Backup Repository on Remote Sever Vs. iSCSI traget to Veeam

[shadex12]

Greetings All,

I have a quick question regarding performance and Veeam.

I am currently redesigning backup infrastructure for a client and can pretty much do anything I like with regards to the design. Currently, we have Veeam installed on a VM, with two proxy servers in VM appliance mode. The backup repositories are iSCSI disks on remote server connected to the Veeam VM. My question is this: Would I get better performance if I simply removed the iSCSI connections and added the remote server as a backup repository in Veeam? My thinking is that using the Veeam transport service to write to the remote server rather than an iSCSI connection might improve performance.

What do you guys think?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Evan,

What is the remote server that is going to be used as a repository? I don't think there would be any huge difference in performance, as both iSCSI and the second variant of configuration will route your VM data over the network to the backup repository.

Thanks!

[shadex12]

The remote server is a Dell Powervault with a bunch of SAS drives in a RAID. Windows 2012.

Obviously, I am going to bottleneck at the network, but I was wondering if writing to a remote server via the Veeam transport service would provide me with any increase compression/dedupe before traversing the network, as opposed to an iSCSI disk that will jut appear to be a local volume to the Veeam server.

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam backup proxy server is responsible for data compression, so it should not matter how your storage is presented in the backup console. How much data are you going to backup?

[shadex12]

Well rough estimate for size of the backup would be around 5 TB.

[Vitaliy S.]

If you're going to use synthetic full backups, then I would suggest using a Windows box added as a repository and not the iSCSI mounted volumes. In this case the backup files rebuild traffic will be kept within the server and will not travel over the network. So start deploying Veeam B&R and then check the bottleneck stats, that would show you want component should be improved to get better job performance.