Initial Planning for Medium Size Deployment

[bg.ranken]

I was hoping that I could get some help planning for future expansions of our deployment. The initial deployment isn't finalized yet or in production.

Currently we are only backing up a small amount of users on Office 365 (less than 100). Over the next five years there's a good chance that all of our users will be fully migrated, which at that point could be greater than 1k users. Datasize is unknown but based on current data usage I would estimate somewhere around 30tb of data before retention. We are planning on having a 7 year retention cycle. So I'm trying to size and plan out our deployment now so we'll be ready when the time comes to do mass migrations and increase our backup footprint.

As of now I have one main VBO server and one VBO proxy server. On the proxy server there is a single repository on it's own drive. In terms of jobs, we have three jobs and each job has the organization added but set to process only one type of item (Mail, OneDrive, Sites). Each of the jobs goes to the single repository.

Here's a few questions:

• Would it make sense to split out each job so they go to a different repository on the same drive? My logic is that if we wanted to split data to different storage units in the future then we could move the entire repository for each job to separate drives at that point.
• We are planning on using Backup and Replication to get the VBO environment to another offsite location. Is there any potential problems with this configuration?
• Are there any other things we should be doing to plan for future growth, both in terms of VBO and the VBR backups of the VBO servers?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Randall!
First of all, just FYI, we have just published new Technical Deployment and Configuration Guide V4 on our website. Its a great read for all VBO365 questions. Highly recommend!
Then, let me clear your questions:
- It is a good idea to split jobs - it gives you flexibility and control over load and configuration changes in the future
- Veeam Backup and Replication perfectly fits to protect Veeam Backup for Office 365 server. You want to copy office 365 backups offsite, right? In case you Office 365 server is protected with Veeam Agent for Windows \ or has agentless Image-Level backups, you can use Backup Copy Job to transfer backups offsite. Alternatively, you can use File to Tape functionality. Both methods work just fine.
- Yes, you need to think in advance for storage on your repositories and proxy server(s) sizing. Guide above helps here.
Hope that helps!

[joshua.hu]

Also Randall, something to keep in mind. One question that I had while I was setting everything up regarding storage was this:
What occurs if I am backing up a users Mail and Archive, when mail is moved from Mail to Archive. Meaning, does VBO double the storage required for this item? The answer is yes. So be aware.

[c2nathan]

I've got a deployment of VBO365 that is currently backing up Site, OneDrive & Exchange Online mailboxes for all of my organisation's users into a single repository. There's currently limited utilisation of OneDrive but the organisation is looking to migrate home-drive and file-server data towards OneDrive and Sites during the course of 2020, so I'm thinking that the 'repository per type of item stored' approach advocated here is worth migrating towards..... as long as that migration is feasible without having to re-work the entire infrastructure. Is there a 'repository migration' process exposed via the UI, or PowerShell, that could be used to move data from [Current repository] to [Exchange Online Repository, containing data from current repository, plus any new inbound content].... and so on for each 'type' of data?

[nielsengelen]

Hi Nathan, you can do this using Move-VBOEntityData in PowerShell.

Additionally, u can use a free community tool I made a while ago called VBO Data Manager (blog with info) and code is available via GitHub.