StoreOnce & VEEAM - Best Practice

[jazzoberoi]

Hi Guys,

We've recently decided to completely overhaul our Server / Storage & Backup infrastructure and have decided to go with HP and VEEAM for all our infrastructure requirements. We'll be running a 2-Node Hyper-V Cluster on Win 2012 R2. All the below infrastructure is running on 8gb Fiber Channel. The primary data is around 1TB.

Our environment consists of the following :
2x HP DL360P Servers (Hyper-V Cluster Nodes)
1x HP DL360e Server (VEEAM Backup & General Management Server)
2x 8gb Fibre SAN Switches
1x HP MSA 2040 - SAN
1x HP StoreOnce 4500 - NAS
1x MSL2024 Tape Library
VEEAM Backup & Replication

Before i bury myself into hundreds of pages of documentation, i'd like to know if anyone has any suggestions or pointers to best practices with the above HP & VEEAM combo ?

The questions i had were :

1. I understand i have to install VEEAM on the management server (DL 360e) in 'physical' mode to be able to leverage the 'Fibre Channel' architecture, is that still correct ?

2. Can VEEAM backup from MSA-2040 storage snapshots yet, or does it still have to be done from the Hyper-V hosts ?

3. Should i utilize the 'Virtual Tape Library' or 'NFS / CIFS' as the backup target for the StoreOnce 4500 ? As i understand, VTL can leverage the 'Fibre Network' where as 'NFS / CIFS' is limited to the 'Ethernet'. Is there a best practice guide for doing this ?

4. Since StoreOnce 4500 has such awesome De-duplication capabilities.. what is the recommended backup method ? Forward incremental, Reverse incremental or Daily full active (not synthetic) ? I'm leaning towards the daily full active as i believe the dedupe engine in StoreOnce 4500 should take care of redundant data automatically without have to stress the I/O for reading the previous backups to create incremental images ?

5. What is the best strategy to offload the data from the StoreOnce 4500 NAS to the MSL2024 Tape Library daily ? Should i run a daily 'backup copy job' to copy the full active backup from StoreOnce to Tape ? I wish to use the GFS scheme for Tape Archiving.

6. Can i use the Veeam Backup server (DL360e) as a VEEAM replication target for mission critical VM's ?

Thanks heaps guys..
Hopefully this post can serve people in the future looking at integrating similar HP Storage portfolio products with VEEAM

[foggy]

Hello, Jazz. See the answers below.

1. I understand i have to install VEEAM on the management server (DL 360e) in 'physical' mode to be able to leverage the 'Fibre Channel' architecture, is that still correct ?

It actually doesn't matter where you install Veeam B&R console. Data processing is performed either by the source Hyper-V host itself (on-host mode) or off-host proxy server.

2. Can VEEAM backup from MSA-2040 storage snapshots yet, or does it still have to be done from the Hyper-V hosts ?

Consider off-host backup mode. Unlike VMware, where we had to implement our own storage integration, Hyper-V has native integration with storage snapshots for backup via hardware VSS providers and Veeam B&R utilizes it with the help of off-host proxies.

3. Should i utilize the 'Virtual Tape Library' or 'NFS / CIFS' as the backup target for the StoreOnce 4500 ? As i understand, VTL can leverage the 'Fibre Network' where as 'NFS / CIFS' is limited to the 'Ethernet'. Is there a best practice guide for doing this ?

You cannot add it as a tape library. Please review this discussion on the repository type preferences.

4. Since StoreOnce 4500 has such awesome De-duplication capabilities.. what is the recommended backup method ? Forward incremental, Reverse incremental or Daily full active (not synthetic) ? I'm leaning towards the daily full active as i believe the dedupe engine in StoreOnce 4500 should take care of redundant data automatically without have to stress the I/O for reading the previous backups to create incremental images ?

Please find some valuable considerations regarding that here.

5. What is the best strategy to offload the data from the StoreOnce 4500 NAS to the MSL2024 Tape Library daily ? Should i run a daily 'backup copy job' to copy the full active backup from StoreOnce to Tape ? I wish to use the GFS scheme for Tape Archiving.

GFS is currently can be implemented with the help of this workaround only. Your strategy for offloading backups to tapes should depend on what you actually need to have on tapes, your RTO/RPO values, amount and capacity of tapes available.

6. Can i use the Veeam Backup server (DL360e) as a VEEAM replication target for mission critical VM's ?

If you enable Hyper-V role on that server, it can serve as a replication target.