MDS600 storage

[ivordillen]

Hello,
I was wondering if anybody was using the HP MDS600 storage box attached to bl460c blades?
Second question is more performance - configuration related:
We ordered a mds600 with 35x600GB and 35x3TB disks and
I have the possibility to use these disks as DAS storage to a physical blade (NFS) or
I could use these disk to present them to a esxi host and have some virtual veeam backupservers with these datastores to backup to or
I could install a physical veeam/backupserver with these disk attached

what is the best practice here?

[Vitaliy S.]

I could use these disk to present them to a esxi host and have some virtual veeam backupservers with these datastores to backup to

Backing up to ESX(i) host directly is not supported, besides storing backup files on the VMFS is not considered as best practice.

I could install a physical veeam/backupserver with these disk attached
what is the best practice here?

If you're referring to best practices in terms of backup repository configuration, then I would suggest using the 3rd variant (because of the reasons mentioned in the thread above). Thanks!

[ivordillen]

Today i have one Veeam Backupserver with a lot of SAN storage.

What are the considerations to change my setup?

I know there are a lot of parameters to take into account but I backup roughly 150 VM's every night. I have one big job of 75 vm's and the rest are smaller jobs (resource pool).

We have 10 esx hosts so I could create some proxy backupservers or just stay with the one physical?

thx

[Helqasem]

Hi Ivor,

Since v6 the back-up tranport chain looks like this:

Source -> Veeam Proxy -> Network -> Veeam Repository -> Target Storage Device

It looks like you have a pretty nice target device to store your back-ups. As Vitaliy indicated directly attaching it to a physical server and installing a Veeam repository on there would work well.

At the Source end of the chain, this really depends on what where you are storing your VMs (actual vmdk files etc). If they are on a SAN (fibre channel, iSCSI) you could use our "Direct-SAN" transport mode which is super fast. To use that you would need to install a source Veeam proxy on a physical machine so that it can connect into the SAN fabric.

Alternatively, you can use our "Virtual Appliance" mode.. this is slightly less fast than Direct-SAN but still much faster than doing a straight LAN copy. To use virtual appliance mode you need to install the Veeam Proxy in a VM and make sure that VM has access to the datastore where the VMs you are backing up reside. You can use Virtual Appliance mode on hosts that are using a SAN, NFS or Direct-Attached storage to hold there VMs.

I guess the question is what does your production storage look like? You can make decisions about numbers and types of proxies based on that information.

Hope this helps.

[ivordillen]

Hello Helqasem,

I think you have a clear view on my configuration

I'll be making my veeam backupserver (with fc towards the actual vm's and DAS for the target storage device) on one server.

I can expand (more proxy's) when necessary but a big blown veeam/backupserver is in my environment still the best way to go I think.

kind regards,

Ivor

[ivordillen]

Because I will be buying a new server I was wondering what cpu I would buy.

It is a bl460c Gen8 (new generation HP blade) with a new Intel CPU. These are the possibilities

Eight-Core Processors
Intel® Xeon® E5-2680 (2.70GHz/8-core/20MB/130W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 (2.60GHz/8-core/20MB/115W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2665 (2.40GHz/8-core/20MB/115W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2660 (2.20GHz/8-core/20MB/95W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2650 (2.0GHz/8-core/20MB/95W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L (1.80GHz/8-core/20MB/70W) Processor
Six-Core Processors
Intel® Xeon® E5-2667 (2.90GHz/6-core/15MB/130W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2640 (2.50GHz/6-core/15MB/95W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 (2.30GHz/6-core/15MB/95W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2630L (2.0GHz/6-core/15MB/60W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2620 (2.0GHz/6-core/15MB/95W) Processor
Quad-Core Processors
Intel® Xeon® E5-2609 (2.40GHz/4-core/10MB/80W) Processor
Intel® Xeon® E5-2603 (1.80GHz/4-core/10MB/80W) Processor
Dual-Core Processors
Intel® Xeon® E5-2637 (3.0GHz/2-core/5MB/80W) Processor

[Vitaliy S.]

You never mentioned how you're going to use this blade or I must be blind Is it going to be used to run ESX(i) server? Anyway, then more powerful CPU you can afford - the better it would be.

[Gostev]

I would go with average 6 or 8 core spec. Traditionally, the performance difference between top models is negligible, but price difference is huge. On the other hand, having more cores does make a big difference, whether you are buying the server to be virtualization host, or Veeam backup proxy.

[ivordillen]

I'm going to make a physical node connected to the san to see all the datastores and virtual raw devices and on the other hand the Diract Attached Storage to backup towards. A quite simple setup but with top components (FC - CPU - MEM - DAS) so I think I can handle the load...