Backup VM or LUN?

[mvozila]

I try to keep my VMFS volumes at around 500 GB whenever possible. I have setup a couple of my datacenters with Veeam B&R a few years ago and set backups to run on each VMFS (i.e. backup one VMware LUN at a time in Veeam) volumes vs VM's. I have recently installed Veeam Cloud Edition and I am struggling with how to setup my cloud backup plan. My main issue is that if I would to restore a backup from the cloud I have to download the entire backup of the LUN before I can restore a VM. In terms of normal Veeam B&R resotres I was always able to restore a VM directly from the LUN backup. The question is should I change my Veeam B&R plan so that I backup based on VM and not LUN? This way I can quickly restore a VM from the cloud without having to download the entire LUN?

[infused]

I don't the answer to your question, but I wanted to add that I don't really see a benefit of backing up an entire Lun/datastore. I backup the VMs in groups for specific customers. Easy to restore that way too.

[dellock6]

If you take a look at what Veeam just announced few minutes ago:
http://www.veeam.com/blog/countdown-to- ... ion-2.html
with the WAN accelerator you can copy remotely the VMs you want to, regardless where they are included in the primary backup job, so there is no more need to create custom jobs containing only the VMs you want to replicate elsewhere.

Luca.

[Vitaliy S.]

Voz, I would stick to your current plan and wait for v7, that would allow you to sync individual VMs with the offsite location.

[mvozila]

The copy feature seems great. Do you know if that feature will be incorporated into the cloud edition as well? I have added on the cloud edition to my current subscription.

[mvozila]

infused,

If you are not running storage DRS the nice thing about running your backups based on LUN is that there are less backup jobs, you run your backups one LUN at a time, and new machines added to that LUN get added to your backups. Veeam B&R just allows you to copy the vbk file for your job. So the only way to send one backup at a time to the cloud is to create backup job for each one of your VM's. That is a bit of a nightmare as you can imagine and would involve me changing my current backup jobs.

[Vitaliy S.]

The copy feature seems great. Do you know if that feature will be incorporated into the cloud edition as well?

Yes, backup copy jobs will be available in the Cloud Edition too.