Veeam in a (very) small environment

[SirBackup]

I am looking at purchasing Veeam for backing up my small business VM's and had a few pre-purchase questions. First, I have a Dell T610 with SBS2011 and SQL as VM's with a Hyper-V host. Considering the small scale of my environment, would there be a recommended setup of where to install Veeam and where the backup storage should be located? I'm looking at the following scenarios and was wondering which would be the best/recommended option:

1. Build a small box with Windows 7 and internal storage that would be used to run Veeam and also use internal HD's in that box for backup storage over the LAN
2. Build a small box with Windows 7 that would run Veeam but would backup to an iSCSI NAS
3. Run Veeam on a Windows 7 (or Win 2008 Server) VM on the current Dell T610 and backup to internal storage on the Dell T610
4. Run Veeam on a Windows 7 (or Win 2008 Server) VM on the current Dell T610 but backup to either an iSCSI NAS or a network share

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

[J1mbo]

The great advantage of having it separate is that it will be available if your T610 dies. And anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with internal storage. Using a dedicated disk array will likely give more bays of course, but with 2TB disks so cheap that is unlikely to be a problem.

FWIW, my own solution uses an old 6-bay PowerEdge loaded with 2TB SATA drives (WD RE4s) running in RAID-10 on a Perc-6i (with 256MB BBWC, not the useless 6i/r). That's backing up over a dedicated VLAN 50+ VMs daily and chugging through the transforms at the weekend - works perfectly for me

[SirBackup]

Yes, keeping Veeam off of the Dell seems like a good idea. What I'm not sure of is if I need Win server 2008 or can use Windows 7? Also, if I have a separate box running Win7 (or server 2008) is there a benefit to have a, say, NAS connected via iSCSI versus just using internal storage on the Veeam box? Again, I'm only backing up 2 VM's totaling about 700GB.

[Vitaliy S.]

Server OS is generally a better choice, so I would suggest to go with Windows Server 2008. Also I do not believe there will be any benefit in running iSCSI NAS as opposed to using local storage of your Windows box to store VM backup files.