Will This Server Work for Veeam B&R?

[vaicsimmons]

I am looking at the following server:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/2U-Supermicro-1 ... 1e9eb89a53

Do you guys and gals think that this will be a good server to run Windows Server 2012 R2 and Veeam B&R? I will be loading the thing up with a bunch of 4 or 6 tb disks and using them as the repository utilizing either Windows Storage Spaces or RAID 6 on the controller card.

Give me your thoughts!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Chris,

Looks good to me, though for better performance of backup repository it is recommended to use RAID 10. How many VMs you're going to protect and how does your current virtual infrastructure look like?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Looks good - I would add internal RAID from two SSDs for the OS, and this volume would make a perfect location for vPower NFS and WAN accelerator caches, as well as guest file system catalog. And you get to keep those precious LFF slots for even more capacity and IOPS of actual backup repository!

[dellock6]

And in addition, I would use Tiering in Storage Spaces and leverage the SSDs suggested by Anton to have even better performances!

[vaicsimmons]

I currently have 15 VMs all running Windows Server 2012 R2 that I would like to backup. According to Veeam B&R, I have about 1.5 TB worth of VMs in total. If you consider that I am running Windows Server 2012 Deduplication on my file server, I am around 1 TB in total data between all the VMs.

Most of the data on our file server is pretty stagnant. The growth of our file server is pretty slow. Without Windows Deduplication, I have about 600 GB of storage in total on the file server. If I was to guess, there is well under 1 GB of files added per week. The other active servers would be our Exchange and SQL servers. The Exchange server has roughly 50 mailboxes on it. The SQL Server has a handful of databases with the largest being 8 GB. All-in-all, we are a small shop.

My thoughts are to keep 7-14 days of restore points, a months worth of weekly backups, 12 months of monthly backups and 7 yearly backups. Running Windows 2012 R2, I can enable deduplication on the volume that holds my achieved (weekly, monthly and yearly) backups to minimize the actual storage space consumed.