Backup 4.0 - little bit confused... need clarification

[willymaykett]

Hi,

I have a ESx 3.5 environment, and am looking at backing up at the vm level, rather than in guest as I am currently doing. I was reading the documentation, and I noticed tha you backup "on the fly". Does this mean that you do not copy the vm locally first to the proxy server, and then perform the backup? But rather it goes directly to the final disk location?

I ask this because I have a couple of 600GB vmdk files, and I do not want to copy them to local storage, and then to the disk storage.
I am also thinking of doing a vmdk type backup on the weekends, and then doing an incremental within the vm. Will the VEaam backup allow me to reset the archive bit in the vm?

Thanks for you help, I am trying to understand how it works, so that I get it right. I prefer to go with Veamm, rather than any other products.

Thanks

[Gostev]

Hi Joe -

Yes, "on-the-fly" means that data never hits local storage on Veeam Backup server (as it happens in case with all other VCB-based solutions). Instead, it is processed in-memory and sent to the backup storage location.

BTW do you have shared storage, and where you are backing up to?

Also, why do you need to do incremental backups within the VM?

Thank you!

[willymaykett]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I have 3x ESX 3.5 with shared FC storage. My proxy server will be FC attached.

I was hoping that the "on the fly" saved me having to copy it to the proxy.

I need to backup the vm's to tape. So I was thinking of dumping the vm to disk, probably locally attached to the backup server, then run a file system backup of the server to put it to tape. I am also looking at doing a replica of the vm's as well for DR.

Can I do incrementals of the vm's during the week and fulls on the weekend? What is the performance like?

I am not after anything fancy, just awant to backup up the VM and restore it quickly if something goes wrong. ( heard of a nasty experience a while back where the san went belly up and corrupted ALL the vm's... they had to manually rebuild all the guest os's cause the site did not have any vmdk based backups.... I want to prevent tha tfrom happenning to me!)

thanks for your help!

[Gostev]

In your case the performance should be up to 100MB/s...

Veeam Backup leverages synthetic backup, which is forever-incremental backup with latest-state full image reconstruction during each incremental backup cycle. So you always have ready-to-restore latest state handy (but you can still restore to earlier states if needed).

Due to synthetic backup, you do not need to run full backup more than once (although in 4.0 you have an option to do fulls occasionally, but it is not really needed and even disabled by default).

You can find nore information on Veeam synthetic backup here:
Veeam Synthetic Backup Explained

Hope this helps.