Storage Setup Question

[kcv]

Hello everybody,

i´ve a storage setup question about ntfs, refs and jobs.
We´ve a new physical Windows Server 2019 Server with a redundant iSCSI NAS.

local Partition:
1x 10 TB - D:\
1x 10 TB - E:\

iSCSI - 20 Gbit (2x 10 Gbit)
1x 40 TB - F:\ (can be extended to 90 TB)

Full Backupsize: 8 TB (without compression, dedup)

What´s the best setup to get a high compression and deduplication?
We want a long-term archiving (there we need no fast-cloning) on drive F:\.

What is the best way to rotate the daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups?

Kind regards

[Egor Yakovlev]

Greetings kcv.
Welcome to the Forums!

I see multiple questionable moments here, so let me go straight:
- NTFS should be your file system of choice
- having 8TB full, your 40TB volume can fit maximum 5 full backups? That surely won't be enough to fit "weekly, monthly, annuals" that you plan to run
- even with extension to 90TB, that will suite about 11 full backups - that is better, however I am not aware of your retention policy(how many of those you wanna keep). Say you want to keep 1 full Yearly backup for 3 years + 6 months of Monthly backups rotated, that will result in 9 full backups.
- use of Windows Server 2019 Deduplication feature is ill-advised, as it has nasty limitations, and will not benefit much for huge backup files deduplication. I am not sure about your workloads spread, maybe use of Veeam's "per-VM backup chains" can be interesting here...that way your 8TB full will be chunked on per-VM .vbk files, that might be suitable for MS to deduplicate...

Having said above in mind:
- check if your NAS box has hardware deduplication feature. If so, keep Veeam compression and deduplication disabled(set to "Dedup-Friendly" compression level).
- otherwise, enable Veeam's Job compression and deduplication, see your Full Backup size now and plan your storage accordingly - align it with how many Full restore points you plan to keep. Depending on data types inside your machines, Veeam compression\deduplication can reduce backup size dramatically.
- consider Tape or Cloud archival as an option for future. That will yield much better $\TB cost for your backups.

FYI, this online calculator can help with storage planning.

Hope that helps!

[kcv]

The 8 TB are raw amount of data. (size of all vm)
In our old veeam setup (without long-term archiving) they were compressed to 2,6 TB (one full backup).
So far we have already used "per-VM backup chains". So it could be working with MS deduplication or is veeam dedup the besser choise?
It´s a synology nas without dedup.

I know the calculator, my questions relate more to the techniques.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Thanks for update.

Better stick to File System deduplication, since its global, and disable Veeam Compression completely(Set to None).
You can find required settings to tune here.
Also check existing thread on forum.

/Cheers

[zadrian]

I would think to ask what is the exact storage sizes (if I am not wrong)....Physical Server have D:\ & E:\ (10TB each) and a NAS of 90TB with 30TB available in the LUN.

Firstly....why not have the server with D:\ (20TB) since likely this is usually controlled by the local RAID (currently RAID 1 "2x 10TB" + RAID 1 "2x 10TB") ?

Then what Veeam Edition and what hypervisor ? We are all assuming is Veeam B&R 9.x using ESXi with vCenter or Hyper-v.

I would recommend using
- Veeam B&R "reverse increment" "stored per VM" backup jobs to backup VMs to local storage (retention period 3, 5 or 14 as per required)
- Veeam B&R backup copy to NAS, Retention period 7 days or 14 days (as per required......Backup copy can set GFS (grandfather father son) such that a synthetic full is created very weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually (as per required, with different retention per setting).

Then I will not bother with dedupe or compression other than as default (why really bother to further compress etc if using reverse increments) ?