Setup at client environment

[murda]

Hi,

We have a client with a esx 3.5 environment based on 2xHP G5's and managed by virtualized Vcenter Foundation. Client is planning to upgrade to vsphere.
The vm's are stored on a HP MSA2312 FC and presented different luns.

At the moment the client doesn't have a backup solution for their virtual environment. (they have backup exec but not for VM's and they use drive snapshot as disaster recovery)

At the moment 6-8 vm's are presented in the virtual environment and they are planning to virtualize their SAP servers as well.
That's why we offered Veeam as a solution for the virtual backup.

We want to test the trial and show the costumer how it works (they already know the benefits ) but that's why i need some help.

- Veeam backup on a physical machine or also virtualised? (I presume that virtualized vm will give a better speed when doing backups?)
- Vstorage API (SAN failover)
- Veeam backups are stored on a NAS storage device.
- If virtualized we are presenting the NAS Backup storage in the ESX environment trough NFS/ISCSI.
- If not virtualized we need to present the NAS Backup storage to the physical machine as ISCSI target or is it better to present the NAS storage towards the esx and select the esx as storage device trought the Veeam Backup?

What is the best option/practice?


(I already tried once with a veeam physical machine and presented the NAS storage to the esx environment and selected to backup trough the esx environment and selected the presented storage from the NAS device (NFS).
We gained speeds between 30-40mb/s.)

rgds,

murda

[Gostev]

Based on the feedback so far, using Veeam Backup in vStorage API Virtual Appliance mode (in a VM) should gives similar performance as using physical host with SAN mode. Only thing you need to make sure is to give Veeam Backup VM plenty of CPU (4 vCPU).

Physical host may give you better performance in case of fast target storage, because Software iSCSI Initiator in a VM will not be able to push more than 40MB/s to the target storage. So unless your target storage is fast local storage, FC LUN or iSCSI LUN with dedicated LAN and hardware iSCSI HBA, then performance between virtual and physical hosts will be about the same.

Both of the stated options for presenting NAS are fine. Personally, I like iSCSI option better, because this would work for both ESX and ESXi hosts, whereas attaching NAS as ESX storage only works for "fat" ESX (you cannot pick ESXi as backup target in Veeam Backup). iSCSI option is also environmentally "cleaner" (no service console agent running on ESX host in this case).