512e Drives Not Supported?

[brainerdmobil]

I'm ready to purchase a new Synology RS815RP+ and four 8TB WD Gold drives to go along with it. My vendor just informed me these "512e drives are not Veeam compatible". Is this true? Does anyone have experience using these drives?

[Gostev]

Hmm, honestly I am not really sure why would Veeam be incompatible with these hard drives... we don't interact with hard drives directly, like for example Storage Spaces do - we operate on a much higher level. Could you please ask your vendor to elaborate, and post whatever he says here?

[brainerdmobil]

Thanks for the quick reply. They're pointing to a VMWare issue, but that shouldn't really matter since this Synology box won't be mounted directly in VMWare and will only be presented as a mapped network drive on the Server 2012 R2 virtual machine that's running Veeam Backup & Replication. I'll keep you posted, but at this point I think my vendor is confused

[Gostev]

Yep, I think so too

[brainerdmobil]

So, my vendor was unable to elaborate any further and said to go with a larger Synology unit with 4TB drives instead. I'm sticking with the 8TB drives as I'm sure it will work just fine. I'll post my results once I get the new unit setup and test it out.

[Gostev]

Sounds good. If the issue is on the Veeam side, we'll fix it for you of course.

[blithespirit]

I run a synology 8 drive NAS with large drives in my home lab, no issues, the synology presents either file or block (use block over file and not from disk for better performance), Veeam will see the repository not the synology, your repository will probably be windows so you should have no issues. Mine is both front end datastores and back end repository, bond your ports and runs quite well.

Hope that helps

[brainerdmobil]

@blithespirit, when you say 'use block level', are you referring to using an iSCSI interface instead of a mapped drive to a shared folder on the Synology? I've seen several other Veeam/Synology posts stating iSCSI doesn't offer much more performance and it's not worth the added layer of complexity. Thoughts?

[Gostev]

We don't recommend using SMB for reliability considerations, especially with slow backup storage such as low-end NAS.

[brainerdmobil]

So you're saying I should use iSCSI instead of a mapped network drive to the Synology?

[Gostev]

Absolutely. Or better yet, skip NAS completely and stuff those disks into a general purpose server. This will make even better backup repository!

[Andreas Neufert]

You said: "mapped drive to a shared folder on the Synology"

Veeam can not write to a mapped network drive. You can add the SMB/CIFS share as a Repository directly. Go to Repository and add a new one. Select CIFS and add username and password. You should then be able to use it.
If I missinterpreted your text... sorry. At least you can check if windows can write to the share, then we would be able as well.

[blithespirit]

@blithespirit, when you say 'use block level', are you referring to using an iSCSI interface instead of a mapped drive to a shared folder on the Synology? I've seen several other Veeam/Synology posts stating iSCSI doesn't offer much more performance and it's not worth the added layer of complexity. Thoughts?

Synology NAS has two options for iSCSI, normal block from disk RAID or iSCSI over volumes, over volumes offers more speed and advanced features. It's much faster, if you choose to use a Synology then use this. In an 8 disk NAS you should have 4 Ethernet ports, bond them to one virtual IP

[mikame]

just a side note, please consider the latest problems with Synology devices that involves Intel Atom C2xxx series bug. On top of that many Synology DS1815+ devices have had PSU problems too, that is a different device that you mentioned. I googled QNAP and problems, seems these lower end NAS devices are not that repliable, at leats that's the conclusion I came, so I'll avoid those from now on.

Because of these I just migrated all my VM's from Synology back to DAS and won't use Synology again. DS1815+ synology device was really slow with iSCSI, pretty useless. NFS worked much much better, much more IOPS, could be the same for other models, don't know for sure.

You could read these forum links before purchasing any Intel Atom C2xxx device from Synology or any hardware maker;
https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopi ... &start=135

https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopi ... &start=105

[YouGotServered]

Absolutely. Or better yet, skip NAS completely and stuff those disks into a general purpose server. This will make even better backup repository!

Hey Gostev,
On another note, one of my co-workers suggested that using iSCSI in regards to a VEEAM repository was hurting performance in that it was essentially doubling network traffic - the data goes from the backup source, to the backup server, which then shoots it off to the iSCSI device, whereas apparently if you just tell VEEAM to send it straight to a network location / NFS share, the data goes straight from the source to the device, thus halving the network utilization.

He is generally a pretty good source for this info and if I'm not mistaken, may have gotten that from another VEEAM forum or documentation (I've asked him for a source so I could reference it for you).

What are your thoughts having said that? I'm all about that performance. Or is there a performance sacrifice that is outweighed by reliability, etc?

Sorry if I hijacked a thread, I can move this somewhere else if need be

[brainerdmobil]

just a side note, please consider the latest problems with Synology devices that involves Intel Atom C2xxx series bug. On top of that many Synology DS1815+ devices have had PSU problems too, that is a different device that you mentioned. I googled QNAP and problems, seems these lower end NAS devices are not that repliable, at leats that's the conclusion I came, so I'll avoid those from now on.

Thanks. I saw that as well during my research and ended up going with the RS3617RPxs. That model uses a Xeon CPU and has redundant power supplies.

[brainerdmobil]

Synology NAS has two options for iSCSI, normal block from disk RAID or iSCSI over volumes, over volumes offers more speed and advanced features. It's much faster, if you choose to use a Synology then use this. In an 8 disk NAS you should have 4 Ethernet ports, bond them to one virtual IP

Are you talking about LACP? I understand how to configure this at the NAS and network switch, but I'm not sure how this is configured in VMWare. How do I aggregate multiple NIC's and pass them through to the guest OS? I've been researching this configuration, but everything I find talks about adding an iSCSI data-store to the host. It's my understanding that the preferred method is attaching iSCSI directly to the Veeam VM via iSCSI initiator, but then I cant pass an aggregated link. Any help with this configuration would be greatly appreciated!

[Gostev]

On another note, one of my co-workers suggested that using iSCSI in regards to a VEEAM repository was hurting performance in that it was essentially doubling network traffic - the data goes from the backup source, to the backup server, which then shoots it off to the iSCSI device, whereas apparently if you just tell VEEAM to send it straight to a network location / NFS share, the data goes straight from the source to the device, thus halving the network utilization.

You could always mount iSCSI LUN directly to the backup proxy, and then the data will also go straight from the source to the storage device.