Veeam Physical Server Placement

[NiallDES]

We currently have B&R 6.1 running on a VM. It is backing up somewhere in the region of 40-50 VMs. We are looking at migrating our backups from a VM to a physical server. I'm wondering where is the best place to install the physical server. Our environment consists of a 3 host vSphere 5.0 cluster. The cluster is connected via 1GB iSCSI to a SAN. We are running backups to a NAS as a network target. We are proposing placing the phyical server in a different server room connected via a 1Gig network link. Is this optimum or is there a better way of doing this? thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Generally speaking, backup server can be placed anywhere (either physical or virtual infrastructure). If you want to migrate to the physical infrastructure I would strongly recommend deploying backup proxy on any Windows Server which has direct connection to your SAN storage. This will allow you to run the backup/replication jobs in the most efficient manner.

In addition to this, I would suggest keeping at least one virtual proxy to perform full VM restores via HotAdd mode using ESX(i) I/O stack, which wouldn't be possible if you have only physical backup proxy.

[NiallDES]

That's great thanks, am I right in saying the direct SAN access can come from a 2008r2 VM with an iSCSI Initiator configured for the LUNs on the SAN? thanks again

[Vitaliy S.]

Correct.

[NiallDES]

Thanks

[Gostev]

If you are planning to use VM for backup proxy, then hot add processing mode is likely to provide equal or better performance. There's little sense to do Direct SAN from within VM these days, in my opinion.