Proxy Best Practice

[JohnnyW2M]

Hello,

I have been experimenting with Proxies a bit with my Backup jobs and wanted to get a professional opinion on this setup. I have 3 Virtual Hosts and my Veeam Server is a physical box. I am thinking that I should have a proxy server on each host and specify those proxies to be used for only backing up the VMs on those respective hosts. Is this how it should be setup?

[tsightler]

Actually, if you're Veeam server is physical you're best bet would be to connect it to the SAN (assuming you have an FC or iSCSI SAN) and let it perform the backup so that the load is not placed on your ESXi hosts. You might need to detail your environment a little bit more (storage type, number of VMs) before I could make a more detailed statement about proxy placement, but in general, with only three hosts, a single proxy would be sufficient (and honestly a single server) unless you are attempting to do something like backup/replicate every hour or something.

[JohnnyW2M]

The physical Veeam server is connected to an iSCSI SAN. The SAN is solely used for the Veeam Backups and is not connected at all to the VMWare Virtual environment. Our Virtual environment consists of 4 Virtual hosts, each host has about 10-15 VMs running on each. The virtual environment is not using a SAN, the storage is directly attached to the Hosts. Reading through the forums and after attending the Veeam User Groups, it seems that my backup speeds are very slow, at an average of 8 MB/s. My bottlenecks are almost always Source or Proxy, so I was thinking that adding a proxy on each Host would help, but I am not really sure. Any advice is much appreciated, let me know if I need to provide more details.

[foggy]

In this case you definitely need a proxy on each host to enable fast data retrieval through hotadd.

[Vitaliy S.]

And make sure your proxy servers meet our recommended system requirements.