Upgrade Strategy Large Environment

[collinp]

We are now protecting 200TB worth of data for 400 VM's. We are dynamically provisioning storage, so it is a lot less in reality but when we upgraded to the latest Veeam B & R Edition last week it took 7 days for CBT to catch up running 24x7 since the backups had to evaluate each block of storage. As far as I can see Veeam scales well into Enterprise Environments with Proxies except for this scenario.

Is there a strategy I can use for Veeam upgrades to get around this? I can split the jobs up into multiple Backup Consoles and stagger the upgrades between backup consoles. But then I would have multiple places to manage backup jobs. What would be nice is if I can manually choose to only upgrade the agents on specific hosts and stagger the agent upgrades. I believe after the upgrade I was presented with a screen to upgrade all of the agents at once, and if I didn't then the host would show up with an error status in the backup console. I am also not sure if the new version of Backup console would be backward compatible with older agents.

-collinp

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Collin,

We have forwarded your feedback on CBT driver improvements to our engineering team, so I would expect further development in this area in our next releases.

As to your idea of having multiple backup servers to address the upgrade/running full backup issue, then it seems like it would be a more complex solution in the long term compared to the upgrade of Veeam edition, which should not happen very often.

An ability to stage the upgrade procedure sounds like a good idea to me too.

Thanks!