thoughts on this setup?

[WallIT]

Hi,

I am new to Veeam B&R. I have read the User Guide and digested most of it, I think. I have sketched out a high level overview of what I want to deploy so I'm just looking for thoughts/suggestions/validation of that.

Deployment will be in two phases; 1st phase to backup VM's to onsite disk (NAS). 2nd phase adds backup to both onsite and offsite, as well as replicate critical VM's to offsite.

Our setup is fairly simple. Three x ESXi 5 hosts and ISCSI SAN. 14 VM's, of which around half are critical. Also have a physical server (2008R2) which will have Veeam B&R installed and be the onsite backup proxy.

Phase 1:
Buy a Netgear Ready NAS 3200 (12TB) to be used as onsite backup repository. Attach to physical server via Microsoft ISCSI initiator. I have read about the 2TB limitation in certain circumstances. Will this affect us?

Phase 2:
Add an ESXi host at remote location. Configure a Veeam Backup Proxy on this host (as a VM). Configure backups to backup to both onsite and offsite repositories. Configure replication for critical VM's. Obviously we need quite a bit of disk space at this site for both backups and replicas. Not sure whether a NAS connected to this single host is preferred to lots of local storage? Pros and cons of each??

That's it so far. Just an overview for now. Anything else I should be considering? Calculating WAN bandwidth is not an exact science, but I think I have a ball park figure based on VM sizes and the backup/replication intervals.

Thanks
W

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Michael,

Buy a Netgear Ready NAS 3200 (12TB) to be used as onsite backup repository. Attach to physical server via Microsoft ISCSI initiator. I have read about the 2TB limitation in certain circumstances. Will this affect us?

Not at all, since you will be using an NTFS formatted volume connected through the iSCSI initiator as your backup target.

Add an ESXi host at remote location. Configure a Veeam Backup Proxy on this host (as a VM). Configure backups to backup to both onsite and offsite repositories. Configure replication for critical VM's. Obviously we need quite a bit of disk space at this site for both backups and replicas. Not sure whether a NAS connected to this single host is preferred to lots of local storage? Pros and cons of each??

I believe local storage should give you a better performance since VMs will be writing its data directly to the ESX(i) storage without sending data over the network stack.

That's it so far. Just an overview for now. Anything else I should be considering? Calculating WAN bandwidth is not an exact science, but I think I have a ball park figure based on VM sizes and the backup/replication intervals.

Your setup looks good to me, though the only thing that I would suggest to do is to deploy a secondary Veeam B&R on your remote site to handle off-site replication jobs.

Hope this helps!