Veeam + VMware + Nimble Storage Questions!

[StevoDevo]

Hi All,

I'm a new Veeam user and have a Veeam Enterprise Plus license. My environment is as follows:

vSphere 6.7 with about 50 virtual machines
All 50 VMs are using Nimble Storage (via a VVol) for their HDDs

I have a Veeam Backup and Replication Server running on a VM that has 8TB storage attached (via a VVol) and I have set all the VMs to be backed up to that storage device.

Is this the best way to do back these virtual machines up? I see Veeam has a way to use the Nimble array as direct storage, but when I go to select that Veeam says that that destination can be used for Primary storage snapshot only.

The other question I have is what is the best way to get a backup offsite? I have a 2nd HPE Nimble at a different location, so how would I set things up to be able to use that as my offsite storage device for backups? One thing I thought to do was to just replicate the 8TB volume using Nimble Replication - but again, is that the best way to go?

Thanks!
-Steve

[Gostev]

Hi, Steve

1. [EDIT: Apologies, I did not catch that you are using VVOLs, please ignore this answer] The best way to back these virtual machines up is from storage snapshots. If you have already registered your Nimble storage with Veeam, all it takes is a single check box.

2. We recommend using Backup Copy job for this. By leveraging storage-based snapshot replication alone, you're not performing a media break required by the 3-2-1 rule. So the replicated storage snapshots will often have the same exact issues as the original primary storage snapshots.

You can still use replicated storage-based snapshots as additional restore points, they just should not be your ONLY offsite data copies.

Thanks!

[Andreas Neufert]

Vvols can be backed up with HotAdd or NBD processing.
Best performance would be if you rollout HotAdd Proxies on multiple hosts.
Hotadd gives you the best speed.
https://bp.veeam.com/vbr/2_Design_Struc ... oxies.html

Then backup to a backup target and create a backup copy job to your second site nimble storage.