Am I asking for trouble not using B&R proxies or SAN?

[matthewmalk248]

Hi Veeam Community.

I recently fell in love with VMWare which also means I recently fell in love with Veeam Backup & Replication.
We have the usual limitations with rackspace & budget, and I "think" I have a decently safe configuration, but it doesn't match a lot of the configs I see online, so I'm wondering if I'm asking for trouble in the future?

Current Setup:
- 2 Identical Dell Servers, each with SSD RAID 10's on Dell PERC H710's, running ESXI 6.0.
- Each have 6 VM's that are set to replicate to the other server, so 6 native VMs, and 6 _replicas (one server can handle all 12 VMs, but figured why not spread the load until something bad happens instead of one server just sitting idle with all replicas).
- Each ESXI's datastore sits on that local server's build in RAID, we have no iSCSI or SAN setup.
- I have Vcenter & Veeam B&R running on the same Windows 2012 VM, with no proxies.
- I have the Vcenter & Veeam B&R server replicate on a different schedule to avoid conflicts.
- Replication jobs are pretty fast, takes about 2 minutes and doesn't seem to slow down anything during the process, so I guess my 2 concerns are..

1) Do I really need Proxies for Veeam B&R? (I've tested planned failovers, but if the stuff hits the fan and I need to do "failover now", am I going to hit a brick wall or errors?
2) Is it ok to use the servers own RAID's for datastores in this setup? I considered setting up an iSCSI box, but to me it seems like going backwards in redundancy by relying on one point of failure and having all VM's depend on it. (Unless I went with two iSCSI's and then I'm doubling costs & space I don't have).

Any opinions are much appreciated!

[skrause]

My thoughts:
1) In a setup as small as yours, using the B&R server to handle the management and proxy roles shouldn't cause an issue provided it has enough CPU/RAM resources allocated per the system requirements for both roles.
2) There is nothing inherently wrong with using internal storage with any hypervisor. It is actually the basis for the shift to most of the new hyper-converged architectures that are en vogue.

[DaveWatkins]

The downside I see is that you're doing NBD backups from the server not hosting Veeam. This can be quite slow on 1Gb (but is fine with 10Gb networking). If you only have 1Gb networking then you could speedup backups from that host with a local proxy, but if yo're happy with the speeds then why bother

[matthewmalk248]

Thanks for the replies! Our VMs are pretty small (50GB to 100GB) so the 1Gb without a local proxy seems to be speedy enough. I'm looking forward to the day where we have enough VM's to need proxies