Will this work? Is it a good idea?

[rushdy]

Hi there!

I'm new to Veeam, but would really like to use it when our school virtualises later this year. Getting a SAN, some switches, and a few host servers seems pretty straightforward. It's the backups and disaster recovery I need to be sure of.

If I describe what I'm thinking of doing, can anyone offer their opinion on whether it'll work, and if it's the right way of going about things?

At the moment, we have a load of crusty old servers, and one not so old machine with direct attached storage (an MD3000), plus a TL2000 tape system.

The plan is to keep this system on, and deck out the MD3000 with cheap Dell nearline SAS disks. I'd like to install Veeam on this server and backup the iSCSI SAN to the attached array. Then use BackupExec to back that up to tape.

Diagram attached to show what I mean.

Thanks,

James

[dellock6]

Hi James, yours is a pretty common design for a Veeam infrastructure, and sounds good. My only doubt, you talk about the MD3000 as a server, but is a SAN appliance. Your physical backup server should be a machine with Windows OS on it like 2003/2008 or the new 2012.
Also, remember to deploy also a virtual veeam proxy to allow for hotadd restores, since directSAN is able to only read from san, not to write into.

Luca.

[rushdy]

Hi Luca

Thanks for your reply! I should have been more clear, the "backup server" block in the diagram is a Dell PowerVault DP500 (says NF500 on the bezel and PV500 in System Properties - go figure!), with Server 2003, 8 cores, and 8GB of RAM. Glad to hear it's nothing too out of the ordinary. Was a little worried Server 2003 would be too old, or a new backup infrastructure was going to cost a fortune! I'll remember the virtual proxy.

Thanks again,

James