New install plan

[meetoo]

I am new to Veeam, and here is my proposed plan for backing up 74 esxi VMs (total initial full backup will be about 21TB):

Install a physical Win2012 r2 B&R server with attached storage (raid6?) running all Veeam roles to begin with.

Run an initial Full Backup on all VMs & then daily Forward Incrementals.

To ensure that the ‘full backup’ for each VM does not get too far out of date, I plan to run Synthetic Full jobs on all servers once a week.

Our retention policy is to keep 1 backup for 7 days, then 1 backup per week for 4 weeks, then 1 backup per month for 12 months.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this plan?

Thanks!

[foggy]

Looks good for the initial plan. Are you going to use some sort of secondary location for your GFS (weekly, monthly, yearly) backups (GFS retention is available in the backup copy jobs only)?

[PTide]

Install a physical Win2012 r2 B&R server with attached storage (raid6?) running all Veeam roles to begin with.

Please mind system requirements for each role. Also I would recommend to use RAID 10 instead of RAID 6 as it offers better performance and a similar level of redundancy. How many drives do you have btw?

Thanks

[meetoo]

Still deciding on the DAS, so not sure. Was hoping to avoid R10 due to losing half the drives.

And yes, I plan to run a backup copy to an Azure VM w/additional storage.

[PTide]

Still deciding on the DAS, so not sure. Was hoping to avoid R10 due to losing half the drives.

RAID 6 capacity gets better as the number of drives increases while the fault tolerance level stays the same (2 drives):

5 drives - 60% can be used
6 drives - 66.6%
7 drives - 71.4%
8 drives - 75%

Since you are going to have all roles on one server it's worth trying to test simultaneous backup of multiple VMs to any storage that you have at the moment to see which part of your system will be a bottleneck. If it's not a repository then you can stick with RAID6.

Thanks

[meetoo]

Thanks for the suggestions!