Are you keeping greater than 90 restore points?

[Veeam-dsiles]

To our user community, I am trying to track down some customers who are keeping many restore points in their Veeam Backup deployments. If you are using Veeam Backup with many recovery points say greater that 60, 90, or 120+ restore points, can you just post a reply and share some details.

We would also be interested in knowing the approximate number of VMs being backed up with this extended restore point retention. Thanks in advance for your feedback.

David

[Davd]

We have 100 restore points on all our VMs (reversed incremental). We run Veeam on a VM with Windows 2008 R2 SP1 and backup target is a DAS that is attached to the ESX where Veeam VM is and backups are peformed through hot-add. Our 8 Veeam backup jobs contain following amount of VMs:

Job1 4 VMs, total VMs size 950 GB
Job2 2 VM, total VMs size 190 GB
Job3 22 VMs, total VMs size 1100 GB
Job4 8 VMs, total VMs size 580 GB
Job5 17 VMs, total VMs size 1050 GB
Job6 1 VM, total VMs size 1700 GB
Job7 1 VM, total VMs size 2000 GB
Job8 1 VM, total VMs size 1850 GB

We have an additional Veeam server in our DR site connected through 1 Gbps WAN. Exactly the same setup as the Veeam VM above. Both Veeam servers perform nightly backups of all servers and schedules on each Veeam server are set in a way where server backups jobs don't collide (thanks Veeam to provide such good backup speed where the nightly backup window is enough to perform backup of all our VMs twice ).

We only backup to disk (never tape or other) and we configured current 100 restore points setting based on information we found in this forum that more then 100 was not recommended. We have not run into any problems with 100 restore points so far, but if possible to increase number of restore points we would we would preffer to do so.

[Bunce]

Same - maxed to 99 (30 odd VM's about 2 TB of VMDK's). - we'd use more if possible.

I think you'll find its the same type of client - those who don't wish to use tape, and hence don't want to continually create new fulls which wastes space.

Ideally - the target would be a dedup-appliance (block level) which automatically remove restore points on a tiered retention basic (eg maintain a weekly for 6 weeks, monthly for 14 months etc), and remove those un-needed points in between, but I can't see how Veeam can achieve this since it would 'break the chain' using the current VIB / VBK methodology.

So we're stuck with maintaining all these un-needed restore points inbetween in order to keep the required RPO's - thereby requiring maximum restore points.

[Veeam-dsiles]

Bruce and David thanks for sharing. Others please feel free to share as well. Definitely interested in someone doing this on greater than 300 VMs.

Bruce I saw some good things to consider as well in your post that I am sure Anton will see as well. Great ideas become feature ideas

Thanks again,

David

[Gostev]

I can't see how Veeam can achieve this since it would 'break the chain' using the current VIB / VBK methodology.

Theoretically, this can be done by merging/consolidating older VRB files together.

[VER]

Local backup:
Job 1: 13 VM's, 700 GB, 99 restore points or more if it fits on disk
Job 2: 2 VM's, 1.4 TB, 99 restore point or more if it fits on disk

Replication:
Job 1: 13 VM's, 700 GB, 5 restore points
Job 2: 2 VM's, 1.4 TB, 5 restore point

We accept that we only have a couple of restore points after a major disaster. (and it saves bandwidth)

[tsightler]

We only keep 90 restore points, and only 80 VM's in about 4 jobs. Total size of all backups, including restore points is about 24TB. We find that performance gets pretty bad with incrementals if you go over 7 of those from the last full backup, but for some reason this is less of an issue with reverse incrementals.

[flavor4real]

Interesting ...
We just keep the last 8-14 days.... only 3 TB, only do backup of OS and a few virtual drives, RDM drives will be backed up over netbackup.

[Veeam-dsiles]

All,

Thanks again for all the feedback. It has been very helpful. I am going to start one more thread. I need to find a few examples of people backing up more than 300 VMs and how many Veeam Backup servers are in play. Thanks again we really have the greatest users in the world.

David

[rbrambley]

bump