Preferred Networks/Windows Routing and Hostnames

[adam.paradis]

Hi All,

I've searched and found a few posts similar to my configuration but not exactly the same so I decided to make a new post.

I have a two-part question.

Part One:

All my Veeam servers have dual network interfaces. One for general traffic and the other only for backup traffic. And these servers are solid between two different locations which are on two different pairs of networks. I've added the backup networks under Preferred Networks but I'm still seeing some traffic going over the general interface. In Windows on each machine both adapters are DHCP with no static metrics or routes. Do I need to adjust Windows to prefer the backup interface over the general one in order for Veeam Preferred Networks to work correctly?

Part Two:

This is regarding hostnames of Veeam infrastructure servers in the Veeam console. Should I have my proxy and repo servers added with the hostname that resolves to the general or backup networks to help with preferred networking or does it not matter?

Thanks.

[tsightler]

Veeam preferred networking it pretty much all about selecting which IP to use to connect when mulitple IP addresses are available, however, Veeam obviously has no control over routing, that is handled by the OS, so if the networks on different subnets, you'd have to make sure the Windows OS or your router sends traffic for the preferred network over the other link. Should be an issue if everything is the same subnet though.

Of course, you still might see some traffic on the non-preferred network, but this should just be management traffic, not data transfer.

Regarding question #2, most of the time what I see is users leveraging one interface for "management" and the other specifically for data flow, so they register the general interface using their hostnames and let the preferred network be used for data flow only, but if you really want ALL Veeam traffic, even management traffic between VBR and the data movers, to use the backup network, then you'd have to register the backup network.