Help with Design

[JoeIanni]

Hi,

I need help with a design solution for Veeam and our ESXi environment. I am new to this product and so I may be asking some obvious questions.

Requirements

1. Provided 2 week routine backup system, maybe moved to a 4 week routine system all to disk.
a. 1 full backup for the week and 6 incrementals
b. This is either maintained for 2 weeks or 4 weeks and then rotated.

2. Monthly backup to disk which is then backed up to tape, depending on the amount of storage this will either remain on disk for a number of months or erased.

3. The ability to start VM’s from the back up server that is not located on the SAN. This is in the event a complete SAN failure.

4. Restore individual files, from the VM

5. Restore at applications level for :-
a. Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 Exchange 2010
b. SQL 2005, 2008 and 2008R2

6. The ability to start the VM’s at another location by manually restoring data from tape in the event the site is down.

7. In the future, the option to replicate the backups offsite.

8. Have a system policy in place to verify backups.


VMWare environment.

- 2 x 10 GB iSCSI Equalogic SAN PS6010vX connecting to 10GB switches 2 x Dell 8024F switches
- The 8024f Switches are trunked together to provided redundancy
- We have 6 x ESXi Enterprise VMware hosts running on Dell 710 with 2 x Dual Port Broadcom 10 GB NIC’s
o 2 Ports x ISCSI and 2 Ports x for Data Network
o iSCSI is setup in Round Robin on ESXi Servers
- VM’s are spread across 10 LUNS, but this will be more in the future
- Majority of VM’s are 2008 R2, some are 2003 – All running version 7 of VMWare tools
- All VM’s thick provisioned

Simplified Solution Design

What we are looking for is a system for backups and possible replication down the track. We are also looking to backup the data onto tape as a company policy requirement.

I want to design a veeam solution to best fit the requirements mentioned above.

My Idea was the following.
- To have a Dell Server or similar physical server running windows 2008 R2 64 Bit as our Veeam backup Server, with up to 16 TB local storage, this can increase later on. This will connect to our 10 GB iSCSI ESXi Network and our 10GB local data network. We also would like to install a third party software system to backup to a locally connected tape unit on this server. (I am aware veeam does not backup to tape.)
- Enable NFS storage on this windows 2008 R2 server and use it as a NFS box in the event of a SAN failure. Point the ESX hosts to this share and start the VM’s
- Use veeam in Direct SAN Access Mode to access the VMWare environment and store the backups locally.

-

Questions regarding this.
1. Will our solution meet our requirements?
2. Is there a best practice for our requirements?
3. Is the mentioned solution supported by Veeam?
4. Are there any draw backs from using this design?
a. Is there a better design to cater for our needs?
5. Any recommendations for Hardware and Software other than what I have suggested?
6. Do the VM’s need to be thin provisioned?
7. Do you have any baseline performance stats for veeam setup in a 10 Gb iSCSI environment?

Thanks for any help
Regards,
Joe

[Alexey D.]

Hello Joe,

1. Provided 2 week routine backup system, maybe moved to a 4 week routine system all to disk.
a. 1 full backup for the week and 6 incrementals
b. This is either maintained for 2 weeks or 4 weeks and then rotated.

B&R has retention policy settings to fulfill the abovementioned requirement. For example, with "2 weeks" cycle you need to keep (1 full + 6 increments) * 2 = 14 restore points. To read more on this, please refer to User Guide (page 13) or to this topic: Rollback points and full backups.

2. Monthly backup to disk which is then backed up to tape, depending on the amount of storage this will either remain on disk for a number of months or erased.

To choose a backup mode which suits you better, please refer to this section of FAQ: Backup. And this topic puts more emphasis to storage size considerations: Reversed Incremental or Synthetic Full

3. The ability to start VM’s from the back up server that is not located on the SAN. This is in the event a complete SAN failure.

That's actually what Instant VM recovery allows you to do: start any VM directly from compressed and deduplicated backup file, including its registration in your VI. Please refer to this section for further reading: Instant VM Recovery

4. Restore individual files, from the VM

You can do this with Instant File Level Recovery. It's also possible to search for any file to restore, accross all of your backups.

5. Restore at applications level for :-
a. Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 Exchange 2010
b. SQL 2005, 2008 and 2008R2

We have Application-Item Restore wizards both for Exchange and SQL Server. The link gives more information: U-AIR workflow. As of now these two wizards are in BETA state, Exchange 2003 is supported and all the abovementioned SQL Server versions are also supported. We are planning to release new Exchange U-AIR wizard in few weeks, with Exchange 2007 and 2010 support.

6. The ability to start the VM’s at another location by manually restoring data from tape in the event the site is down.

Even if your site is down and you've lost B&R installation, you can still restore data from tape, please continue reading here: Extract utility: restore to ESX and VIB support

7. In the future, the option to replicate the backups offsite.

To take backups offsite: off-site backup ideas

8. Have a system policy in place to verify backups.

That's actually what SureBackup technology is designed for: to automate routine verification process of every backup. SureBackup (Recovery Verification)

Concerning the scenario in general, SAN mode is a good option when B&R is connected to SAN fabric directly. Here are details and some estimations on backup speed too: Direct SAN Access Mode.

Concerning thin-provisioned disks: it's up to you whether to use them or not. B&R supports thin and thick disks as well.
The main advantage of thin disks is that storage space is allocated on-demand which allows to fit more disks at a single datastore (in comparison to thick disks with space preallocated).

Hope I've answered all the questions. Thanks!

[JoeIanni]

Thankyou for the reply Alexey.

This has helped.

Joe