Calculating Veeam Backup Size

[Username2120]

Hi All, I am using Veeam vbr calculator to calculate the size of my repositories.

However, I am a bit confused with the GFS and the retention period options. Would appreciate if you could help me understand it better.

Below are the details:

Source Data = 7TB
Daily Change Rate (Incremental) = 5%
Yearly Growth = 10%
Reduction = 50%

1) Daily incremental Backups with 1 weekly synthetic file with 4-week retention period
2) Quarterly full image backup with 1 year retention

Thanks in advance!

[Mildur]

Hi Khateeb

Our backup jobs do not provide a quarterly GFS option. That's why you can't find it in the calculator.
I suggest you use monthly full backups. With a reFS/XFS filesystem on your repository you will be able to use FastClone/blockcloning. This gives you almost spaceless full backups.

Do you have a second repository for backup copy jobs? Preferable immutable (hardened repository / object storage) or airgapped (tape)?



Best,
Fabian

[Username2120]

Hi Fabian,

Thank you for your helpful response. It's greatly appreciated. Based on the retention and backup frequency, I had to split that 7TB into 2 sections.

For 5 TB:

Code: Select all

Source Data = 7TB
Daily Change Rate (Incremental) = 5%
Yearly Growth = 10%
Reduction = 50%

1) Daily incremental Backups with 1 weekly synthetic file with 4-week retention period
2) Quarterly full image backup with 1 year retention

And as you mentioned, 
Below are the details I put:
GFS Points:
Daily: 30
Weekly: 4
Monthly: 12
Yearly: 0
Which comes out to be 25.49 TB.

For the remaining 2TB below are the conditions:

Code: Select all

1). Monthly backups to be retained for 1 year AND
2). Yearly backups to be retained for 3 years

For this I have put the following:
GFS Points:
Daily: 30
Weekly: 1
Monthly: 12
Yearly: 3
Which comes out to be 18.7 TB.

So, all together, the capacity I would require is 44.5 TB. Would appreciate if you could confirm this?. Thanks!

Secondly, there is no plan for having a secondary hardened repository. The plan is to have redundant veeam servers for backup and replication at two different sites, with one linux hardened repository. Furthermore, would appreciate if there are any recommendations for the infrastructure. Thanks!

Regards,
Khateeb

[Mildur]

Hello Khateeb

I used the new calculator and have different estimations (with ReFS/XFS): https://www.veeam.com/calculators/simple/vbr/machines
My calculation was done by 10% growth and a forecast period of 3 years.
- 2TB: https://i.ibb.co/zP13tby/2024-04-16-Calculator-2-TB.png
- 5TB: https://i.ibb.co/wgdH0ty/2024-04-16-Calculator-5-TB.png

The plan is to have redundant Veeam servers for backup and replication at two different sites, with one linux hardened repository.

We don't provide a "redundant" backup server. I recommend to run the main backup server in your DR location. One backup server can manage jobs in multiple sites.
FOr DR purposes, use vSphere HA for virtualizes backup servers or have a standby backup server ready to restore a configuration backup if required.
A Hardened Repository can technically be shared between two backup server, but we don't support it. Each backup server should have it's own hardened repository.

Best,
Fabian

[Username2120]

Hi Fabian,

Thank you for the response. The calculations we did were based on the 5-year forecast. Furthermore, thanks for clarifying that Veeam does not support the redundant backup server. We will keep it as an active/standby configuration.
With respect to the hardened repository, as per your recommendation we will procure a separate hardened repository for each backup server if required in the future. For the time being, we are only after one Backup server (VM) and one hardened repository (physical). Are there any Veeam recommendations on the BOM/Hardware selection setup for our 45.5TB capacity requirement.

We are considering the following:
Dell PowerEdge R760xd2 Rackmount server
Intel Xeon Silver 2.4GHz 12C/24T
32GB RAM
2x 500GB SSD for Linux (Ubuntu)
7 x 12TB 7.2K SAS

Please let us know in your expert advice if the aforementioned setup is appropriate for our requirements. Or we would need to modify/add anything in our BOM. Your recommendations are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Regards,
KH