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imo
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Veeam backup to NAS

Post by imo »

Hi there,


I am planning to use a Synology or QNAP NAS box for backup.
But i was courious to hear about what the community uses and cons & pros for Synology and QNAP?



Regards,

Ibrar Ashraf
Alexey D.

Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by Alexey D. »

Hello Ibrar,

You may want to refer to search results, there are various topics mentioning Synology/QNAP.
Gostev
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Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by Gostev »

I will speak unofficially here, not as Veeam representative, but as a regular user and community member.

I've been choosing between the two for powerful home lab NAS. I would say, if you have money, go with QNAP for sure. Synology appears to have really bad firmware problems, they cannot stabilize their major release for many months now. They are also very slow to respond to issues on their community forums - users screaming for update are simply being ignored. QNAP on the other hand seems to be much more responsive to community, and fixes issues quickly. They are also keep adding new cool features very often, definitely going forward at full speed.

The only two big benefits for Synology are much better price, and much nicer management UI (awesome design, functionality and usability). But it does not worth much because core functionality seem to have really bad issues around performance and stability.

Both vendors seem to have equally bad and unstable iSCSI implementation, so if you were planning on doing proper LAN-free backups via dedicated iSCSI network, forget about it - or look for "proper" SAN (just call DELL and ask for another low-end Equallogic, you may be surprised how aggressively they are willing to discount sometimes to get your business).

Hope this helps.
alexfeig1
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Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by alexfeig1 »

You definitely get what you pay for.

I have a Synology for my home and I really like it, but I wouldn't consider using it in a production work environment. I haven't had any firmware issues personally, but maybe I'm lucky... who knows. They definitely do CIFS well enough. It will also do iSCSI, but it uses IET and not SCST.

For the price range of something like a Synology or Qnap you may as well just roll your own with FreeNAS/OpenFIler or SCST.
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Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by Bunce »

Backups to QNAP over SMB (using second dedicated NIC) works well for us. One NIC for backup VLAN, the other for production network.

Allows us periodic (scheduled) backup to external USB for offsite rotation, plus builtin RSYNC replication over WAN to another QNAP (currently testing).

They've just added RAID10 with latest firmware release which may come in handy.

QNAP's aren't perfect by any means - as touched on their iSCSI is rubbish, and they concentrate far too much on new features rather than fixing bugs and getting the simple things right (sound familiar :-)) ), but overall a pretty good product.
imo
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Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by imo »

Gostev wrote:I will speak unofficially here, not as Veeam representative, but as a regular user and community member.

I've been choosing between the two for powerful home lab NAS. I would say, if you have money, go with QNAP for sure. Synology appears to have really bad firmware problems, they cannot stabilize their major release for many months now. They are also very slow to respond to issues on their community forums - users screaming for update are simply being ignored. QNAP on the other hand seems to be much more responsive to community, and fixes issues quickly. They are also keep adding new cool features very often, definitely going forward at full speed.

The only two big benefits for Synology are much better price, and much nicer management UI (awesome design, functionality and usability). But it does not worth much because core functionality seem to have really bad issues around performance and stability.

Both vendors seem to have equally bad and unstable iSCSI implementation, so if you were planning on doing proper LAN-free backups via dedicated iSCSI network, forget about it - or look for "proper" SAN (just call DELL and ask for another low-end Equallogic, you may be surprised how aggressively they are willing to discount sometimes to get your business).

Hope this helps.

Hi Gostev,


Thanks for your reply. I am often on the forum to find solutions to specific problems and almost everytime encounters a reply from you. I appreciate your dedicated effort.
Actually the last to lines from you was the most interesting part. It was exactly the cons & pro for the iSCSI on the NAS boxes i really was interested in. I wanted to present the iSCSI storage as datastores to ESX and create a VMDK for VBR Server. I searched for some reviews and i found some posts stating that the iSCSI is unreliable - but the posts were a bit old. So i hoped that someone might had tested recently as they (NAS vendors) release new firmwares often.

I guess i wanted the NAS to be a cheap and perfect solution :)

Regards,
Ibrar Ashraf
Gostev
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Re: Veeam backup to NAS

Post by Gostev »

I did research this iSCSI reliability very recently, and can confirm that both vendors still has issues, with the only difference being that QNAP seem to be fixing all reported issues promptly. But it looks like there are too many issue there with iSCSI, because I am yet to see someone being happy about it. As far as I understand, specifically most issues surface if you are trying to do concurrent access or very heavy I/O to iSCSI LUN. So as long as you will only have that used by single VM, you might be okay.

I would recommend not using VMDK though. You will be limited to 2TB this way, plus storing your backups in VMFS is not considered a good practices (search this forum if you need more info). So instead I would suggest that you attach RDM disk pointing to NAS iSCSI LUN to your Veeam Backup VM, and format it with NTFS. This will get you up to 16TB data per volume, and if needed you will be able to reattach this LUN to any Windows server via software iSCSI initiator (even to your notebook) and get data from there in less than a minute, should the disaster strike and ruin your whole environment including your backup server.
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