Advice needed for Veeam newbie

[T0bster]

Dear All,

New to VMWare and Veeam and in need of some advice. Please excuse my lack of knowledge...

I have recently purchased two Dell PowerEdge R720s on which I have installed ESxi 5.5. One will be my production host running two Windows VMs initially (one DC / file & print, one Exchange 2010). The other box will be my backup host and is located in a different location on the site. I have purchased Veeam Backup and Replication (V7.0) which is installed on a Windows 7 Pro VM on the backup host. My Windows VMs will be backed up to local storage on the backup server. The plan is to use external hard drives to copy my backups onto in order to get an offsite backup, and also keep backups for a longer period of time (I will be able to keep approx one month on my backup server local storage).

The plan is to purchase a PCI USB3 card for my server and use VMDirectPath to pass through, so I don't have to add the device in the host each time I plug in a new hard drive.
There is an article on how to achieve this here - http://www.tinkertry.com/usb3passthru/

My question is, is anyone doing this already? If so, what type of external hard drives are you using, and how do you rotate your drives?

Many thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Toby,

Yes, some of our existing customers are indeed using the same approach to save backup files to the USB device. The performance of this setup is not very great, you can check that by yourself > Sphere 4.1 and USB Passthrough (it's a bit old, but should give you the idea on what to expect).

As an alternative to leveraging VMDirectPath I would suggest using any physical Windows server with these USB disks attached as a target repository for your offsite backups.

And here is an existing topic talking about backup copy jobs and rotated drives, please check it out > Veeam 7 Copy Job - Transform

Thanks!

[T0bster]

Thanks for the reply Vitaliy! It all looks very complicated. Backing up to tape using Backup Exec seems so simple in comparison!

[Vitaliy S.]

Toby, I would say that backing up your VMs to tape with Veeam is even simpler. Are you going to continue using tapes or you would like to swap tapes to USB drives? My point was that you setup looks fine, though when I experimented with pass through disks the performance was not very good.

As to the rotated drives question, then you can use weekly rotation scheme and regular backup job (not backup copy jobs) to save your backups to these drives. Let me know if you have any further questions.

[T0bster]

I have a rack mounted Dell LTO4 tape drive that is connected to my Win 2003 server on a SCSI cable. Backup Exec 11d is installed on the server and currently manages all my Windows backups.

I can use this drive for backing up my VMs in the future, but I guess we will need a solution for the transitional period.

[Vitaliy S.]

In order to continue using tapes, you would need to install Veeam B&R on this very server. During transitional period you can create a repository on this server and use BE to offload backups to tapes.

Just to make sure we are on the same page - you would like to use rotated drives and tapes to store your backups? Did I get it right?

[T0bster]

I guess I'm just thinking about the number of hard drives I would need to buy in order to go back 3 month or 6 months or a year. Tapes are relatively cheap, hence the thought.

To be honest I need to talk to the business to understand exactly what the requirements are, and that will dictate my strategy.

Thanks again for the responses.