Veeam planning for new virtual environment

[TwystedPair]

I am very new to VMWare and just got our environment up and running a few weeks ago. I have the trail version of Veeam installed and have a few design questions.

Here's a little background info about my environment:
I have 3 ESXi hosts with the plan of having around 50 VMs when it's all said and done. I have an HP EVA SAN connected via Fiber with about 60TBs capacity. We are an advertising agency so we deal with very large amounts of data. I have one file server alone that stores around 22TB of data. Currently, we have 6 different file servers, most of them and the biggest ones being Mac servers. My plan is to move all of our data onto one big Windows file server. Once I reclaim some hardware for our archival system, the amount of data that I need to store in live system will be a much more manageable 15TBs or so.

Initial Veeam design questions:
First of all, I've read some conflicting views on best practice for making the Veeam server virtual or physical and am having some problems deciding which is best for my environment. In the reading that I've been doing, I think I'm ok virtualizing it and then setup a physical backup proxy directly connected to the SAN. Does that make sense?

My second question is in regards to the storage that Veeam will use for it's backups. Can I use my existing SAN or does Veeam need it's own storage? If the answer is yes, do I need to present a LUN to the ESXi hosts?

I'm sure I will have lots more questions as I really start digging in, but these questions should at least get me started.

Thanks for reading!!!!

[J1mbo]

First of all, I've read some conflicting views on best practice for making the Veeam server virtual or physical and am having some problems deciding which is best for my environment. In the reading that I've been doing, I think I'm ok virtualizing it and then setup a physical backup proxy directly connected to the SAN. Does that make sense?

Yes, need plenty of CPU power in the proxy given the volumes of data.

My second question is in regards to the storage that Veeam will use for it's backups. Can I use my existing SAN or does Veeam need it's own storage?

Think about the scenarios that you're trying to protect against. If it's just file level recovery, then fine, but if it's to restore from if the SAN suffers some catastrophic failure....

[zak2011]

Totally agree with James. You wouldn't want to use the SAN both for backups as well as for VMs to reside on. You loose the SAN you loose everything.

[TwystedPair]

Thanks for the quick reply guys.

I understand about giving Veeam it's own storage and will start figuring out what's best for us and start the approval process. I would like to start testing Veeam now, however, so I think I'm going to have it backup to the SAN for now just so I can start playing with it. So that creates two new questions:

1. How do I get Veeam to see the SAN. Do I need to create a LUN on my EVA, present it to the hosts, and then create a datastore in VMWare? Is there a different process for allowing Veeam to see it?
2. Is it easy to change where the backup repository once I am able to purchase new storage for Veeam?

Thanks again for the help! I'm very excited to get Veeam up and running. My SOX restores are going to be sososososososososososooo much easier!!

[Helqasem]

Hi Matt,

Comments below:

1. How do I get Veeam to see the SAN. Do I need to create a LUN on my EVA, present it to the hosts, and then create a datastore in VMWare? Is there a different process for allowing Veeam to see it?

Veeam can back-up to anything that windows can see. If it's just for testing you have a couple of opitons. You could make your life easy and just put an extra disk on the VM where you install the Veeam Console. When you install the console, it automatically installs a default repository which can see all the windows drives configured on the console VM. If you added an E: drive to the VM with 100-200GB of capacity that should give you some decent space for testing small-to-medium sized VMs. Use that drive as your repository.

Alternatively, if you wanted a repository to write directly to the SAN (for speed), you could install a repository on the same machine as your physical proxy. For the repository to use the SAN, you'd just need to provision a LUN and make it available to the windows OS configured on your physical box. Remember in this case, the repository will be sharing CPU cycles with the proxy so take that into account.

2. Is it easy to change where the backup repository once I am able to purchase new storage for Veeam?

Yes, you can create a new reporitory at any time.. copy the back-up files to it. When added to the console, rescan the repository and re-configure the back-up jobs to point at the new repository (map the back-ups that are in there during this process).