How to use Veeam in a small environment

[davidkillingsworth]

Hello,

I have a few questions about how to most optimally use Veeam in a small environment. I've been reading the forums and talking to some vendors for quite a few months now and I think I'm gaining a better understanding of how it works. I'm not 100% sure that I've got it all firgured out though.

I work for a managed service provider. We provide IT services to other companies. Typically, our clients have a single VMware host and anywhere from 2 to 7 VM guests on the VM host.

Some of our clients have 100Mbit synchronous broadband, so we can easily replicate across the Internet to our own data center or to their 2nd site. Other clients are only able to get 600Kbit upload speed, so we have to backup to disk, then to external USB.

Please see my attached PDF, which is hosted at Dropbox. I am much better at explaining my questions with graphics. I have several questions about how we are considering to implement Veeam.

Any and all input appreciated.

One question that I forgot to put on the slides is what is the best way to protect a Veeam server.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37092156/veeam_ ... _draft.pdf

[dellock6]

Hi David, you have so many questions but I think many of them have their own answers crawling through these forums.
One doubt I have about your design is the external usb drive, is not a problem itself, but it requires manual intervention to be used, because someone has to phisically detach it and move it elsewhere. So it could be prone to errors or simply omissions. Automated replication is to b preferred to offer DR as a service or offsite backup services. For slow links, you can use initial seeding, and if the VMs are not changing too much (I suppose so beeing small customers buying slow lines...) that slow link can be enough.

Luca.

[davidkillingsworth]

Cheers for the answer. I have been crawling for the forums for a while. I wouldn't have asked the specific questions, if I was able to find the answers.

I'm fully aware of the manual action of having to switch USB drives. It is not unlike switching tapes out, as we are doing now with our physical servers and Backup Exec. The reason, I'm planning USB's and manually interaction is that some of our customers can only get DSL with 600kbit upload speed. It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of that is all that is available and will be available for the foreseeable future.

For such low bandwidth sites, are you sure that 600Kbit upload speed is enough for offsite replication with seeding? I have a hard time believing that.

[dellock6]

It depends... how much is your daily CBT amount? How much time have you consider as a sustainable RPO? Based on these answers, your line speed could be or not be enough.

Luca.

[davidkillingsworth]

Valid points. I'll have to see when we get Veeam installed how much CBT (Change Block Tracking?) there is on an average day.

[foggy]

David, a handful of links below, just to point you in the right direction regarding your questions:

recommendations for veeam backup storage
Best method to access NAS storage for backup performance?
External NAS Destination Stores
VM larger than 2TB in size: How to backup it to a Qnap NAS?

Veeam Backup & Removable Media (rotated drives)

What is the best way of protecting the Veeam Backup server?
Veeam replication resiliency through a VPN that renegotiates

Hope this helps. If you still have any questions, feel free to ask.