Best practise for single ESXi / Backup Mode

[eisback]

Hi, we support a few small networks where there is a single ESXi with about 10-20 Windows VMs on local storage. Veeam Backup always runs on a separate PC (not domain joined). All networks work with 1 GB and the backup has always been done via NBD. An incremental backup is about 75 GB on average. Rather by chance I found out that the backup can also be done via one or more virtual proxies via HotAdd, which is supposed to work much faster. I'm thinking less of daily incremental backups, for which the time windows are still sufficient, but rather of DR scenarios where every minute counts. How do you handle this in such small environments? Would you advise me to use HotAdd? In a 10 GB network, would a backup via NBD be as fast as with HotAdd? Assuming I need to restore all VMs from the backup, including the proxy VM, would the proxy VM be restored first (via NBD) and then the rest of the VMs via HotAdd? Thanks, Nico

[chris.childerhose]

With a 1GB network, HotAdd would be faster than NBD, but in a 10GB network, NBD is pretty fast for sure. If you only have a 1GB network, try adding virtual proxies to get HotAdd working and compare if you already have numbers for NBD.

[Zew]

May I play devil's advocate and ask why Veeam itself is simply not a VM on the ESXi host?
Then HotAdd would be defaulted.

[chris.childerhose]

Yes that would be the ideal solution since it is a single ESXi host.