[ARCHIVED] OLD recommendations backup storage, backup target

[chy]

Is it possible to create an NFS share from a shared SAN LUN in VMWare ESX 4.0 the storage is EMC CX4- 120

[ctchang]

I've just been there and done that.

An Alternative Way for Low Cost Veeam Backup Solution

Sorry, it’s really long, but I do think many will find it very interesting as it involved many things (USB 3.0 HBA, 2.5” 7200RPM external disk, Poweredge R610 PCI-e x8 slot and of course low cost Veeam Backup Solution)

I found myself running out of Veeam backup space recently. Instead of ordering an expensive DAS, I started to explore other alternative solutions that focus on low cost storage.

My Veeam Backup server is a 1U Poweredge R610 server which has 900MB internal storage (10K RPM SAS 300GB x 4 in Raid5) and it has only one PCI-e slot (Gen 2 x8) left.

The original option is to purchase a Powervault MD1200 with 12 2TB 7200RPM near-line SAS disks in Raid50 + 2 hot-spare configurations. PERC H800 raid card (with multi-path load balancing SAS Cables) is going to be used in that extra PCI-e slot. The expected performance should be around 500-600MB/s. One thing keeps delaying the client’s purchase is the cost as it is quite expensive considering there are only 16TB left (Raid50 with 10 2TB disks).

USB 3.0 really comes into play this year, giving its 10x improvement in transfer speed comparing to the old USB 2.0, it quickly captured main stream desktop and laptop market, but not in server at all.

Continue...

[zidtugraz]

Our solution is not among the cheapest, but it is very reliable, performance is quite good, and it perfectly fits our infrastructure: We are using HP LeftHand VSAs (Virtual Storage Appliances).

Our storage backend for virtualisation is HP LeftHand (built using P4000 series storage nodes); we are using a fully redundant multi-site setup. Our backup storage is also a fully redundant multi-site setup, but runs on relatively cheap standard hardware (HP ProLiant DL180 G6 with 12 x 1 TB MDL SAS disks). We are using ESXi 4.1 U1 on top of the hardware, and the most current version of the LeftHand virtual machines (HP LeftHand VSAs, SAN/iQ 9.5.x).

Currently we are using 4 "backup storage nodes" (with 12 TB each). Each storage node does not only run two LeftHand VSA virtual machines but also one dedicated Veeam Backup & Replication server. I.e., we have "black boxes" containing the storage plus one backup server. Since we have four backup servers, the backup servers are also redundant. I.e., if one server fails we can still run backups and restore already backed up data.

[slidek9]

We use a 64TB satabeast; cheap n cheerful SAN storage.

[wimdes]

Hi,

we are using HP ML110 servers for our customers Veeam D2D backup, with cheap internal storage.
For disaster recovery or longer-term storage, we copy the VBK file to external USB 3.0 drives, every day or every week, after Veeam has finished. But verifying if the copy on the external storage is consistent is a challenge. The VBK files average 500-600Gb.

We have been testing with checksum calculations and parity blocks, but they all take a very long time to complete or we feel the scripting might get too error-prone. Right now we use ViceVersa for VBK copy + compare, but it's not a solution as polished as we would like yet.

Of course the nicest solution would be for Veeam to provide such functionality
Does anyone have other suggestions?

Taking into account deduplication and compression, a few bad blocks on a disk could render the entire backup file useless, or does Veeam B&R provide some sort of error correction?

regards
Wim

[J1mbo]

That would likely be very much a problem, but I would note that's no different from tape. USB3 itself is pretty robust in terms of signalling, from here:

"Many error detection mechanisms are used in USB 3.0. All packets are attached with CRC fields. Based on the size and type of the packet, CRC5, CRC16 and CRC32 are used. Apart from indirect error detections like out of sequence packets are also available. Separate error handling mechanism at Link Layer level and at Protocol Layer level are defined. Hence the communication is more robust even at very high bit rate."

The transmission method also includes scrambling with a linear feedback shift register, according to wikipedia, before 8/10 encoding, which apparently helps with tollerance to EMI (i.e. electrical noise).

