Veeam Backup Capacity Calculator Unusable

[amagnone]

After seeing that the venerable http://rps.dewin.me tool has become deprecated, I started playing around with the tool that will replace it and I seem to have hit a road block. It seems to impose a minimum amount of Backup Copy restore points which greatly inflates the storage requirement.

Since I will be using SOBR capacity tiering to S3, I will not need to setup a backup copy job. Is there any way to bypass this limitation?

[Gostev]

What specific tool are you playing with?

I heard the following is the most complete at the moment is https://vse.veeambp.com/
This is from the Best Practices web site https://veeambp.com/

Please note that none of these tools are managed by Veeam R&D though.

[amagnone]

This is referring to the tool located here: https://calculator.veeam.com/vbr/

It is the replacement that is specified on the http://rps.dewin.me website as well as the first result when searching Veeam Backup Calculator on Google.

[Mildur]

He is talking about the replacement for the old RPC. The rpc is deprecated.

The replacement tool is:
https://calculator.veeam.com/vbr

@Amagnone
You can simply ignore the backup copy part. Yes, it is shown in the results, but it can be ignored. It doesn‘t have any effects for the performance and capacity tier tables.

[amagnone]

@Mildur Understood. Thank you for that clarification.

I've also noticed that it produces vastly different results compared to the old tool. Similar native data (10TB), retention points (31), change rate (10%), and compression (50%) produces Around 28TB of needed space on the old tool and around 55.4TB on the new tool.

After poking around a bit it looks like it only allows forward incremental backup chains. I'm not seeing an option to adjust it to forever forward like the old tool could. The main reason I suspect this is that when I turn on the ReFS/XFS option it brings the required space down to 30.7TB.

Am I missing something? We typically use reverse incremental in production and this is useless for that scenario.

[Mildur]

Yes, looks like only forward incremental and forever forward is supported by the tool.
I have to say, I manage a few dozens customers and no one is using reverse incremental. ReFS/xfs with forward incremental should be the designing best practice for new implementations today. That could be the reason why the tool doesn‘t offer reverse incremental.

I'm not seeing an option to adjust it to forever forward like the old tool could.

For forever forward backup copy results you can use the calculation from the backup job without gfs results. The backup job in the calculator supports forever forward incremental. The required space should be similar.
A note:
If you want to use the move policy with s3 storage, you can‘t use forever forward incremental. The backup chain would never be sealed and older backups can not be moved to s3.


I‘m on your site with the calculator is missing somethings like backup job runs per day, backup job type and so. But most of the data can be calculated from the existing results.

[amagnone]

We certainly are going to be setting up forward incremental with ReFS for new clients, but we have a bunch of old clients that have NTFS volumes and some with Windows deduplication. Switching those old chains to ReFS is not feasible in our situation.

We also get some utility from reverse incremental by allowing us to drop old restore points if a volume gets completely filled. We've run into issues in the past where a datastore gets completely filled and to clean up the backup chains it requires running the backup job and this is a decent workaround.

[Mildur]

Timothy, the author of the calculator wrote a statement here about why he doesn‘t continuing with other Backup methods.