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.

[NickKulkarni]

Hi and thanks for the replies, much appreciated.
I had already applied the Preferred Networks option in Veeam Console and it didn't work but I think I have a root cause. Hardware level the NIC is not fully SET and SRIOV compatible. CLI was configuring it but it wasn't working properly and CLI was not generating error messages. Ignore anyone that says NDIS 6.5 support drivers are sufficient for SET is probably the best answer. Low level the NIC must support certain hardware features too.

Going forward I have specified a certified Intel NIC for the new server and hopefully will deploy the following across a pair of 4 port NIC.
4 x NIC ports (two from each physical NIC) in SET for VM traffic
2 x NIC ports (one from each physical NIC) in SET for Backup
2 x NIC ports (one from each physical NIC) in either SET or LBFO/LACP if that is possible as it will remove the Management NIC from the Virtual Switch layer.

Any advice on the proposed layout would be very welcome.
Thanks
Nick