One way to be sure would be to generate a hash of source and destination and compare the two. I guess it would also be very easy for someone with Visual Studio to knock-up a simple command-line file copier that copies then compares either directly to the original, or to a hash created from the original on the fly?

[as-ap]

We have been using the QNAP TS-459 Pro+ and have been VERY pleased.
If you go to their web site I am sure you can find a model to fit your needs and budget.

[CMB5]

We have been using the QNAP TS-459 Pro+ and have been VERY pleased.
If you go to their web site I am sure you can find a model to fit your needs and budget.

Could you tell how did you connect and set up QNAP,
I just bought Veeam and I do have a ts 459.
Would love to set this up. Thanks.

[bsousapt]

If you have some time and patience here's my recommendation.

Buy an x86 server with as much ram as possible (minimum 8GB) , a LSI non-RAID SATA HBA and a Supermicro disk array, and as many disks as you can buy.
Install OpenIndiana or NexentaStor Community edition and create either SMB shares or iscsi volumes and attache them to the veeam backup server/proxy.
Using OpenIndiana/NexentaStor gives you the possibility to use SSD devices as cache for reads and writes making your cheap san box quite interesting one.

Example config :

• Dell R310 (has 4 SAS interfaces) with 2 disks (OS) 8GB ram will cost around 800$

• LSI HBA (LSISAS 2008) around 150$

• Supermicro 24 bay SAS 4U disk chassis around 1000$

• Seagate 2TB Hard drives - around 100$ each, buy 14 drives = 1400$

• 2 Kingston 128GB SSDNow V100, around 300$

Total = 3650$

Configuration example in terms of storage

• 2 internal disks in RAID 1 for OS install

• 12 disks in RAID 1 giving 24TB raw capacity , let´s say 20TB usable capacity, and 2 disks as Hot Spares

• Create two partitions per SSD. One partition of 8GB and the rest space for the second partition. First partition in RAID1 and the other 2 partitions no RAID. This would give 8GB in RAID 1 for write cache and at least 180GB for read cache (good if you need to recover data )

I don´t know your definition of cheap , therefore such prices can be very distant from your needs, but keep in mind this is just an example and some money could be saved by buying less disks, no SSD´s or cheaper ones..

This example setup would give you a SAN box with dedup,compression, NAS,SMB,iSCSI,FCoE capability for a very interesting price compared with tradicional vendors...

Bruno

[Gostev]

Seagate 2TB Hard drives - around 100$ each, buy 14 drives = 1400$

Good luck finding such price these days

[bsousapt]

Well...the hard drives shortage due to flooding should not take long to ramp up again, so prices will drop after Q1 2012 (or so i hope )
Besides..Hitachi already has 4TB drives to add even more price pressure to 2TB ones

Bruno

[matarvai]

We have used Synology products for few Veeam installations and that have worked pretty good. RS3411xs is in our own enviroment with iscsi attached to HP Proliant DL360G5 with Veeam. Few sites is backing up to smaller Synology Diskstation products.

[chadness]

We're using a cheap Coraid Ethernet based SAN that performs surprisingly well! They happened to make a call right when we were looking for storage for this project. I had been thinking we would use a cheap NAS solution or internal disks, but I decided to try this and am quite happy I did. I'll let you google them to find their info, but so far I'm quite pleased for this for a DR solution. The cheap one we have doesn't allow us the SAN flexibility we have with our nice Compellent production system, so there's no way I'd replace that, but for DR it's perfect for us.

[Manico]

I can NOT recommend Drobo FS. The Storage is just way to slow to be useful. Wish we never bought it.

[camerond]

I use a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer with 6 x 2TB in X-RAID2 (ReadyNAS version of RAID6) giving 10TB backup storage over CIFS. Throughput is good from just one gigabit port and this takes care of nightly incremental backups. Weekly and monthly backups are stored on an Intel SR2520 chassis with two Xeons, 16GB and 5 x 2TB in RAID5. Storage is supplied by iSCSI connected to the Veeam backup host using 4 aggregated gigabit ports. FreeNAS 8 drives the SR2520 as it works well and is easy to configure. Lastly I have remote storage over a WAN for infrequent backups using a HP MicroServer containing 4 x 2TB in ZRAID2. It uses FreeNAS and iSCSI shares as well.

