Proxy & Transport Mode Advice

[SmithErick]

I need to figure out the fastest transport method possible and how to achieve it. Our current infrastructure is as follows:

I have 6 VM's with the largest being at 900GB (Small Business Server 2003)

-Highly Reliable Systems BNAS301 (Physical - Running Server 2008) - https://high-rely.com/HR3/includes/BNAS/BNAS%20301.pdf
Dedicated for Veeam 6.5 (Local & Removable Drive Backups Nightly)
Gigtabit LAN

-DELL T710 (VMware ESXi 5.1)
4 300GB SAS Drives (No Longer Used)
Dual Gigabit LAN

-Synology RS3413xs+
40TB Total with a single 3TB LUN for the VM Datastore
Dual Gigabit LAN


I am still in the learning phase and would love the assistance! It was setup on automatic but we have issues when a backup will slow our Small Business Server to a halt. I have read all Knowledge articles on Source Bottlenecks, etc.

I would like to use SAN Direct, would this work?
High Rely Server with iSCSI Initiator with target as the VM Datastore LUN (Synology)
Backups Stored Locally on the Veeam Server (Internal and Removable Drive)

Thanks in advance for your expertise!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Erick,

Yes, please take a look at our sticky F.A.Q. on how to configure direct SAN mode > VMware : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. In this topic you would also find how to tweak your backup server iSCSI connection to boost backup job performance.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

[yizhar]

Hi.

The BNAS301 backup server seems to have limited CPU power (single intel i3 cpu).
I assume that the T710 has much more CPU power.
Therefor I would go with using the BNAS as repository but not as proxy for best performance.

I suggest either of the following (in both options, you will have a virtual Veeam proxy in Hot/Add mode):

Option A:
Install Veeam server on virtual machine with 4 vCPU, and use it as proxy.
use BNAS as repository.

Option B:
Install Veeam server on BNAS, but use it only as repository.
Install a windows VM with 4 vCPU and configure it as Veeam proxy.

In your scenario I think that a VM in hot add (appliance) mode will provide best backup performance.
However you can also try using SAN mode from BNAS to Synology and test the results.

BTW -
You can use the 4*300gb disks on the T710 server in RAID5 configuration, and put the Veeam proxy/server VM on it.
Then you can provide about 800gb to that VM and use it as additional (and much faster) repository for backups.
You can then configure Veeam jobs to use the SAS RAID5 repository for some jobs, and the BNAS for other.
The SAS RAID5 capacity will be limited and not able to backup the whole environment, but you can still use it to store additional copy of some of them such as SQL or DC.

Bye
Yizhar