iSCSI configurations with v6 Architecture

[Wintel]

Consider the following components (don't get too hung up on the numbers)

vSphere infrastructure:
Blades A - 10x VMware ESXi 4.1 hosts
iSCSI SAN A - production storage with 20 LUNS all connected (READ/WRITE) to all hosts in Blades A
200 Windows 2003/2008 R2 virtual guests

Backup infrastructure
Server B - Windows 2008 R2 physical server
iSCSI SAN B - backup storage with 5 LUNS all connected (READ/WRITE) to Server B as additional drives

Veeam service
Veeam v6 Backup and Replication server - 1x virtual server, 50 jobs
Veeam Backup Proxy - 4x virtual server
Veeam Backup Repository - 5x Windows configured from Server B


Is this a sensible configuration :

For the VBR server and ALL Proxies, present ALL Production LUNS as READ.

this should:
ensure that SAN is the preferred backup transport
allow any Proxy to backup any virtual machine

[Jfmoots]

I like it!

I have a question.

Do you have NICs "legged" in to and iSCSI network on your hosts from those proxy VMs? If you're going to use SAN mode for iSCSI traffic you'll want to be sure that traffic seperated from your other traffic.

Have you considered just using Hot-Add (Virtual Appliance) mode instead of SAN mode. It should give very similar performance and not require the extra NICs and iSCSI configs within your proxy VMs.

[Wintel]

no, although the ESXi hosts have a separate iSCSI LAN switch, the iSCSI traffic from the Proxies currently passes across the public LAN - I take your point about using hotadd instead. That's reinforced by this recent thread (http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11185) as we are using P4500 as well.

However there seem to be issues with Hotadd (http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 8&start=30) - I am experiencing the problem decsribed with jobs that have run fine for a week. Logging a call for this one.