The ReadyNAS Pro is a great storage device as it lets you start with a few disks and expand non-destructively. Performance is good across all sharing options (CIFS, iSCSI, NFS) and easy to configure. The HP MicroServer with FreeNAS is a great storage device for those on a budget and works every bit as well as the ReadyNAS. The SR2520 was used because it was there and had disks.

[avick]

[merged]

Does anyone have a good experience using a particular type of target disk (array) for backups? I am currently using HP Windows servers with an external drive array (MSA) and have been getting good performance but it is time to upgrade. NetApp, Quantum, Drobo, EMC VNXe are a few I am looking at. Using Veeam 6.0 currently. Thanks!

[dellock6]

I think they are all good, it really something you have to judge based on IOPS and size you can have for the budget you have, and also based on the backup method you want to use. Basically any storage can handle forward incremental backups, heavier methods like reverse incremental or synthetic put higher loads on the storage, this can result in longer backup windows if the storage have a limited amount of IOPS it can handle.
There are also dedicated backup appliances with deduplication (ExaGrid, DataDomain to name a few) that are more focused maybe on this kind of activity.

Luca.

[chimera]

As mentioned by Luca above, I'd go to a dedicated deduplication device if I were to buy again. Using Dell R510 with a heap of 1TB / 2TB SATA disk with 10GbE iSCSI connected to an EqualLogic PS6010XV, backup speed is really fast (the key is that there is no 1Gbps network in the mix - apart from Veeam chatting to vCenter for snapshots etc) but if you can get the backup device doing the dedup at the hardware layer and turn it off in Veeam, I'd imagine space/speed would improve quite a bit. The Dell DR4000 looks like a pretty cool alternative from what I've read.

[smartsys]

I have a small note about the reviews at Smallnetbuilder.com

I read a few reviews and the benchmarks are not representative.
The reviewer is testing the NAS devices with the disks provided by the manufacturer and thus is comparing apples with pears in the overall table.
We all know, I hope, that various brands and models of expecially low-cost SATA drivers (as used in these NAS devices) have very different performance specifications.
Some drives are tuned for power usage, others for durability or video editing.
In fact what is shown here is the total performance of disks in a specific NAS device. Changing the disks in a NAS would almost certainly change the benchmark results.

From my experience we only use DAS for Veeam Backup. Mostly a HP DL380 with several 1TB 2,5" disks of a DL380 with a MSA60 with 3,5" 1TB disks. In al cases we want some form of redundancy in the backup data set, so these are configured in Raid 5. Cache on the controller is configured for maximum write performance and disk cache is also enabled.
We usualy try to use direct SAN attachement for backup, but the proxy function of Veeam 6 can be used to use some regular VM's hosted om different VMware Host servers to transfer data to the central media server using DAS.

We don't use NAS devices, because we also make tape backups of the Veeam data. Using a NAS makes this very difficult, since most NAS devices don't support tape devices. Only some high cost Windows Storage Server based NAS servers can be used in these cases, but we usually build something comparable ourselfs using standard HP hardware building blocks.

[collinp]

[merged]

Is there any preference as to which protocol to use for a storage array that stores the Veeam Backup files? We were thinking of going with Fibre Channel connected storage but I noticed that a lot of people use CIFS/NFS/ISCSI storage for the backup target storage. Wasn't sure if vPower or any other Veeam feature was more compatible with one over the another.

[Gostev]

Backup & Replication is storage agnostic, you can you any product feature with any storage.

[cmserver]

Hello,

I'm curious to see what others are using for the destination storage for the Veeam backups. I'm looking for a reliable low cost solution to store the backup files. We already went thru 800GB within 2 weeks so I suspect I'll need to at least double or triple that to get the 14 restore points that we would like to keep.

Any storage recommendations that you have been happy with?

