Backing up my data centre - Some challenges...

[NeoTurfMaster]

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this isn’t the correct place to post, but I’m looking at replacing our current data centre backup solution with Veeam. We already use Veeam for our site backups (reverse incremental with daily offsite clones and weekly backups to tape).

I’ve run into a couple of issues while planning on putting Veeam into our Data Centre. While they’re not technical issues, I thought someone here might have some ideas/workarounds for my challenges?

1 - Physical week/month ends

While most of our data centre is virtual, we still have a number of physical servers. I have played around with the Veeam agent for Windows/Linux, and while it seems to work well, there is no option for reverse incremental backups.

We currently store daily backups on an EMC Data Domain and weekly backups to tape (changing the retention based on if it’s month/year end). Reverse incremental works well for this as our month end tape is always a “full” backup. We don’t want to be archiving incremental backups to tape. Only full backups.

I know that the Veeam agent of Windows and Linux doesn’t support reverse incremental backups yet, but I was wondering if you guys would have any ideas on how I might be able to get around this?

One theory is that I could have 2 backup jobs. Monday - Thursday, and a Friday job that only keeps one restore point...therefore always being full? However, I’d prefer to not have to have multiple backup jobs if possible.

2 - Large Backups

We have some large backups. One being about 24TB after compression with our current backup solution. For this backup (weekly) we go directly to tape, which I know Veeam doesn’t support, and we don’t have enough space to put this backup on our Data Domain.

It’s a long shot, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how I might be able to get around this? Some kind of way to trick Veeam in going straight to tape perhaps? Or is the only option more storage? If so...that could be a deal breaker and kill my dreams of having Veeam in our data centre

Sorry for the long message, but thanks in advance for any help and advice you might be able to give me!

[MichaelCade]

Hi,
Not sure how we can get you sorted for the first question, your solution / idea would work but its going to use twice the storage as well.

in regards to 2 though, is this 24TB a backup job consisting of multiple VMs or is it one VM that is 24TB?

If multiple VMs have you checked out the Per-VM file chains this will split them down to individual files per VM it will mean losing the effciencies from Veeam on the large backup file but it would break down those large files.