Veeam Design Considerations for fairly small environment

[Vmagic]

Hi,

Looking for some advice and best practices for settings up VeeamBR and Enterprise Manager for a fairly small environment: 3 hosts, 40-45 vms. Environment will probably grow to 6 hosts(DR site), within a year.

Veeam BR 6.1 is installed on a vm which has full connectivity(all datastores) to a fibre-channel connected HP MSA P2000G3 Disk Array. Now, what about Enterprise manager, should I install it on the same vm? or seperate it? Is microsoft search server necessary? What about Veeam Backup Search? If yes, would you put it on the same server?

What about transport mode, Virtual Appliance to use SCSI hot-add feature my best option here?

Backup proxys: I have a Synology nas in our DR site which I have a 1Gbit dark fiber connection to. Should I install more backup proxys close to the veeam br vm ? Should I send the data directly to the backup repository from the veeamBR vm, or deploy a source agent on windows server and map the backup repository(CIFS/iSCCI) on the same windows server in the DR site?

For people using Synology products as a backup repository, what transport method do you prefer and gives best performance? CIFS share och iSCSI? Anyone care to share some numbers?

Great product by the way, love it!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Gabriel,

Now, what about Enterprise manager, should I install it on the same vm? or seperate it?

It's up to you, both variants would work equally well.

Is microsoft search server necessary? What about Veeam Backup Search? If yes, would you put it on the same server?

This is covered in our sticky F.A.Q., please take a look: >>> READ FIRST : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS <<<

What about transport mode, Virtual Appliance to use SCSI hot-add feature my best option here?

If your Veeam backup proxy is installed on the VM, then this is the best option to run your backup/replication jobs.

Backup proxys: I have a Synology nas in our DR site which I have a 1Gbit dark fiber connection to. Should I install more backup proxys close to the veeam br vm ?

Proxy servers which are retrieving VM data should be installed close to source hosts. Given that using FC in your environment, you may want to install Veeam proxy on a physical server and connect it to our SAN storage. This will allow you to use Direct SAN processing mode.

Should I send the data directly to the backup repository from the veeamBR vm, or deploy a source agent on windows server and map the backup repository(CIFS/iSCCI) on the same windows server in the DR site?

If want to store your backup files on the Synology NAS in the DR site, I would recommend deploying a backup repository on the remote site (any Windows machine would work) and connecting it to your Synology NAS device.

For people using Synology products as a backup repository, what transport method do you prefer and gives best performance? CIFS share och iSCSI? Anyone care to share some numbers?

I do not have any numbers, but I believe iSCSI should be a better choice.

Hope this helps!

[Gostev]

I have DS412+ and it can write to iSCSI LUN with wire speed pretty much.

[Vmagic]

Thank you Vitaliy Gostev for you input. I have a RS3412RPxs with 10 x 2TB SATA drives so im hoping speed will be good.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the only potential downside I can see with using an iSCSI target is if I decide to deploy more than one(1) target-side agents/proxys. Wouldn´t that mean that I will have one initiator per target-side agent connected to the same iscsi target? which with ntfs is a bad idea.

[Vitaliy S.]

I might be misunderstanding something, but why would you want to have multiple repository servers targeted to the same NTFS volume?