Our backup storage hardware is EOL and needs to be replaced. The new storage we have in mind is all-flash and would present to Veeam as object storage.
Current storage has both SSD and HDD pools - we send primary backups to SSD w/ 7d retention, then use Backup Copy jobs to store GFS chains on the HDD pool. We present to Veeam via Windows repository servers using REFS block cloning. We have around 500TB of per-VM GFS chains on 146TB of disk space. We don't have enough capacity to run an Active Full if we needed to. We have GFS backup chains for ~225 VM's spread across a few dozen backup jobs. A small percentage of these are encrypted. We would like to have everything encrypted on the new object storage repository.
So far I figure my options are to either move the existing chains to the new storage, or keep the old storage around until retentions expire while starting 'fresh' on the new storage...
Can the existing backup copy GFS chains be 'mapped' by a new primary backup job with GFS enabled?
If we used Veeam to move the current GFS chains to object storage, it would use the same 146TB on disk?
Can the data be encrypted during the move, so that it lands on the object storage encrypted?
If it can't be encrypted during the move... I understand we would need to run an Active Full to trigger encryption from that point onwards in the object storage... Being object storage, would that active full use the total amount of capacity of a full backup, or would it consume the space that an incremental would?
Can the existing backup copy GFS chains be 'mapped' by a new primary backup job with GFS enabled?
No.
If we used Veeam to move the current GFS chains to object storage, it would use the same 146TB on disk?
Yes. Moving backups is a FastClone aware operation.
Can the data be encrypted during the move, so that it lands on the object storage encrypted?
No.
If it can't be encrypted during the move... I understand we would need to run an Active Full to trigger encryption from that point onwards in the object storage... Being object storage, would that active full use the total amount of capacity of a full backup, or would it consume the space that an incremental would?
Active Full to Object Storage based repositories will always consume the entire space of a full backup.