If you are looking for something that is a bit more enterprise ready but cost effective you could look at Coraid depending on how much data you think you will have. The SRX2800 can hold 16 drives for storage up to 48TB if you use 3TB drives. However I am suspecting you do not need that much so you could get smaller drives to save on cost. Then by using the Coraid HBA about $150 for PCI-e 1GB version you connect the shelf directly to the Veeam Physical server if it is physical or share it out through another one. From my experience CIFs is problematic. I would use either the Physical Veeam (Master) Server with the disks connected via the HBA or share it from a Linux server with NFS. I have some coraid contacts if you like. This is most likely the solution we will end up with. It is fairly inexpensive, has some pretty good throughput and is quite reliable. We have used Coraid for 5+ years with hardly any issues.

Coraid SRX2800
http://www.coraid.com/products/srx2800_ ... _appliance

Coraid HBA
http://www.coraid.com/products/host_bus_adapters_hba


Brent

[dellock6]

I've always seen savings in Coraid solution if you are going to need tens of TBs, and it lowers its price per Gb as you grow. But on smaller environments the price for buying dedicated HBAs (they are not "so" cheap) basically deletes the savings in regards to other storages. It a good fit anyway...
Another solution can be some deduplication appliance, but as Brent said, it all depends on the amount of data to be saved.

[SilkBC]

[merged]

Hello,

We have been trying to back up to an external NAS device, NexStar NST-610NU-N1 (jut a hard drive enclosure that connects to the network). We have never been able to complete a full successful backup to these devices (corrupt metadata) and after some troubleshooting with Veeam, we tried a different device we had laying around, and the three full backups we have done to it have all been successful. Unfortunately, this particular device is not very portable. We are wanting to swap these devices out on a weekly basis to store offsite as a weekly archive, which is why the NexStar devices were so attractive to us.

We are wondering if anyone here might have some recommendations for similar devices to the NexStar (i.e., portable, gigabit NIC) that you have had experience with and no issues backing up to using Veeam?

Thanks!

-SilkBC

[dellock6]

I've taken a look at that product right now, it's a single disk nas, surely it's not a good candidate to be used as Veeam repository, so you did well in switching to a better/faster storage. About exporting backup, you have several options, depending also on the storage you are using. Many small NAS like Qnap or Synology have a option to connect a usb drive to them and dump their storage to it. Another option is to replicate them to another storage offsite directly via vpn or dedicated lines...

Luca.

[scott.hale]

[merged]

When reviewing the stats on most of my jobs, I usually run into "Bottleneck target" - A better storage target might solve my problem ? I use cheap Buffalo Terastation NAS systems as the backup targets. Does anyone have suggestions for better mid-range SMB NAS boxes ?
No budget for the buku stuff like HP or Data Domain deduping systems unfortunately ( -

Suggestions welcome (QNAP boxes perhaps ?) -

Thanks !

SH

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Scott,

Please look through this topic for recommendations on the NAS make and model. Additionally, I would recommend to take a look at this topic, pretty informative: Best method to access NAS storage for backup performance?

On a side note, what backup mode are you currently using (forward or reversed incremental)?

Thank you!

[randomb]

[merged]

Hello Dear Veeamers

im wondering if there is any kind of best practice for replica storage, i have a customer thats search for a NAS thats able to power 3 vms in case of DR from replica

My though was:

http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?lang=e ... 701&n=3423

Usually we have a server to hanlde the replica load,

This is a sbs with larger exch datastores and sql server

Any Recommendations?

[dellock6]

You would need anyway at least one ESXi server in DR site to poweron the replicated VMs, the nas itself cannot power VMs.
About this model, we do not know the size and compute requirements of those 3 VMs, so it's hard to tell if that Qnap can be enough. It could...

[Starman]

I have a $1000 iscsi based Iomega store-center which has 4 3tb drives in raid 5. Now, I use this as secondary backup storage that runs over a fiber line across our campus in case of fires and such. This works perfectly fine even thought it tops at 28 mb/sec. The initial backup on a large NAS (say 700 gigs) takes many many hours but the daily incremental s only take 10-15 minutes at most. Been running like this for 1.5 years with no problem and I'm backing up 50 servers to it nightly using about 5 TB of space. This is a possible solution for a small scenario as a primary backup location. My normal veeam backups go to local SAS 10K drives on one of my Vsphere hosts. Very fast, the same 700 gigs might take 1 hour at most to pull from my Dell MD3200 SAN to local storage and the incrementals might take 1-2 minutes.