Best practice mounting iSCSI NAS for Veeam repo (QNAP entreprise) in VMWARE ESXi

[Simon_LBC]

This question is both related to Vmware and Veeam best practice, but let's try it here.

My Veeam server is a virtual W2012R2 running on a brand new ESXi 7.3 hypervisor. I have a QNAP TES-1885U enterprise NAS that I wanted to use (completely) as Veeam repository for backup, the NAS have a single RAID array of 75 TB capacity. From a best practice and optimal performance perspective, what would be the best way to connect my QNAP enterprise NAS to my Veeam virtual server machine. Please note that both my ESXi server and my QNAP NAS are connected on 10 GBPS link using a 10 GBPS network switch. I have two scenario in mind :

Scenario #1 :

The NAS is already formatted into a single iSCSI LUN that is currently served to an old Windows server. I leave this like that and I simply establish a new iSCSI mount between the NAS and the new Veeam virtual server at the Windows operating system level.

Scenario #2 :

I connect the NAS using iSCSI directly to my Vmware ESXi 7.3 hypervisor using vSAN feature (not that much familiar with that feature). Then I format the NAS as a Vmware datastore, then I create a single VMDK volume that I connect to my Veeam virtual machine and then I format it from Windows operating system as a virtual disk attached and create my repository on it.

In conclusion both scenario seem perfectly doable, however I don't know which one can offer best performance, stability, reliability and security.

[rennerstefan]

Hi Simon

In what you explain scenario 1 seems the better way to me.
You will have a direct connection between your repo server and your array via iscsi. Another benefit is that you can always remount the lun the another server in case something happens to your original veeam server.
So in my eyes that is much better than trying to go via a data store and vmdk way and it’s even a very common way seen in the field.

Hope that helps.

Thanks

[Simon_LBC]

Thanks Stefan, yes scenario #1 also appears to be the simplest way to do, I was just wondering if the scenario 2 may offer some magical/hidden VMware feature that can improve somewhat the performance or whatever, this is why I was asking.

Let's keep thing simple in this case! LOL

Thx again

[rennerstefan]

you're welcome.
No in my eyes there is not much magic you can expect here from VMware.
I would even say, try to keep it simply and build it in a way where you always have a way to recover if something fails.
If you put everything in a Datastore and VMDK you will always need a (new) vSphere host to get access to you backups if your current environment fails.
Thats why keeping repositories physical would be the best practice.

Thanks