined ~ 400GByte)
- Bitlocker encrypted filesystems on the Windows Server, TPM modules of the server are not visible in the VMs (as far as I know), so you'd have to use a USB thumb drive when rebooting the machines (see: http://www.christowles.com/2010/10/how- ... nning.html)
- AES encrypted filesystems in the Linux machines

Questions:

- Can Veeam do online backups (VM is running) with Bitlocker encrypted partitions (does Veeam even care/know that these are encrypted)? Performance is generelly no issue here, the backups should run at night - near zero usage of the VMs then
- I'd like to have full backups on the NAS (at least once in a week), so that I could theoretically use them in VMWare workstation - or move them to another server (manually)

Anything else to consider?

Thank you _very_ much!

Rgds

[Gostev]

Hi, correct - Veeam does not care about VMDK contents. Your infrastructure plan looks good to me. Thanks!

[avanlil]

Hi, correct - Veeam does not care about VMDK contents. Your infrastructure plan looks good to me. Thanks!

Thanks for your reply, may I ask some additional questions?

- we're talking about online backups (with running VMs), right? (via the VMWare Storage APIs, that's why we can't use the free vSphere solution?)
- Do I need to calculate for additional HDD space when running Veeam backups on the vSphere server? The disks are at the moment 90% filled. Snapshots, etc.?
- Is it possible to configure full & incremental backups with Veeam, so that you have a full backup (say every second day) and an incremental one for quick desaster recovery? Can I configure to always keep one full backup?

If I decided to setup another server as a cold-standby (e.g. manually started, migrated, etc.)

- Could I copy the Veeam created full and/or incremental backup to that machine and start the VMs there if Machine (A) breaks down?

Thank you!

[foggy]

- we're talking about online backups (with running VMs), right? (via the VMWare Storage APIs, that's why we can't use the free vSphere solution?)

Yes.

- Do I need to calculate for additional HDD space when running Veeam backups on the vSphere server? The disks are at the moment 90% filled. Snapshots, etc.?

Yes, you need additional space to temporarily store VM snapshots while the VM is being backed up. Snapshot size is much smaller in size than the actual VM (depends on how active the VM is on disk I/O).

- Is it possible to configure full & incremental backups with Veeam, so that you have a full backup (say every second day) and an incremental one for quick desaster recovery? Can I configure to always keep one full backup?

Yes, you can flexibly configure Veeam B&R according to your backup and retention policy.

- Could I copy the Veeam created full and/or incremental backup to that machine and start the VMs there if Machine (A) breaks down?

You can import backups into another instance of Veeam B&R and successfully restore the VMs. Moreover, we have a standalone utility (extract.exe) coming with every Veeam B&R installation that allows to restore VMs from any VBK file created by Veeam B&R, in case you do not have the product installed.

Thanks.

[avanlil]

Great, thanks. To be honest: your forum support here will result in a purchase of your product