Although we've had a licence for Veeam for a while now we are only now looking seriously at putting it live. I have a number of options available to me and am trying to work out the best combination. We have Equallogic iSCSI SAN devices as the primary SAN holding VM files on VMFS (ESX 3.5) - Four ESX Hosts. The intended store for local Backups is a 24TB OpenFiler box. These backups are intended to replicate to a matching OpenFiler box (using its own replication functionality). I hope to backup every VM every day (hopefully without too much impact on production performance - we have no "backup window"). I have a spare Win2003 physical server which I can use to run VEEAM.
Questions......
I can carve the Backup storage as either an SMB share, a Windows formatted iSCSI volume presented to the Veeam server, or a VMFS formatted datastore presented to the ESX hosts. Which is the ideal ? If one of the iSCSI options would performance be better if the Veeam server had a QLogic iSCSI HBA fitted (I have one 'spare')
Is VCB mode likely to be quicker / less intrusive ?
"backup" is faster than "replication" ? The fact that backup allows compression is not a huge issue to me - my backup storage has more space than my production environment. Our production SAN (equallogic) has volume replication to our DR site and will have automated snapshots hourly to allow quick rollback if needed. What I'm after is a long term backup that we can eventually take off to tape and hold in archive in case ever needed.
Most important factor to me is the speed of the incremental backup - I don't mind the intial backup taking hours but once up & running I ideally want even our Exchange server (500GB ish) to be backed up every night.
If anyone can give me some very basic pointers then I can make a start and fill in more details as I go along !

My first attempts at installing Veeam a week or two ago (network backup/replication to VMFS store) worked OK but I could not see the second or third pass as being any faster than the initial job, even on a machine with very little data change.
Thanks !