ESXi/Veeam Essentials Config

[itknight]

I want to run the game plan i've come up with by the Veeam experts to see if i'm headed in the right direction.

I plan to have two main ESXi 5.5 hosts, running all the main production VMs (~20 total). These will be loaded with SSDs and plenty of RAM.
I plan to have another ESXi 5.5 host loaded with 4TB SAS drives. Call this Host 3.
All storage will be local to each host, no SAN or shared storage of any kind.
We'll use the VMWare Essentials and Veeam B&R Essentials licensing.
The vCenter VM and the Windows VM for Veeam will be on Host 3, with a large VMDK attached to the Windows OS as the Veeam Backup Repository target.

We'll backup all VMs from Hosts 1&2 to the VMDK on Host 3. In theory, if we lose Host 1 or 2, we can start those VMs directly on Host 3 for almost immediate recovery and little to no wait time for it to copy to the host (since it'll already be there). We'll also do copy jobs to copy from the VMDK to external storage. We may also replicate the vCenter VM to at least one other host. The storage array on Host 3 will be (8) 4TB SAS drives in Raid 10, making a 16TB volume. This should provide a good chunk of space for full and plenty of incremental backups (our current backup solution only stretches back 2 weeks, i assume this is going to grow quite a bit with this new scenario).

See any holes with this game plan? Better way to go about this? I'd prefer to stay away from going bare metal for Veeam unless someone has a good reason for it, we won't ever have 50-100 VMs.

Thanks

[foggy]

Ted, the major hole in this plan is the fact you're going to store backups on VMFS, which is not recommended. Besides that everything seems reasonable.

[itknight]

Thanks Foggy. I read that thread a couple days ago but it didn't seem to have a definitive answer, the OP seemed to make a case for using VMFS anyways.

What would be the best way to go about this if i wanted to keep Host 3 a virtual host, so that we could start a backed up VM in the event we lose Host 1/2? Should we take say 4TB and make it a volume for ESXi (for both vCenter & Veeam VMs plus room for temporarily running VMs) and then make the rest into a raw NTFS disk and pass that through to the Veeam VM for a backup target?

Also, if we backup VMs to a separate volume on the RAID array, if i try to start one of the VMs by using the mounting feature, will the Host 3 ESXi just be able to run the mounted VM from the raw NTFS disk? Or does it have to copy it to the actual ESXi datastore?

I was under the, probably incorrect, assumption that it would be easier for Host 3 to run a backed up VM if it was already in the local datastore. But it seems now that the backups are actually going to be stored inside an NTFS disk attached to the Veeam VM rather than directly at the datastore/VMFS level. So i guess when you do a "start VM from backup location" operation the ESXi host has to mount an image from inside the Veeam OS's local disks, no matter if the Veeam OS is a VM on the same ESXi or on another physical machine.

Thanks again.

[foggy]

Thanks Foggy. I read that thread a couple days ago but it didn't seem to have a definitive answer, the OP seemed to make a case for using VMFS anyways.

It's always up to you, we just feel like we cannot keep silent about the consequences.

What would be the best way to go about this if i wanted to keep Host 3 a virtual host, so that we could start a backed up VM in the event we lose Host 1/2? Should we take say 4TB and make it a volume for ESXi (for both vCenter & Veeam VMs plus room for temporarily running VMs) and then make the rest into a raw NTFS disk and pass that through to the Veeam VM for a backup target?

I'd still consider some external storage. Any decommissioned physical server stuffed with a bunch of hard drives could be a perfect one.

Also, if we backup VMs to a separate volume on the RAID array, if i try to start one of the VMs by using the mounting feature, will the Host 3 ESXi just be able to run the mounted VM from the raw NTFS disk? Or does it have to copy it to the actual ESXi datastore?

It will be able, thanks to vPower.

[ortoscale]

I would split storage space on Host 3 and do both replicas and backups. And grab backups with backup copy job and use replicas for failover plan. You can also replicate vCenter and Veeam to both Host 1 and Host 2. Also check your DNS/AD dependancy on those two.

[itknight]

I'm finally getting around to setting this up. Host 3 has a single RAID card. I set this up as ~3.5TB for the ESXi plus datastore that will house vCenter and Veeam VMs, and then 11TB for a raw NTFS drive. One issue i see with that config is that you can't passthrough a single disk/LUN from a RAID controller, you have to passthrough the whole controller or nothing.

How do people usually set this up when they only have one RAID/HBA controller? Do i have to use RDM in this scenario? Is RDM supported as a backup target for Veeam?

Thanks

[foggy]

RDM is supported as a backup target.