New storage for long term archives; best practices?

[bhagen]

We're running VBR9.5 Enterprise (perpetual) on "server a".

"server b" is a windows 2012R2 box with 60Tb of storage. The drives on this server are setup (in the raid card, at the bios level) in a raid6 array with a hot spare. Within windows, the entire 60Tb is allocated to the d: drive. A folder on that d: drive is shared, and is part of the backup infrastructure in VBR. I have a veeam proxy server running on a separate, "beefy" box. It seems to work fine; been doing it for several months and I usually have about 7TB free and so-so throughput.

The next phase for us is to starting doing G-F-S archiving (backup copies), so we now have another server ('server c') with 130TB available.

My question is: what is "best practice" for presenting this new storage to VBR?
1. The same as above?
2. iSCSI connection?
3. Other?

Thanks!

[bhagen]

Oh; I'm also interested in knowing if there's a correct "block size" that I should be using for this array.

[foggy]

Repository connected via iSCSI is typically preferable.

[nmdange]

Best choice for your backup storage is locally attached SAS/SATA drives using a hardware RAID controller on a Windows Server. Depending on the number of drives, RAID 60 might be a better choice than RAID 6.

When you say a folder on the D: drive is shared, does that mean you added the repository to Veeam as file share and not a Windows server repository? Forcing Veeam to access the server via an SMB share and not running any Veeam components locally is going to hurt your performance. You can tell the difference if you right-click the repository in Veeam and go to Type. It should be "Windows server" and not "Shared folder".

[bhagen]

Sorry; the repository is added to Veeam as a windows server.

Foggy, you say iscsi is preferable, but there's no option to add an iscsi lun as a Veeam repository. ??

My storage is locally attached to a windows server (12-bay server with a 16-bay expansion chassis connected by SAS cables), and presented to that server as a drive letter. The best choice I see when adding that storage as a repository is "windows server", so I suppose that's the way to do it?

And what about block size on the array itself?

Actually, what I've not been able to find is Veeam's guide to building a storage repository for VBR. Is there such a thing? I bet these questions would be answered there..

[bhagen]

Interesting! I may have just answered my own question. I experimented with adding the 130TB volume to Veeam as a repository, and I got the following popup: "The file system on the specified volume does not support fast cloning. We recommend using ReFS volume formatted with 64 KB cluster size. Proceed anyway?"

I guess that pretty much sums up what Veeam recommends.

[Gostev]

Foggy, you say iscsi is preferable, but there's no option to add an iscsi lun as a Veeam repository??

There is - you should mount this LUN to a Windows or Linux server (or even to the backup server itself), and register this server in Veeam as the backup repository.

However, I admit I am confused by Foggy's recommendation no less than you. Why would you bring iSCSI in the picture in this case? All you need to do is just register this new server C with Veeam as the backup repository. Also, I would highly recommend doing the same with server B, instead of sharing its storage as a shared folder - as the former will give you much better performance and reliability.

[foggy]

Just didn't realize this was a server and not just a NAS box.