VMware VSA and Veeam Backup

[m.novelli]

Hi guys, anyone using Vmware VSA and Veeam Backup? I'm wondering if VSA is a good product and if it works fine in conjunction with Veeam Backup

Would be nice to hear some feedback from user base

Marco

[Gostev]

I have not heard any good feedback on VMware VSA here or elsewhere, but even if it works great, it is still way too basic for its price. There is really not much to pay for, plus you are getting storage product from a company that never specialized in storage. Does not seem like a good choice to me!

As far as virtual storage appliances, for using in conjunction with Veeam I would HIGHLY recommend HP StoreVirtual VSA. It has ALL the features you've come to expect from Enterprise-class storage (code base will reach major version 10 this month), and B&R 6.5 tightly integrates with it (read up on our Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots). We have great deal of customers using these appliances on a large scale, and they are very happy.

And you will be pleasantly surprised with its price tag, too.

[Bunce]

We use VMware VSA at two smaller sites.

Works fine - as documented. A few minor quirks requiring command line recovery of cluster, but quite good overall for a V1 product.

Backed up by Veeam without issue.

[dellock6]

For the OP, are you talking about backing up the VSA itself, or the VMs running inside it? If it's the second one, then the VSA is seen by vCenter and then Veeam just like any other NFS storage, so you can run a virtual proxy in hotadd mode or network mode.

Luca.

[markfellows]

Anton (and anyone else who can help),

With what you've experienced would you say the HP VSA is worth the additional expense over just upgrading to Essentials Plus (which includes VSA 5.1). What additional features and flexibility does HP’s offering provide over the VM version.

We're looking into implementing a VSA and like the idea of the integration of the HP VSA with Veeam.

[dellock6]

Well, for example with Veeam 6.5 you can use SAN snapshots even on the HP StoreVirtual VSA. Other features StoreVirtual (or LeftHand is it was called until few days ago) has:
- a single cluster can scale up to 32 nodes, VSA only up to 3
- you can create multi-site configuration and replicate between them
- you can use network raid 1 or 5 between nodes, VSA can only do 1

To me, StoreVirtual is worth the additional price, but my suggestion is to test it yourself, since you can download it for free with an evaluation license.

Luca.

[markfellows]

Thanks Luca, that's really useful. I was planning on testing both but after investigating it a bit more I'm not sure it's worth testing VMWare VSA as present.

A quick question, our budget is pretty tight, is there any point in using StoreVirtual without VM Essentials Plus (HA, Vmotion)?

I know this is a bit off a Veeam topic so sorry!

[dellock6]

No, it works exactly as the VMware VSA, you create an iscsi network and you use it to expose LUNs to the ESXi hosts.Then ESXi read iscsi from there. Sounds weird at times since both the storage and the ESXi are on the same machine and share the same network, but it works!

Luca.

[markfellows]

Thanks Luca, sorry I wasn't being specific to StoreVirtual I meant any brand VSA. The availability of the data is what appeals to me with a virtual storage cluster even without HA/vMotion.

With the VM data files residing on the remaining VSA cluster host (in a 2 node environment) would I just have to manually re-register the VM (in the vCenter inventory) to the remaining ESXi host in the cluster?

One final thing, I promise!! Is the 10tb node limit raw or after RAID? E.g. 2 nodes each with 20Tb raw, 10 Tb after RAID 10, 5Tb after network RAID 1 so total storage available to the cluster would be 10tb, is this currently maximum with a 2 node cluster?

[dellock6]

No, the nodes of the VSA all act as active nodes, if one of the VSA stops working, you still see the LUN exposed from the other one. When the other VSA comes back, a resync operation copies the delta data onto the other VSA.
About the storage limit, is about the vmdk you create and give to the HP VSA, regardless of the underlying raid configuration: you do not see this configuration, from ESXi you only see a LUN and you format it with VMFS.

Luca.

[markfellows]

Thanks for clearing things up Luca.

When I mentioned the re-registering of the VM I meant where 1 physical server in a 2 server cluster failed (ESXi host and VSA).