Newbie Veeam B&R questions on retention strategy, NFS, etc.

[asckey]

I'm new to Veeam B&R, and am currently evaluating v6.1.0.205 for backing up our vSphere 4.1 environment (3 ESX hosts) in place of our existing creaking VDR deployment. I'm impressed with it so far, and we're considering the Standard version as part of the Veeam Essentials package, but I've come across a number of issues:-

• It doesn't allow a hierarchical retention strategy (daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/etc.)
• It requires more storage than VDR for the same number of VMs (1.25TB so far for about 5 daily backups (845GB for the full backups + ~100GB/day for incrementals), compared to 0.84TB for 7 daily+4 weekly+3 monthly backups in VDR)
• It can't use an arbitrary NFS repository without installing an agent onto it

As a result of the first two issues, I'm looking at using custom scripts to copy the relevant full backups onto a deduplication store (currently evaluating the OpenDedupe NAS appliance). I can write my own scripts, but to save time, can anyone point me at any existing ones to implement hierarchical backups for Veeam? (Ideally, one that links the files, rather than copying them.)

I don't understand the third one; as NFS is built into the product, why does it need a separate agent to handle an NFS backup repository? It does mean that I can't use an arbitrary NFS NAS appliance as the backup repository without having to deploy a Linux server to mount it first and re-share it, which seems pointless to me. Is this a design decision, or was the feature simply omitted due to time pressures?

I also haven't worked out how to restore a guest file directly to the original guest VM. Is this something that is only available in the Enterprise Web Manager (which I haven't installed yet)? If so, can I assume it won't be available in the Standard Edition?

I know that SureBackup isn't available in the Standard Edition, but I haven't a clue about the VirtualLab. Is that part of SureBackup, or a separate feature?

Thanks for reading, and hopefully for answering!

[dellock6]

If you do not want to deal with complex scripts, you can use programs like AllwaySync on windows, and create a schedule to copy only VBK files in the dedup appliance. It's easy to apply a file extension filter to that it will copy only VBK without the incrementals.
About linux nas, Veeam needs to deploy a small perl script into the nas to act as repository (from what I understood about this), that's why it needs regular linux. And I really think is a design decision, just like having simple restore points based on retention rather than GFS schemas.

Luca.

[foggy]

And yes, restore to original location and virtual labs are available in Enterprise Edition only.

[asckey]

Luca and Alexander, thanks for the information. I can write complex scripts, I just thought there might be a good starting point somewhere.