I love Veeam!

[JustinCredible]

hello hello,
I've been using VEEAM now for a couple of years to backup our two vSphere hosts. It's always worked great for us, but I had Veeam on a physical server separate from my VM's. The speed was acceptable, a couple of hours, but I didn't know how crazy fast it could be.
I just set up Veeam on a VM, with a Repository as the physical server it used to be on. Then I added an additional proxy on the host Veeam was on, and two on the other host. I set the transport modes to only Virtual Appliance and voila! I'm now backing up the exact same amount of data I was in two hours, but now in half an hour (and 57 seconds)! We used to get around 15-20mbit processing rate, and now we get over 100 consistently, and my last backups ran at over 250.

Quite amazing I must say.

I don't know why I hadn't tried this before, I just wanted to keep veeam fully separate from the infrastructure. But I suppose all that really matters is the backup files that are created are fully separate.

I was a little grumpy that WAN acceleration wasn't included in Standard edition, and I apologize for that. I still think most marketing said "built into veeam" so heavily it implied that it wasn't limited by version, but at the back of my mind I kinda figured it would be. Sometimes I don't agree with the licensing schemes of software companies these days (not just veeam) but man do you guys make one hell of a product and I have to commend you. If we could afford it and justify it, we probably would have Enterprise edition.

So, failing WAN acceleration, I did find the new Backup Copy job. File Copy was not what we wanted; it would always overwrite the files. Backup Copy is amazing! It monitors my jobs and keeps a copy after first compressing it into a vib file. Instead of copying a 19.8GB backup, it compressed it down to 7.2GB, a 2.8x compression. I'm guessing we may be able to keep way more offsite backups with this method. Only question with this is if we have three external HDDs can I just mirror the file structure from one to the others and then swap them out nightly? Will Veeam throw a fit or just overwrite the data, or will it just add the next vib and continue along merrily?

Again thanks for making such great software... and we'll see you at Spiceworld! which reminds me, Veeam is the only company to ever give me a free massage... that was a nice touch last year

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Justin,

Thank you for your kind words.

Only question with this is if we have three external HDDs can I just mirror the file structure from one to the others and then swap them out nightly? Will Veeam throw a fit or just overwrite the data, or will it just add the next vib and continue along merrily?

I believe everything should be ok (if you do that every time after the backup job run), and backup copy jobs should not "notice" the difference and will continue running incremental passes.

Thank you!

[foggy]

I believe everything should be ok (if you do that every time after the backup job run), and backup copy jobs should not "notice" the difference and will continue running incremental passes.

However, could you please elaborate on what is the reason to rotate drives in this scenario (after mirroring their contents)? Thanks.

[JustinCredible]

Well, we have to take the backups offsite. We have three external hard drives: one that is plugged into the backup server, another at home, and another "in transition" - either coming from home to replace the one plugged into the server, or the one that was plugged into the server that is now in the car waiting to go home.

Soo somehow I have to make this scenario work with the Backup Copy job. Or I'm back to just robocopy'ing the backup repo, which I guess works OK.

[veremin]

Additionally, in order to be on the safe side, I would recommend disabling a backup copy job temporarily before the drive is swapped with the other one. Thanks.

[mv43]

Well, we have to take the backups offsite. We have three external hard drives: one that is plugged into the backup server, another at home, and another "in transition" - either coming from home to replace the one plugged into the server, or the one that was plugged into the server that is now in the car waiting to go home.

Soo somehow I have to make this scenario work with the Backup Copy job. Or I'm back to just robocopy'ing the backup repo, which I guess works OK.

I'm using the robocopy method for pretty much your exact situation.. I considered having the backup dumped directly to the external drives but you need to do a registry hack and honestly not sure what else it could potentially mess with... If you have the space where it will initially backup to, then I would go this route, if you don't, then consider the registry change... I like the fact that I have basically two full backups of my VM's using this method... can never have enough backups!!

[cparker4486]

If we could afford it and justify it, we probably would have Enterprise edition.

WAN Acceleration is an Enterprise Plus feature so you'll have to go up two steps.

[cava83]

I'll be doing something similar and I am rather new with Veeam, I am wondering if you can answer a couple of questions if you don't mind

"with a Repository as the physical server it used to be on" how are you placing this on the server? Have you turned the server into a NAS or something similar? Or just using it as a dumping ground on a shared location within Windows?

"Then I added an additional proxy on the host Veeam was on, and two on the other host" I don't understand this bit. Could you explain a bit more how you implemented the proxy's? Again, apologies as my knowledge isn't quite up to speed yet.

Seems like you are amazingly pleased, which is brilliant news

Thanks ever so much.

G.

[veremin]

"with a Repository as the physical server it used to be on" how are you placing this on the server? Have you turned the server into a NAS or something similar? Or just using it as a dumping ground on a shared location within Windows?

I believe that the op had originally used local drives attached to the physical server as a target repository. Then, when he switched to virtual VB&R server, he just added this server to the console of new backup server as a new Windows-based repository. That's all.

"Then I added an additional proxy on the host Veeam was on, and two on the other host" I don't understand this bit. Could you explain a bit more how you implemented the proxy's? Again, apologies as my knowledge isn't quite up to speed yet.

The role of proxy can be assigned to any Windows-based machine in the environment. So, the op has just assigned the proxy role to one of VMs that resides on similar host that VB&R does, and, then, specify this proxy server in Hot Add mode. Thanks.

[foggy]

Gabi, I recommend reviewing the Veeam B&R user guide for basic understanding of the product components. The architectural part is described there in pretty good detail. Basically, repository and proxy servers are created within the Veeam B&R console and can be assigned to any (keeping system requirements in mind) Windows server, either virtual or physical.