The company I'm working for is looking into Veeam for backup of our virtual machines. We have around 700-800 virtual machines which results in a lot of terabytes that I need to store somewhere. The problem is, that our Veeam is based on a server with DAS (alot of daisy chained Dell MD1220's). Everytime I add an MD1220 i get around 18TB of storage which i then make into a drive on the Veeam Backend. Let's say I add another MD1220, then I get another drive, so that I now have a E: (18TB) and F: (also 18TB).
How can I make Veeam use both of the drives for backup repositories. Is it somehow possible to just give Veeam a pool of drives and then Veeam does the distribution so that the drives doesn't just fill up and then have to alter the backup jobs to use another drive?
Just FYI - no, I don't want to use Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces
munklarsen wrote:Let's say I add another MD1220, then I get another drive, so that I now have a E: (18TB) and F: (also 18TB).
In this case you have to manually create a new repository in Veeam B&R for that new disk and retarget some of your existing jobs to distribute load. No way to do it automatically and probably not the best practice anyway - one of the reasons is that you always want to have the whole forward incremental chain stored in one place as loosing one of the increments that is stored separately will break the whole chain with inability to restore from it. Besides, this will give you less control over what you have where, make import of backups overcomplicated, etc.
So it's better to provision sufficient space for backups/set appropriate retention settings beforehand so that your repository does not fill up (and control available space constantly, by using Veeam B&R free space notifications, for example).
Hey there. Does Veeam B&R support a way to have backups written to any number of drives instead of configuring each job to only go to one destination? Like creating a 'backup pool' of drives to just point the jobs at?
Let's say I have four 2TB volumes presented to my backup respository, and I don't care which one it goes to. If anyone has ever used Commvault you're probably familiar with this method if you backed up straight to disk.
Veeam does not currently have any such capability. Veeam writes backups to self-contained, portable files, thus it is dependent on a filesystem to provide a single namespace. You can certainly pool your 2TB disks into a single large volume using OS level volume management.
Backup job can only be pointed to single repository, however your repository can be anything and you can create a storage pool/storage spaces of disks in Windows Server 2012 OS.
It would be helpful to have a cloud design for storage repositories. That way you could pool multiple repositories and present that to the job. That way repositories don't have to be limited to a single folder on a drive but rather many sources.
I know this option is available by using OS presentation of volumes but it might be helpful to have an option.
