Network Traffic during synthetic fulls with hardened linux repo and SOBR

[mschlott]

Hi, I am designing the replacement architecture for our Veeam Backup environment and need some help understanding where the traffic flows when using hardened repositories in a SOBR.

Our current environment we have the backup server at a remote location with direct attach storage and a backup proxy at our data center with direct attach storage. Each day incremental backups run at the datacenter writing backups to the backup proxy which are then copied to the backup server at the remote location. Each month synthetic full backups are created at the remote location. The hardware is end of life and needs to be replaced.

I would like to keep the backup server and backup proxy and utilize hardened Linux repositories at both sites. The primary backups would be configured with a 14 day retention period and incremental backup mode. The backup copy location would consist of 3 Linux servers with 28 8TB SSDs set up as hardened Linux repositories.

What I need to understand is when synthetic full backups are created at the remote location, will the backup server need to read and write files across all the hardened backup repositories? If so, does that change if I keep all the full and incremental backups for a given job on the same extent of the SOBR?

[Mildur]

Hi Mike

Synthetic Full will leverage Fast Clone on your hardened repository server if you use XFS filesystem.
I understood that you want to use the hardened repositories as backup copy targets? When the backup server starts a new synthetic full copy session, your source repository will copy the incremental backup data directly to the hardened repository. Your hardened repository will then synthesize a full backup file from existing backup data and the new incremental data.

If so, does that change if I keep all the full and incremental backups for a given job on the same extent of the SOBR?

To make full advantage of FastClone, Backup Placement Policy must be set to <Data Locality>. Or synthetic fulls will not benefit from spaceless and fast synthetic fulls.

Best,
Fabian