Best way to Calculating Backup/Restore Space for VMs

[37rellimcm19]

Hi, by no means am I an expert, just trying to figure things out here.

Right now I'm trying to figure out best practice for backing up from Veeam to an older HP ProLiant DL360 Gen 9 Server with 5.2 TB Free. As the previous admins didn't leave any good backups running and I'm trying to fix all of that.

This is the setup:

I have 25 VMs, around 4.2 TB, doing a weekly backup as this is a test environment with 2 restore points. Just doing incremental and not selecting Create synthetic full backups periodically

I have another 10 VMs, around 1.3 TB, doing a monthly backup from the same test environment with 2 restore points as well. Just doing incremental and not selecting Creating synthetic full backups periodically either.

I'm also backing up the MSSQL Database, Veeam config file and various other texted based log files from a few other servers straight to tape too.

All of these VMs are sent to an HP tape machine as well too, which has 65 TB free right now.

My question for everyone, is with 5.2 TB free, will my backup schedule allow for the weekly/monthly backups to run successfully and also be able to restore the occasional VM without running out of space on the HP server?

Since I'm only doing 2 restore points, I'm not understanding if I'm getting a full backup as well to restore from if something were to happen?

I've also used this to try and figure out space growth, however I'm having a hard time filling out some of the drop downs.

http://rps.dewin.me/

thanks

[HannesK]

Hello,
I always go with the default value "reduce to 50%" of the restore point simulator you mention. I would not calculate with "growth" as long growth rate is not clear.

If 2 restore points is good enough for your test environment, then you can choose reverse incremental or forever incremental (default) for estimating disk space. As you only run monthly / weekly backups, your change rate is probably higher than the 10% default value. I would go with 20% for the weekly backup job and 30% for the monthly backup job. Select 3 retention points (1 full and two increments)

You do not need disk space for restore (as long as you only restore from disk). If you need to do file level restore from tape, then you need to restore a VM from tape to disk first( use per-vm backup files ). That disk space is hard to estimate. It depends how much the biggest VM of your backup is, that you need to restore.

Best regards,
Hannes

[37rellimcm19]

So maybe something is wrong.

I was under the impression to backup VMs, its backing up to the local backup server, and then it moves that backup to an HP Tape machine.

When I tested a restore of a VM, it didn't have enough space on the local backup server. I had to clean up a few botched jobs (.vib and .vbk) to do a proper restore.

[HannesK]

Hello,

and then it moves that backup to an HP Tape machine.

nope, it's a "copy". there is no "move"

When I tested a restore of a VM, it didn't have enough space on the local backup server.

you can restore VMs directly to VMware without staging data on disk. staging to disk is only required for file level restore

Best regards,
Hannes

[37rellimcm19]

Ok, I stand corrected. Move the VM to the media pool, which in this case, the media pool is a HP Tape Server.

I'm pretty sure I did a VM restore, and not a file level restore. I know there are a number of options from the radio buttons when doing the VM restore. Will have to test again.

thank