Availability Suite Installation question

[jcavalear]

We have just updgraded our Veeam B&R license to Availability Suite Enterprise Plus to enable us to start using Veeam One. Currently we have one Virtual B&R E+ server which also has the Enterprise manager installed. We are currenlty using SQL Express 2012 on this same VM and each of the current DB's are roughly 6GB in size. We are currently only keeping 4 weeks of session history.

90 VMs total. 45 of them at our central site on 4 hosts with the rest spread out between 8 other sites with 2 hosts each and an average of 3-5 VMs per host.
10 proxy servers, 2 at main site and one each at remote sites.
4 Hosts at the central site
2 hosts each at the remote sites with local storage. One host is actively running all VMs and we replicate them every two hours to the 2nd host as a DR backup. This model may change to a vSAN model in the future so we can utilize the resources on both hosts.
1 repository at each remote site.
We will be incorporating and Exagrid appliance at the main site.
4 additional repositories at 1 remote site used to run Bcopy for jobs at the main site.

My questions are:

1) Can I / Should I install Veeam One, B & R , and Enterprise manager all on the same server?
2) Can I still use SQL Express on this server to host the databases? I'm guessing the new DB for Veeam One may exceed the 10GB limit. I'm getting pushback for either upgrading this instance to SQL Standard or offloading the DB's to another existing SQL server until I install and configure Veeam One and prove it won't fit.

I have attempted to use the Veeam One Sizing calculator spreadsheet and if I have my numbers even close it's telling me:

vSpere Infrastructure DB size = 15.74GB
All infrastructures total DB size = 19.95 GB

If I do need to upgrade to SQL standard should I run an instance on the same VM or offload the DBs to a shared SQL server. One reason I'm getting resistence from offloading to another SQL server is the maintenance angle. If that server goes down for maintenance for one of the other databases then my B & R could get interrupted.

Thanks for the time. I couldn't really find any question relevant to this specific question searching the logs. Sorry if there is already a thread out there.

[Shestakov]

Hello Joe,
1) You can install ONE and VBR on the same server. It's not recommended for medium and large infrastructures, but for 90 VMs should work. You can always move VBR or ONE server to another machine later.
2) Given calculator's results, SQL Express is not sufficient for you case. You can run it on the same VM.

[jcavalear]

Thanks for the response Nikita. I will be doing the install in the next couple of weeks. I'll post my findings here for anyone else that may have a similar question.

[Vitaliy S.]

SQL Server Express is recommended only for POC purposes since it is limited in size (DB) and CPU usage. The less performant your SQL Server is, the slower your reports would be (generation time). Veeam B&R, on the other hand, does not use SQL Server that much that's why Express edition is sufficient for it.

[jcavalear]

HI Vitaliy,

Thanks for expanding on that answer. I am trying to convince management that we will need to either purchase a SQL Standard license for this or host the DB's on an external SQL server. This latest answer helps a bunch.

My understanding is if I am forced to try using SQL Express and the DB turns out to surpass the 10GB limit, I can simply install a license and convert the SQL Express instance to Standard? I will run this by my DBA also but it's not his choice either.

Thanks

Joe

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Joe,

Yes, your understanding is correct, but keep in mind that once you hit the DB size limit alarms will stop working as well as new data ingestion.

To be honest, If you want to save some money, then SQL Server Express would work, but do lower the retention policy settings. For example, if you don't care about capacity planning and usage trends, then you can select storing data for 1 month only. This will be sufficient for basic usage scenarios, but if you want to analyze trends and keep historical data, then SQL Server Standard and above should be a way to go. Your DBA already knows this anyway

Thanks!