Question for new user..

[ps23Rick]

So.. I work in a small office and we're ordering a new Dell rack server that will have a windows server 2019. We've also got 3 office desktop machines running Win 10.. With that said I've been tasked with looking into options for doing backups on said hardware. In talking with our Dell guy they hooked us up with an RD1000 backup and suggested Veeam as the software of choice. So.. I'll admit that I'm not sure which flavor of Veeam I should be looking at.. There's this one -- the agent for Windows and others.. I obviously don't want to buy something that isn't a good fit. I'm guessing that perhaps Veeam Backup essentials might be ok? Sorry for the dumb questions and If I'm in the wrong place please let me know.. thx

ps. I'm assuming that Veeam is capable of fully automated backups with the ability to notify someone if something fails, and the usual suspects feature wise..

Thanks in advance!

[Gostev]

You could start with the free product (Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition) and see how it fits your needs before purchasing Veeam Essentials. Community Edition has all the basic functionality you're looking for. Thanks!

[ps23Rick]

Thanks! That sounds like a reasonable plan!

[Regnor]

It sounds like you don't have virtualization in place. So basically you will use Veeam agent to backup your server and the desktop machines; Veeam agent is the standalone tool. With Veeam Backup & Replication (both the community and essentials editon) you will also be able to backup with agents, but you can centrally install it on your sever and manage the backups of all agents there.

You can do all with the free community edition. And if you discover that the product fits for you, you can purchase Essentials which will enable you to contact Veeam Support.

[Mildur]

you can purchase Essentials which will enable you to contact Veeam Support.

Veeam Support is already provided with the community edition on best effort.
Meaning, paid customers are prioritized over free user. There is no guarantee, that free users will get an answer from support.

If your backups and restores are important, then follow Regnors advice to pay for the product to get paid support. Someday, your companies existence may depend on it

[Regnor]

Yes, my wording maybe a bit wrong here
Best effort support is just something, you don't want to have in production or with products you depend on.
So if you really want to get support, you'll have to pay for it.

[ps23Rick]

Thanks guys! We had a slight change of plans due to parts availability w/ Dell (and I'm sure others) and are switching to a tape system (LTO-6) for the backups.. I've got to get that quote approved but will spec Veeam Essentials as part of that with upper management.. Thanks for your timely advice!

[Regnor]

Please keep in mind that Veeam isn't designed to backup directly to tape; you'll always have to backup to disk first. The only exception is file to tape, but this isn't what you will going to use.

[ps23Rick]

Please keep in mind that Veeam isn't designed to backup directly to tape; you'll always have to backup to disk first. The only exception is file to tape, but this isn't what you will going to use.

Umm.. So.. I'm just getting started with Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition with our Dell PowerVault 114x (w/ two LTO-6 drives -- no tape loader) that I was able to cable up the other day to our 2019 Win Server without issue. We have the driver installed (Avago Technologies version 2.61.29.2) on the server to use the Dell HBA355e SAS adapter and it's showing up in the device manager w/o issue. The two IBM LTO-6 drives are connected to the HBA355e card and are ready to use.

It's been a LONG time since I've worked with any sort of tape drives and am I guess looking for a little bit of guidance needed to use the tape drive(s) w/ Veeam. Per the above comment it sounds like I need to use a multi-step backup -- initially to a hard drive (image?) and then from the hard-drive to the tape.

In poking around in the Veeam console I see the "Tape Infrastructure" settings -- with options to add tape server, file-to-tape, backup-to-tape, restore,....

I'm still reading through the Hyper-V Veeam docs -- and ran across the comment below listed for individual tape drives :

NOTE -- If you use standalone tape drives, it is recommended to install drivers in non-exclusive mode.

I've got no idea how to make that setting -- I'm assuming it's part of the device driver config (e.g. in Windows Device Manager). If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful!

I guess I'll take one step at a time as I read through the docs.. I'm not in any hurry.

[Regnor]

That's right. For virtual machines you will start with a backup job which creates image backups to disk.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

In the second step you use backup to tape jobs to copy the backup files from disk to tape.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

I have to admit that I haven't heard about this requirement before regarding the driver mode. But I would think that an exclusive driver mode would be a separate driver setup from Dell, if such an driver is available.
Just add your server as a tape server under tape infrastructure and check if you can access both drives and inventory it's media. If this works, you can add the media pools and jobs according to your requirements.

[ps23Rick]

Thank Regnor..

So.. Stupid question #49120.. The server with the tape drives connected is running Server 2019 std. I'm sure we could do things better if money was not an issue but for now this one server is running AD, and two virtual machines and acts also as a small file server.. If we just want to backup the two VM images (the entire drive images I assume) I'm assuming that is not as efficient from a backup perspective as it's just backing up a "blob" of data instead of just doing an incremental of things that may have changed from within the VM itself (as opposed to being outside the VM -- if that makes sense).

If I just for starters want to backup the file shares that are not housed in a VM, is that something that I can do to start things off -- assuming I can add this tape server in the tape infrastructure part of the Veeam console..? Thanks much!!

[ps23Rick]

ps. Yes, I was able to add the tape server w/o issue.. I've got it running an inventory on an empty tape right now.. Seems to be working like a charm!

[Regnor]

Veeam will use changed block tracking for the VMs, so an incremental backup will just contain the changed blocks.

In order to get the file shares to tape, you could use a file to tape job, or backup the file structure via Veeam agent first and copy it to tape with a backup to tape job. The later one would be better to handle, but needs more disk capacity.

[Mildur]

Veeam will use changed block tracking for the VMs, so an incremental backup will just contain the changed blocks.

Change block tracking (CBT) is not the reason for a incremental backup.

CBT is for reducing the load on the production storage and increases the speed of an incremental backup.
CBT helps the backup software, to read only changed blocks from the production storage. The proxy stores this changed blocks after dedup, compression and optionally encryption to the backup repository.
If no CBT is used, veeam needs to read the entire content of the VM, but will also only save the changed blocks to the backup repository. The incremental backup will take much longer without CBT.

backup to tape job

This are not available in the community edition. Backup to Tape Jobs requires an enterprise, enterprise + or VUL license.
So it has to be a File To Tape Job. If the share runs on a windows or linux machine, then use veeam Agent to backup this machine and write the backup Files to Tape.
If it's not on a windows or linux server, I would go with direct backups from the share. But you have to watch out about the file count. File To Tape Backup Jobs will have an impact to the SQL database. If you use the build in SQL Express DB for the veeam configuration database, you could reach the limit of 10GB really fast with File To Tape Jobs, which backups millions of files.

[Regnor]

Technically a much better answer and I've overseen the limitation of the community edition, thanks Fabian

[ps23Rick]

Thanks guys! I guess I've got a bit of reading and playing around to get this jelling in my head properly.. I'll consider what was written above and take heed.. Thx!