v11 - GSF 321 basic setup

[craig.maxwell]

Hi VEEAM’ers

VEEAM v11 just loaded, but even after researching, and attempting, I’m still battling to get the simple GFS 123 setup I want.

Host1 = Production (server room)
- Hyper-V 2016
- 7x VMs running on an internal RAID = 2TB (max total)

Host2 = Backup and Failover (remote building connected with 10GB fibre)
- Hyper-V 2022 with VEEAM v11 loaded on host
- 1x internal RAID = 4TB (for Replication)
- 2x iSCSi targets = 10TB each (Medium & Long retention)
- 1x LTO6 Tape drive (Long Offsite retention)

Goals for VEEAM:
- Daily - Replicate all VMs from Host1 to Host2 internal RAID, with 7 daily recovery points (Done).
- Weekdays - Backup Host1 VMs to Host2 iSCSi-1 target, 14 days retention, 2 Fulls for safety.
- Weekends - Archive weekly backups to Host2 iSCSi-2 target, aim to have 2 weekly, 12 monthly and 2 yearly restore points.
- Weekends - Archive weekly backups to Tape for offsite archive.

I just can’t seem to get the whole GFS and Backup Copy jobs to do exactly as I want.
I’m even thinking of just running separate Backup Jobs that will run on Sundays to get the retention I want on iSCSi-2 target.

If anybody has some recommendations to achieve this setup, or a better setup, please share your advice.
Any additional advice, like Synthetic, Maintenance etc would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Craig

[PetrM]

Hi Craig,

iSCSi-1 target: You should schedule either synthetic or active full to run weekly so that the backup chain can work in forward incremental mode. You may have a look at this page of the best practices guide to get a better idea of pros and cons of synthetic and active full methods. Basically, I think that synthetic full would be a proper choice, especially in case of REFS which enables Fast Clone functionality. Also, active full backups are resource-intensive and consume considerable amount of network bandwidth, this detail is worth taking into account when planning offsite backups.

iSCSi-2 target: As far as I understand, your goal is to keep GFS backups only on the secondary storage. I don't recommend to go this route as it does not allow you to follow 3-2-1 rule and have exactly the same state of data on two different medias. You can stick with the desired GFS retention but you need to configure short-term retention as well, for example 7 days.

Tape: You can create GFS media pool and schedule GFS backups to run or you can run regular B2T job once per week with the disabled processing of incremental backups.

Speaking about maintenance, I recommend to enable health-check to avoid potential issues related to data corruption during restore. Also, have a look at remote replica from backup: you can create replicas using backups on host2 as a source of data to minimize load on the source infrastructure on host1.

Thanks!

[craig.maxwell]

Hi Petr,

Thank you for the help and information, I'm going to read the links and give it a try tomorrow.

After weighing up many posts, I went with the NTFS option for the iSCSi NAS target.
I can make it REFS, but as the NAS is not on the approved list, I thought it safer to use NTFS.