I've been looking forward to using the new Scale-Out Repositories feature, so I just installed v9 yesterday and noticed my Enterprise edition only allows for a maximum of 3 extents. I'm curious how Veeam came up with that maximum number of extents? It just seems that the feature is restricted on Enterprise, to the point where calling it an "Enterprise" feature is a misnomer. Going from 3 extents with Enterprise to unlimited with Enterprise Plus is a very drastic difference and will end up forcing customers to (or pricing out of) Enterprise Plus in order to utilize this new feature.
In my environment, I have a physical Veeam server with 2 local volumes, so basically to make use of any additional storage space (for me iSCSI) I can only add one additional volume to my scale-out repository. Everyone's environment and needs are different, so maybe I am unreasonably expecting a little more flexibility with this feature with the Enterprise edition, but it is still somewhat disappointing. I won't make use of most additional features provided in Enterprise Plus edition and I am unable to justify the cost for the remaining ones that I could.
Maybe some insight from others can help me figure out whether my concerns are legitimate
Hi, sure - I can give you an insight behind this decision.
Main reason was a poll we did among our enterprise customers (> 50K deal size) about half a year ago. It turned about that roughly 50% of them were using 3 or less backup repositories. So, it seemed to be a fair place to draw the line (originally, SOBR was planned to be Enterprise Plus only feature due to its spirit and positioning).
Additional minor considerations were:
1. 3 is quite "standard" (so to speak) number for feature limitations... think 3 hosts limitations in VMware Essentials, for example.
2. It's very easy to increase this number if we determine that the initial choice was bad, but it is impossible to reduce one without pissing off every impacted customer big times.
3. Since Enterprise edition customers constitute roughly 75% of our user base, it's a good idea to let SOBR technology prove its stability and scalability before letting large amount of people set up configurations with large number of extents.
I'm also running Enterprise and a bit disappointed with the 3 extent limit. In my case, having it be 5 or 6 would be enough to cover all of my scenarios.
Us too. When you're given lots of little bits of storage that aren't good enough for production use, you need more extents. 6 would be ok, but I think we could use 10.
Also only just discovered after upgrading to Veeam 9 at the weekend that only ONE scale out repository is permitted in Enterprise Edition. Please can we either have more extents or more scale out repositories in Enterprise Edition?
Please think about making it possible to have more then one Scale-Out Repository with Veeam B&R Enterprise edition!
The jump from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus have no other features for us that we can use/need then the possibility to create more then one Scale-Out Repository = BIG price for only using that feature.
Please think about adding more then one or the possibility to buy this as a standalone license.
I think the biggest difficulty with an odd number of extents is in an offsite scenario; If you have 2 extents at your main site, you basically don't get any scale-out at your DR site.
Due to this, I would love to see a minimum of 4 extents for Enterprise.
The limit of 3 extent is counted inside the single scale out repository you are allowed to create, so I don't see this limit you are explaining. Even if you only use two extents in one site, you cannot build a second repository with the enterprise license.
Luca Dell'Oca Principal EMEA Cloud Architect @ Veeam Software
I should have included the limitation of a single scale-out repository as well. Basically, it would be nice to be able to join two storage arrays at both the main and remote site for DR scenarios, even if the total limit is just 4.
Yes. That would be the functional minimum for a two-site deployment, which I would think (or hope!) many Enterprise-level customers have some sort of offsite setup.
Obviously I would love to have 6 or more total extents (for my EQL SAN, which has a 15TB LUN max), but realistically I understand why you limit the number of extents based on license level. Hopefully this number will increase gradually over time as the feature is more "standard" in the product.
Yep, we were waiting for v9 to switch to scale-out repository...We were running out of space in our 4x 4TB lun spanned volume on windows storage repository. It not seems to be good approach to continue adding 4TB luns...
Scale-out repository looked liked solution, long waiting for v9 and then we found limit of 3 extents - not way to go. Switching to Linux repository - big xfs filesystem on lvm...
It not seems to be good approach to continue adding 4TB luns...
Ramping up disks in a spanned volume is definitely not a good approach unless you have a secondary repository that holds copies. Every extra disk increases the probability that your spanned volume will eventually fail.
limit of 3 extents - not way to go
Have you considered using backup copy job in order to reduce the length of your primary backup chain and lower the risk of losing the whole backup set?
dellock6 wrote:So, just to recap, you'd be fine with 4 maximum extents, regardless if they are grouped in 1 or 2 scale-out repositories.
