HP P2000 G3 Setup

[JMWTech]

We've recently implemented a pilot of Veeam in our shop and fell in love with it. We've went ahead and ordered enough licenses for our entire VMware environment.

We're trying to re-purpose a HP P2000 as our primary backup storage for the new Veeam environment. Here are the specifications for the P2000 we have:
HP P2000 iSCSI G3
12 x 2TB SAS 6G 7.2k drives
2 x 1Gb connections on each of the two controllers

I'm in the process of figuring out the best practice for carving up the storage and presenting it to a VMware guest that will act as our data repository for the backups. I've done a lot of reading but still have no clear answer as to how to specifically provision the storage and present it to Veeam in the best way. But from what I read I'll be doing the following:

Provision 2 10TB Raid5 Vdisks (no hot spares)
Create a one volume on each and present it to the ESXi Hosts
To get a larger than 2TB virtual disk I'll have to use RDM

Am I headed down the wrong path here? Anyone else done this before? Did I miss some documentation that will make this easier?


Thanks in advance.

[dellock6]

Hi Jake,
your design is pretty ok. USing RDM to map the P2000 to a virtual Veeam server is a common design, in this way you can directly format the LUNs via NTFS, so in case you loose all your vSphere environment, you can connect via an iscsi initiator even from your computer, install Veeam on it and start recovering.

Luca.

[tmckinnon]

We use a HP p4000 G2 in our backup setup and have an entire node in it's own cluster of which the VM/Physical machine connects to the SAN Node using iSCSI and has read only access to all VMFS LUN's (note: do not install the MPIO software!)