Backup small/medium environment

[StoneEdge]

Hi

I have installed a trial of the new Veeam BR, but I have some doughs if this is the right tool to backup our virtual Environment.

We have around 35 hosts and 350 VMs, this is around 9Tb of data, but not all will be backup. I have checked and will backup around 4.5Tb of data.

Question:

Is this environment too big to use this backup tool?

Right now we have some iSCSI Storage(Equalogic PS Series) and we are migrating to NetApp, and maybe will use the Equallogic to hold the backups.

My problem(if this is a problem) is that amount will take too long to backup(the full backup anyway) since we are using LAN?

Also we have some VMs that is not possible to create snapshot and need to have a workaound on this, but the main question, is this tool the right tool for this environment?

Thank You in advance

SE

[dellock6]

Hi,
- not at all. Ours is 1000 VMs but I can bet there are even bigger around
- if you are going to use EQL for backup storage, connect them via iscsi to a Veeam repository. This role can be both physical or virtual, and in both cases you can escape lan backups. For the iscsi transport, I would suggest to design a separated lan (or vlan) to transport data.
- every software doing image backup via VMware vStorage APIs rely on snapshots to backup VMs, what kind of limits you have on those VMs about snapshots?

Luca.

[StoneEdge]

Hi Luca,

Thank you for the reply.

That is good to know the size of other environments.

For now I think we will use the Veeam as a Virtual Appliance and allocate a LUN from the EQL to the Windows.

About the VMs that we cannot snapshot, these are some special VMs with some especial OS and apps, they are two for each app and both share the same VD. Backup with snapshot is not an option, VM copy will also snapshot first, so I need to find a workaround on this.

Thank You

SE

[StoneEdge]

Hi

Try to backup this weekend to test, and the job only list the VMs, when starting backup first VM just say "Task failed unexpectedly" and all VMs have the same error.

I have look at the backup job, but did not see anything regarding this error, or why the Backup did not success. Where do I need to look, and what do I need to find?

Like I said before, I am using Veeam as a VM and have choose: "Reserver Incremental, Storage Local Target, Backup Proxy as Virtual Appliance, no Guest index or Application-aware is enable"

Any Help

Thank You

SE

[Cokovic]

You should give Veeam support a call or a mail at support@veeam.com as further investigation is necessary.

Btw. backing up our environment with Veeam and 1500+ VMs

[dellock6]

First of select on the left a single VM to see the details of the job, so we can try to understand what happened.

[StoneEdge]

Hi

Email send it to support.

1500+?? big

Can you explain a little bit your environment?? Are you using Veeam as a physical server or a VM? Backup to local disks, or to a Storage

Thank You

SE

[Cokovic]

Right now we are using 6 physical Veeam servers with FC Cards for direct SAN access and storing these to a local disk repository. Each server has it's own raid array with a total of 10.5 TB space. Using Reversed incremental and keeping 15 restore points on disk. Once a week we backup these files to tape too with longer retention time.