This would work for my environment as well. Of course I'd like 6 extents total across 2 scale-out repositories, but just having two scale-out repositories with 4 extents to split between them would be enough to get me by. It would be far better than what was offered especially since the current setup kind of ignores the basic 3-2-1 rule of backup since with the current setup the offsite copy can't get the scale-out repository if you're using the one given for your primary. And realistically the offsite needs the scale-out repository almost as much as the primary site since GFF transforms can benefit from the performance option. But it's hard to justify giving your offsite the single scale-out repository since your primary site can benefit from smaller backup windows by using it.
Randall and Will, a thought about having one scale-out repository span two sites... I am not sure that would actually give you more redundancy. Assuming individual VM backup chains, if you chose a performance SOBR, a single backup will be spread over all disk volumes, both primary site and backup site. And if you chose the other kind (can't remember it's name) all backups for a VM are kept together on the same volume as long as there is space left. No second copy on the other site. And... Having a copy job use the same backup repository as the original backup...? Not a good idea I think, if it is even possible to configure in VBR.
EDIT: Having 2 scale-out repositories, one on each site, would make sense to me though. One for the primary backups and one for copy jobs.
Just some 2 cents, whatever they are worth today...
Matts N wrote:Randall and Will, a thought about having one scale-out repository span two sites... I am not sure that would actually give you more redundancy. Assuming individual VM backup chains, if you chose a performance SOBR, a single backup will be spread over all disk volumes, both primary site and backup site. And if you chose the other kind (can't remember it's name) all backups for a VM are kept together on the same volume as long as there is space left. No second copy on the other site. And... Having a copy job use the same backup repository as the original backup...? Not a good idea I think, if it is even possible to configure in VBR.
EDIT: Having 2 scale-out repositories, one on each site, would make sense to me though. One for the primary backups and one for copy jobs.
Just some 2 cents, whatever they are worth today...
// Matts
Not sure if I was specific enough but I only wanted a separate scale-out repository for the second site where the backup copies go to.
I didn't realize there was a limit not just on the number of extents per SOBR, but also on the number of SOBR instances in Enterprise. Perhaps allowing repositories from a single repository server being added to only one SOBR at a time would make more sense than having a system-wide limit on the number of SOBR?
Its very difficult to put a number on the amount of extents/SOBR's and i think Veeam have made a sensible choice. It would be nice to be able to pay for this feature only as some customers would definitely need this but may not need the other enterprise plus functions. Downside is you end up with more SKU's
My opinion is either remove this feature in version 9.5 for Enterprise Edition or please think about extending the number to more than 2.
For my and a lot other users 2 Scale-out is to little.
I cannot see any feature in Enterprise Plus that I can you and therefor is dosn't make sense to pay a lot more ONLY to get the possiblity to use more than 2.
I REALLY hope that you listen to this for upcoming patch or v.9.5 or makes it possible to buy features to add more.
Any chance this might change soon? Not being able to create two Scale Out repositories (one in the local datacenter and one in a remote site) makes this feature pretty unusable in Enterprise Edition.
Hi, all - sorry for not providing any updates on this matter.
I actually did the poll internally among our systems engineers a few months ago, and the option to keep everything as is won by far (2 to 1). So please, provide your feedback to your Veeam sales reps - as this kind of licensing changes need to be driven from the sales side (I cannot make the call).
I personally am inclined to agree that we need to allow two scale-out backup repositories (with 3 extents max in each) in the Enterprise Edition. I do promise to support you from my end, if they ask for my opinion
As always, thank you for being so responsive to the community, even if it isn't the answer we want to hear. Your customer focus was one of the main reasons I moved our SME from BE to Veeam.
We know 9.5 brought no new changes in respect to maximum SOBR size and I did not hear anything about this for V10. What is the consensus on this feature from within Veeam? Even allowing more than 1 SOBR with an extent limitation would be very helpful.
There was mention of SE's not supporting the motion to increase the limits. I would be interested to see what sort of size data sets these guys are working with and what kind of tin is suggested to accommodate the backups?
