Best Practice and How To separate backup traffic from Production Network

[NickKulkarni]

Hi everyone,
Hyper V 2022 with SET for production traffic
Veeam 12.32.2.3617

Current situation: multiple ESXi hosts configured with seperate vSwitches for Mangement, Production, Backup to physically seperate traffic to external NICs.Physical NIC are in LAG mode to a Cisco Server stack.

Target, migration from ~ESXi to a single Hyper-V for all production VMs and, if possible using SET to provide redundancy and bandwidth.

Test Lab Server with three network cards. One for Management, two for production teamed using SET.

Problem. As configured currently the backup and restore traffic is going through the Management NIC. This could be my fault as I am new to SET and its a long time since I did Hyper-V networking.

Can anyone please advise on best practice and how to set up the Hyper-V to isolate backup/restore activity from both Management and Production as I have done in the past with ESXi. (admittedly it did take some doing and the creation of custom TCP/IP stacks applied to each vSwitch) I am not sure how to emulate this in Hyper-V with SET. Do I assign a virtual NIC to each Hyper V External Switch and given them Static IP and VLAN? Any and all advice gratefully accepted.

[david.domask]

Hi NickKulkarni,

Try setting Preferred Networks in the console.

For managed servers (including virtualization hosts), Veeam is aware of available endpoints on the hosts, and you can tell Veeam to prioritize use of a specific network.

[nmdange]

What is the physical NIC setup in ESXi? If you have two vSwitches assigned to two separate NIC pairs, then you just need to do the same with Hyper-V: 2 SET switches each using a pair of NICs. You'll need to create a virtual NIC on the SET switch and give it an IP address to the host for Veeam to be able to assign network priority for backups.

As far as "best practice" for isolating traffic (management, storage, backup, VM traffic), it's really environment dependent. We have management, backup and VM traffic all share a single pair of 25Gbps NICs with a SET switch. There is no need to isolate traffic on different physical NICs unless you need more bandwidth than a single pair can provide. And even then, you could have a single SET switch with 4 NICs attached.