Veeam Host Storage

[duhaas00]

When creating the Hard Disk on a VM that hosts Veeam, is there a best practice in terms of what kind of disk you should create that will be used as a backup target? For example:

Thin
Think Lazy
Thick Zero

Just trying to make sure I follow whats considered best practice.

[pcmmitham]

personally i wouldnt backup my VM's to a VM, sorrta voids the point really! my backup server is an external PE 2950 (yes its older) with 13TB of DAS in the form of 3TB 7200 rpm SATA disks! that way my backups are not on the same SAN as production. after all the point of the backup is to put the data in a different physical place incase your SAN is compromised or you have VM corruption!

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I would agree with Pierre in regards to not using vmdk disks for storing backup files, because imagine that something goes wrong with the host or VMFS itself... in this case you will not be able to recover your backups.

[Cokovic]

Except if he is offloading the backups additionally to tape or somewhere else

[Gostev]

Thick eagerly zeroed is best for performance, but the difference should not be very noticeable.
I am going to +1 to concerns with your plan on storing backups though

[rbrambley]

Just to emphasize everyone's points, if you have to use the same SAN as your production VMs as a backup target you are better off (not for performance per se, but for logistical and recovery reasons) provisioning a raw LUN that is not used as an ESX datastore. This LUN would then be accessed and formatted (NTFS) by the Veeam server's Windows OS. You could use an RDM or even an iSCSI initiator. Search these forums for that discussion. We have many Veeam customers doing this already.

For performance just be aware of number of disks and raid type. The better I/O you can create the better your backups and restores (especially vPower related) will perform. Separate array and separate disks would be best, obviously.

And then figure out how to get a copy off of the SAN and saved somehwere else on a regular schedule!

[Gostev]

And most importantly, be absolutely sure to copy backups off your SAN to 3rd storage at least periodically (for example, weekly backups). Otherwise, you risk loosing ALL the data including your backups (in case of data corruption issue on SAN).