Massive VM Guest OS File Exclusion scenerio

[KoflerTx]

Hi,

We are running a file server VM (10TB) and so far the whole VM is backed up via Veeam for disaster recovery. The file backup of this server should now also be handled by Veeam backup to tape.
The retention period for the file backup needs to be much longer than for the VM itself.

Does anyone have any experience of excluding 10TB of data via VM guest OS file exclusion?
Or how would you approach this scenario?

Thanks in advance.

[david.domask]

Hi Thomas,

Just to be sure I get your scenario right, you want to backup just the system but exclude the 10 TB of data the system hosts? Are you needing the files directly on tape for archival purposes or are you able to meet your requirements by having an image level backup of the file server on tape for archival purposes?

The last question is a bit unclear for me, as with Tape, if you do VM backup to tape, you must first stage the backup on a repository before you can perform file level restores from it, but if you just need an archival copy of the file server you can recover if required?

As for the VM Backup Guest File Exclusions, it will work, though the processing may require extra time -- are there specific issues you were seeing when trying this or just wanted to know what experiences others had?

[KoflerTx]

Hi,

thanks for the response. We need to be able to restore the files directly from tape. For the full VM backup we don't have the necessary storage available for the requested retention time.

For the VM Backup Guest File Exclusions that documentation part

However, selective processing takes additional time that depends on the number of excluded files. It also requires obtaining per-file metadata (stored in backups).

questions how saleable it is. How much is additional time and metadata storage for e.g. 10 TB and 250.000 files.


Thanks

[david.domask]

Hi Thomas,

You are very welcome -- just to make sure I get it correctly, there is not enough on-disk storage space left to put the file server data on disk first, so you want to go directly from the File Server to tape, is that correct?

If so, then you will need to use File to Tape for this. VM Backup to tape will put the backup files themselves on tape for recovery of the server, file level restore from these backup files is possible only after you first restore the backup file to a repository. Note the license requirements for File to Tape in advance please.

> questions how saleable it is. How much is additional time and metadata storage for e.g. 10 TB and 250.000 files.

It's heavily dependent on the environment so I'm not sure that we will be able to give specifics on this; I do not recall that even rather large exclusions had a meaningful impact on the backup size (at least when we're discussing a a multi-terabyte file), but as noted above, I'm not sure that you need the VM Backup Guest File Exclusions if your goal is to get the files backed up to tape directly and directly restorable from tape.

[KoflerTx]

Thanks a lot for the inside. Looks promising and we will go into a proof of concept.