Old HP Proliant setup help

[tesla969]

Hello,

We currently have Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5 running on a HP Proliant DL385 Gen8 Win2012 server that was set up years ago by a consulting firm. We would like to upgrade to 9.5 and add more storage and I was told I basically needed to start over since upgrading from 6.5 to 9.5 wasn’t possible. So, I converted the server to a virtual machine on one of our esxi hosts and moved the current backups to another repository temporarily just so I can make sure I continue to have backups running nightly while I work on rebuilding the Proliant server.

The Proliant was initially set up with six internal 2TB drives. Since the hardware is a bit old, it does not have UEFI support and can not use GPT, so the consulting firm set up a RAID 5 array with multiple 2TB logical drives and then spanned the drives together to create a large volume to store the backups. I am now going to add 4 more 2TB disks to the equation. My question is should I follow the consulting firm’s setup or should I look to do something different? Sorry, I’m not a storage guy so I’m not sure what is best practice these days and reading posts with other peoples‘ configurations has me more confused (which isn’t that hard these days).

Any help would be appreciated.

[DonZoomik]

I think it's possible to upgrade in multiple steps. Veeam employees can probably give exact information.
You can use GPT just fine on non-UEFI system, as long as it's not the boot disk. RAID5 with 2TB disks is borderline acceptable from reliability perspective. If you have additional backup copies, it's probably fine. While you're rebuilding the system, you may want to upgrade Windows as well. Either for faster dedupe NTFS side or for ReFS block clones (or both block clones and dedupe if Veeams decides to support it in Windows2019/Veeeam9.5U4).

[foggy]

Correct, there's an option of a gradual upgrade - to be able to upgrade to Veeam B&R 9.5, you first need to upgrade to Veeam B&R 8.0 Update 3. But you would need to contact technical support to get the required setup packages.