Repository Setup

[TopKatz]

Im designing my first Veeam setup for my first datacenter. I'm trying to figure out the best way to setup my repository using my hardware. My storage can be presented as NAS (CIFS/SMB) or SAN iscsi. From what I have read it sounds like iscsi is a better way to present the storage from a performance stand point. My concern lies with recovery if I loose my datacenter and need to rebuild my veeam install and all VMs, how do I present my existing iscsi target to my new veeam server with out looosing my backups? Will this be an issue? Can I grab that target and reuse the existing data to rebuild my datastore?

Thanks for any insite

[dellock6]

Hi Michael,
if you format the iscsi target with say NTFS and mount it as a local device to a Windows Veeam repository, then any new installation of Veeam will be able to read its content and start restores from there, no issues at all.

Block devices are indeed suggested as better solution rather than SMB because of performances, and also data integrity, SMB protocol is less reliable, and because we cannot deploy our datamover into the storage in this kind of design, we cannot verify what's written into the SMB share after blocks leave the Veeam machine; with our datamover writing to a local-attached disk, we can check integrity down to the writes to the file system.

[TopKatz]

That makes some sense. So Initialize the target on the veeam server and then format it as NTFS. If something then happens to my datacenter I could then grab the target with a different veeam server and use it. Once I did that I would not risk losing my backups after initializing with a new server?

Sorry I dont have any real world experience with iscsi in production.

[Vitaliy S.]

Once I did that I would not risk losing my backups after initializing with a new server?

Correct.

Sorry I dont have any real world experience with iscsi in production.

That's fine, you can use Widows iSCSI client to connect to the target storage and then use Disk Management MMC snap-in to configure the volumes for backup repository.