Multiple installs of veeam saving to one storeonce and immutability

[pazzoide76]

Hello,
I have a question about different veeam installations saving backups to different catalyst stores on the same storeonce.
I currently have three installations of veeam.
Each veeam installation manages the backup of a vmware cluster and the data is saved on three different catalyst stores on one storeonce.
Now I would like to upgrade to veeam 12 to be able to use the immutability on the storeonce.
Is it possible to use immutability in this setup?

Thank you

Greetings

[HannesK]

Hello,
as far as I remember, immutability must be enabled on Catalyst stores during creation.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... eonce.html mentions the two settings (dual authentication and Maximum ISV Controlled Data Retention)

Best regards,
Hannes

[pazzoide76]

HI,
from what i read here https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-p ... art-2-4436 immutability can be enabled for a catalyst store as well existing.
My only doubt is that in the best practices https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120 it says:
One HPE StoreOnce deduplicating storage appliance must be added to one backup server only
I understand that it would be better to have a store once for veeam servers but given the cost of the hardware it is not possible also because everything is working correctly in my configuration.
So I need to understand if in the configuration I have I can enable immutability or if I might have some problems.

Thank you

Greetings

[Regnor]

Yes you can enable immtutability for existing Catalyst Stores, but only the current backup chain or any new one will be made immutable. All existing backups stay unprotected.

Regarding the statement in the helpcenter. I think the reason for that is that each StoreOnce system has it's internal limits of which Veeam is aware of.
If you target a single device with multiple independent VBR servers, you could overload the StoreOnce or see unpredicted behaviour.
So it may work, but you won't get any support in case of issues.

[HannesK]

Hello,
ah, good to know, thanks!

The statement makes no sense to me. We did not have it in V11 and I see no reason for it. Let me double check.

Best regards,
Hannes

[pazzoide76]

Hi Hannes,
I await your verification.

Thanks

Greetings

[HannesK]

Hello,
we will change the user guide. It will be "one backup server per catalyst store" (which it always has been).

Thanks for bringing it up!

Best regards,
Hannes

[pazzoide76]

Hannes,
thank you for the support

[FedericoV]

Just to provide a double validation
1) yes, you can have multiple Veeam servers accessing a single StoreOnce.
To better isolate the access, you can make catalyst stores visible and accessible to a specific server only by setting proper user/pwd access permissions.
The White Paper below explains the access permissions.

2) Immutability: Veeam is able to set the ISV-managed immutability on StoreOnce. This feature doesn't need to be activated, it is on by default.
Veeam requires that StoreOnce is in compliance mode. For that you have to activate the Dual Authorization.
The best practice is to create a few Security Officer accounts, and put them on paper envelopes. They are required to approve all the operations that can cause data loss, such as a Catalyst Store delete.

3) If you are making reconfigurations, the second biggest improvement with V12, after Immutability, is support for Catalyst in Fixed-Block-Chunking for pre-aligned Veeam data. Long explanation for a simple advantage: it is way faster than before. A single stream backup can be 4 time faster than before. It also makes other operations faster, so, if you can, I suggest to use it. Unfortunately this Catalyst Store configuration needs a fresh new Catalyst Store.
The White Paper below describes the process. Only VM and Server backup can write to Backup-Repositories on Fixed-Block catalyst stores. This includes all backup that write .vbk and .vib. NAS and Application agents should instead go to traditional Catalyst stores

White Paper with tons of best practices: "HPE Reference Configuration for Veeam Backup & Replication version 12 with HPE StoreOnce and HPE StoreEver"
https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00023056enw

[dueni]

hi
by the way: All these features are only supported on Generation 4 (Gen4 and Gen4+) and need at least version 4.3.2; actual version is 4.5
regards, daniel