Hello all. I’m a current user (running 9.5) who has a physical server that houses our backups. This server is also my Veeam server which performs all Veeam functions except being a Proxy. The server is need of an upgrade due to space as well as it performs the backups slowly the way it’s configured. Veeam software indicates that the Network is my primary bottleneck. It has a few 1GB uplinks. So I recently purchased a new physical server with more storage as well as a dual 10GB SFP card so I can tie into either my 10GB top of rack switches or iSCSI network. I run a VMWare environment with 100+ VMs which reside on a Nimble Storage array.
Basically, there are many ways to implement and Veeam will work but I’m looking to configure it the best recommended way for my environment. I want to backup as quickly as possible with the least load on my production machines. I will also look at running version 10 at this time.
The new server is running Windows 2019 and I created a RAID array for the backup repository. However I was thinking about using a ReFS file system to help with reducing the footprint necessary for the backups.
So I have a few questions:
Will ReFS work OK with the Veeam backups or am I wasting my time? Do I need to configure them to work in a certain way? (I currently backup incremental daily and a full backup weekly)
Should I use the SFP to connect to the iSCSI network so it can talk directly to the Nimble array or rather connect it to my management/traffic network? (I do have 2 standard 1GB NICs on the server as well)
If I connect directly to the iSCSI network, does the server also need to act as a proxy? (I currently have 1 virtual proxy with no direct access to the storage)
Do you have any other suggestions on how I should setup my new physical server?
1. REFS is a definitely good idea but you may run synthetic full backups instead of active fulls to benefit from the Fast Clone technology.
2. If you're going to backup from storage snapshots using iSCSI protocol, you may check these requirements for proxy server. The new server should act as a proxy and the direct connection is usually more reliable and faster.
3. For your current jobs: take a look at this option and try to increase a number of upload streams. I think this option is worth trying as long as Network is the bottleneck for most of your jobs.
Thank you for the info! If I was going to use REFS, I was going to enable Windows deduplication to reduce footprint of backups. However based upon my reading, it looks like FastClone may not work if dedup is enabled. Is this correct? I think the benefits of dedupe will outweigh faster synthetic fulls.
Is is OK to have my storage repository, Veeam management software, and Veeam proxy all on the one server?
That's true: Fast Clone is not available by default as long as you enable Windows data deduplication but there is a registry value which enables block cloning on REFS + dedupe.
One more consideration is that Fast Clone allows multiple full backups on disk to share the same data blocks and therefore to reduce repository space consumption: take a look at this post.
From my point of view, the "all-in-one" setup is totally fine: Data Movers are running on the same server, network is no longer a potential "bottleneck".
OK, great. This is a good feature vs turning on dedup and having to deal with the extra tax on dehyrdation, etc. So I haven't done Synthetic backups before and that is because I'm not sure if I should trust them vs active full. I don't currently use SureBackup because I haven't ever gotten it to work correctly but I'm assuming that would eliminate my concerns if I ran this across the synthetic backup each week...is this correct? Is it recommended practice to run active fulls once in a while?
Basically, you can trust either synthetic or active full because there is no real difference between both methods from backup data consistency perspective.
Anyway, periodic validation of backups is highly recommended and SureBackup is the best method: it provides block level validation and allows checking a restored VM behavior in an isolated environment.
I recommend to figure out what exactly does not work when you try to run SureBackup and address encountered issues.
But keep in mind that read speed from dedupe device is usually slower and in this case SureBackup performance might be affected.