New install design recommendation

[jamesr]

Hello,

I'm in the process of purchasing Veeam for my 4.1 environment and I'm looking for some recommendations on the best configuration for performance and resiliancy.

The VMware environment consists of two active clusters each with its own vCenter. Each cluster is in a physically separate server room with stretched vlans running at 1Gb and a stretched SAN FC fabric.

There is a EVA8400 is in each server room and VMs access local LUNs via FC.

My Veeam design is currently going to be this...

A physical HPDL360 server in each server room (running 2008 R2) using one or more LUNS presented from the remote EVA8400 FATA disks - i.e. a sort of cross site configuration with DL360 in server room A accessing LUN on EVA in server room B and DL360 in server room B accessing LUN on EVA in server room A.

Backup mode would be SAN.

Server room B has a tape library which I plan on using to backup the data store/s from both Veeam servers. The tape library is SAN attached so the whole backup process of disk-disk-tape should be LAN free.

A few questions I have in my head about this design...

1 - would it be better to use the Veeam backup server in server room B to backup the VMs in server room A? I'm thinking what happens if server room A burns down then although the backup store resides in the other server room I would still need to readd this to a new backup server (not sure how difficult this is)

2 - what size does the datastore grow to? I guess this depends on the number/size of VMs and the dedup level but having read the user guide Veeam appear to suggest limiting the number of concurrent jobs using the same destination LUN.

3 - I had planned on installing Enterprise Manager on one of the two Veeam backup servers, is this a valid configuation or would it be better to just install Enterprise Manager in a VM?

Any comments or suggestions would be really useful. I'm planning on setting it up in the next few weeks.

[Gostev]

Hi,

1. Your plan looks fine to me, although I understand your backups will still stay in the same physical location (site) - just different rooms, so this may be insufficient protection for things like flood, big fire and such. For there reasons I always recommend syncing backup offsite.

2. Depends on too many things (backup mode, retention policy, amount of daily changes on VM disks, how duplicate and compressable the data stored in disks). You cannot really guess until you try, so plan for worst case...

3. Yes, this configuration is fine.

Thanks!

[jamesr]

Hi Gostev,

Thanks for your reply.

The two server rooms are about 1/2 mile apart so your right about syncing offsite. I plan on using the tape ibrary to backup the Veeam disk stores and take the media offsite.