Best Practices for Job Setup

[Troy]

I am new to the Veeam product and had a few questions regarding best practices for job setup. We have 25 VMs running Windows Server 2008 R2. Currently we run one job for each VM. Would this be the best way to back up our 25 VMs? Would it be better to put more then one VM in a job or say even all 25 VMs in one job? One of the reasons why I bring this up is it seems like my backups each day are much larger then they should be. For example most of the jobs round out to be about 1-3 GB for each vrb file. now this is not true for our file server or exchange server they are more like 10 GB for each vrb. Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks in advance

[Gostev]

Yes, it is best to put all VMs in the same job (for best dedupe, and less disk space required to store your backups).

[tsightler]

What we do is create a folder hierarchy in vCenter that groups VM's into logical containers based on their recovery point objectives and retention requirements, and then subfolders that break them into functional groups. Our Veeam jobs then mimic this folder structure. For example, we have a 1hr RPO job with a 7 day retention, and a 1 day RPO with 30 day retention.

This is nice because, when we create a new machine, we simply place it in the appropriate folder in vCenter and it automatically get's backed up based on our policy without even touching Veeam.

[Troy]

I plan to start making changes and hope to see some better dedupe and less disk space used. I also really like that folder idea that seems to make setting this up and upkeep a lot easier. Also thanks for the advice Gostev and tsightler this seems to answer a lot of questions I had about the Veeam backup process.