Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Setup Help Needed

[bscheele]

Hello -

I would like some assistance with determining the most efficient setup for backing up disk-to-disk-to-tape.

Physical environment for version 6.5 (before adding a physical Veeam 7.0 server):
2 ESXi servers attached to an iSCSI HP P2000 storage device.

P2000:
LUN 0 - three 600 GB drives RAID 5, primarily for ESXi server 1
LUN 1 - three 600 GB drives RAID 5, primarily for ESXi server 2
LUN 2 - one 2 TB drive, used for the D: drive for the Veeam virtual machine

1 full backup of all VMs and 2 days of incrementals consumes about 530 GB of space.

Now that there is tape support, we added:
Repurposed a Dell file server as a Veeam physical primary backup server - 408 GB (usable) C: drive, iSCSI HBA (connected to the P2000)
This repurposed server is attached to an HP 1/8 Autoloader (LTO-4)
Added three more 2 TB drives to the P2000, considering converting LUN 2 to be RAID 5 with 4 drives for 6 TB usable storage for d2d operations.


The physical Veeam server is named VeeamPhy (runs Veeam 7.0) and the virtual Veeam machine is named Veeam32 (runs Veeam 6.5).


For an optimized d2d2t setup, how would you recommend going about this?

I would assume that VeeamPhy would run all the d2d backups as well as the d2t backup copy jobs.
Should Veeam32 even have a backup repository?
Should I even still have a Veeam virtual backup server (it is currently running 6.5, since Windows 2003 is not supported for version 7.0)?

Maybe the first 2 questions are irrelevant. Assume that I am starting fresh, and I have my physical server for running Veeam. What would be ideal in terms of virtual machines on ESXi for functioning perhaps as backup proxies? Do I need a repository of any kind within a backup proxy VM? Should my repository reside with the physical backup server instead? Or, should I split the 6 TB usable space between a physical and one or more virtual backup proxies?

One thing I noticed while testing a backup of data from Veeam32 to VeeamPhy was that the transport mode used was Network rather than Direct SAN access or Virtual Appliance. Perhaps this is because I only connected VeeamPhy to LUN2 (I don't know, since i am still a bit of a noob with external storage). I would assume that Network would be slower, but would it be that much slower to go over gigabit ethernet vs iSCSI?

Maybe there is something else I can do that I have not mentioned.

d2d performance should be considered much more important than d2t performance.

[foggy]

Should I even still have a Veeam virtual backup server (it is currently running 6.5, since Windows 2003 is not supported for version 7.0)?

You would not need a second backup server but might want to have a virtual proxy to retrieve data from ESXi datastore using hotadd.

Do I need a repository of any kind within a backup proxy VM?

No.

One thing I noticed while testing a backup of data from Veeam32 to VeeamPhy was that the transport mode used was Network rather than Direct SAN access or Virtual Appliance. Perhaps this is because I only connected VeeamPhy to LUN2 (I don't know, since i am still a bit of a noob with external storage).

To be able to use hotadd, the host running backup proxy server VM must have all datastores where protected VMs' disks reside connected to it (however, there are some limitations of using this transport mode). For direct SAN access, the volumes should be seen by operating system in the Windows Disk Management snap-in on the backup server and read access on them should be allowed for the backup server.

[veremin]

My 2 cents:

If I were you I would completely stick to one physical 7.0 VB&R instance.

• Delete 6.5 installation and use it as virtual proxy, instead, since 2003 R2 is supported OS for V7 backup proxy server
• Specify Direct SAN method, following the recommendations mentioned above
• Test both modes and see what best suites your needs
• Create a share disk, map it to your physical instance of VB&R and use as a target repository for configuration backup. Should any disaster situation happen (physical server goes down, for instance), all you would need to do is to install Veeam on any other virtual machine you have and import previously backed up configuration.

Thanks.