Backup to removable media (rotated drives)

[csinetops]

Hello-

We have been using Veeam for about 6 months now, we love it so far!

I have in the budget this year to rework the way we archive backups and I'm looking for input. We are a 100% VMware shop connected to a Netapp SAN VIA FC. Our Veeam servers are all virtual using the appliance mode, forward incremental backups with synthetic fulls once a week.

We do file copy all of our backups to a secondary SAN in a separate location with a 1 year retention policy as that's all the space we have.

At the end of the month I plug a external HD ( or two) into a workstation and manually copy our month end backup .vbk and vib's and vbm file to the external drives and send them off site just as piece of mind.

I want to automate the month end process to include some sort of auto loader or backup server where I can have hot swappable drives and just use Veeam to do the copying for me. I also want to speed the data transfer rate up, using USB 3 I can only attain about 70MB/s, it takes me a day or two to copy the 4-6TB of data we have.

Input? I have about $10K to work with...

[Gostev]

Hello, you don't really need any other software, as we have added full support for removable media in 7.0 Patch #3 (see the release notes for more info). Just set up a Backup Copy job to backup repository backed by rotated media. Thanks!

[csinetops]

Hello-

That makes sense and crossed my mind. However, we are 100% virtual, Veeam servers and all. I'm not quite sure about passing a fiber channel tape drive to the veeam VM thru the Esxi host. I have read that does not work very well. And that's my main kenundrum. How to get large backups from a virtual Veeam server with local disk to removable media.

I tried CIFS shares on my Netapp filer as backup repositories, that didn't work out too hot, Veeam couldn't do synthetic fulls. We are fiber channel only so I had to just present large RDM's to my VM's as a normal hard drive.

All of my Proxies have local ( well virtual disk presented via physical RDM mapping) to use for backup storage. If I added a physical server to use as a Veeam proxy and attached a tape drive to it would that suffice? I am thinking the backup copy to tape would be slow since it is going from virtual proxy --> physical proxy --> tape.

Ides?

Thanks-

Jeff

[Gostev]

Hi, I am not sure I follow. Why you are talking about tape now? I thought we were discussing rotated hard disks? Thanks.

[csinetops]

Let me clarify- Rotating hard drives are what we use now. It works, it's just slow as I have to connect a USB hard drive to a workstation and copy the 4-5TB worth of files from the repository. In a recovery scenario it's not ideal to have to wait 4 hours to move files from USB back to storage where the veeam server can see them.

So, I was more or less looking from some insight on what people with 100% virtual Veeam environments are doing to get their backups off site.

Sorry for the confusion.

[Gostev]

OK, but I still don't follow how you think tape would make it any faster? With tape, you would also need to copy backups from tape to disk storage Veeam server can see, before you can do restore?

In a recovery scenario it's not ideal to have to wait 4 hours to move files from USB back to storage where the veeam server can see them.

Actually, you do NOT need to move your backups anywhere from USB hard drive in a recovery scenario. Just plug USB drive back into Veeam server, or any backup repository server, then do Import Backup operation (which is instant), and bingo - you can now restore VMs directly from your USB hard drive.

[veremin]

That makes sense and crossed my mind. However, we are 100% virtual, Veeam servers and all. I'm not quite sure about passing a fiber channel tape drive to the veeam VM thru the Esxi host. I have read that does not work very well. And that's my main kenundrum.

On a side note, even with 100% virtual backup infrastructure it's possible to utilize physical tape device - just make it exposed via ISCSI protocol, using certain tools. Thanks.

[csinetops]

Thanks for the replies/tips!

Sounds like I am already doing what most users do, just copying the backup files to a USB drive etc. I'll probably just stick with that method, maybe build a physical proxy server with a hot swap hard drive cage to get away from USB and or make it a little more secure in the data center.