Best practices for the CE product

[cosmik]

Hello everybody,

please let me elaborate on what we have and what we want to do (unless advised otherwise ):

we have just acquired three ESXi 7.0U1 nodes, with the VMWare Essentials license (no vMotion, although considering upgrading to). Two of them have shared storage and are on the same location, whereas the latter system is connected to a low latency/low bandwidth (2Mbps to be upgraded to 10Mbps sometime this year) location. Our entire server infrastructure is virtualized.

The local systems are 16 core (2cpu x /64Gb nodes. Common storage is a FC Dell SAN (not much storage though, only 4Gb). Both local and remote locations have a Synology RS-1619xs+ system with 6Tb of RAID5 storage, soon to be upgraded to around 30Tb. The local synology will most likely be used to provide file storage for our users over iSCSI to a Windows Server 2019 VM.

The idea is to install the community edition of Veeam BR to take care of our 3 esxi nodes and our 10 VMs. We thought of utilizing veeam to backup each of our sites to the other one: ie the local VMs to the remote synology and the remote ones to our local synology. Or something along those lines.

And that ends the intro.

Having read the requirements of installing veeam CE I'm a bit at a loss of what its requirements would be or where it should be installed, or which components go where. Veeam documents is pretty elaborate and helpful but it feels like being an air traffic controller here. Should it be on a physical machine or a VM. Which parts go where?

As some added info:
* local node1 hosts vcenter, plus various Windows VMs. In total around 5 VMs. Free memory is around 16Gb. Connection to the LAN is via 1Gbe links. Storage utilizes the Dell VSAN over 10Gbe FC and will also utilize our Synology over 1GbE iSCSI. CPU utilization according to VM is less than 10%
* local node2 hosts around 4 Linux VMs. Free memory is around 30Gb. Connection to the LAN and storage are the same as node1
* remote node3 hosts only a single Windows Server 2019 VM. Free memory is around 8Gb. Connection to LAN is via 1Gbe. The 2019 VM storage is on the node local disks. The remote Synology is not utilized at the moment.

Can someone shed some light on what to install where? I'll try to ask around and gradually build up my knowledge but at the moment the hardest part is deciding on the where/what's of this design.

Thanks in advance for any information provided!

[wishr]

Hi Michael,

I would recommend first of all take a look at the Veeam BP website created and maintained by our system engineers. Together with our official documentation, It should answer most of the questions you highlighted. A single all-in-one physical server should cover your landscape.

Thanks

[cosmik]

Thank you for your response. On spot is your advice to use a single all-in-one physical server, it was a big point on how to start. Unfortunately we lack any other server-grade systems we could use. Best case would be using some Dell Optiplex i7 (10th gen IIRC) systems with 16Gb of RAM. Do you think that would do?

As for reading, I'll start looking into the BP site asap. And thanks again!

[wishr]

Thanks for reaching back.

Yes, since currently, you have just 10 VMs it should be fine even if you decide to keep the SQL database on the same server. However, I would recommend carefully go through the sizing sections of the user guide and BP portal to get an idea of for how long that setup will be sufficient. If there is a chance of exponential growth in the number of VMs and jobs, it's a good idea to be prepared for this instead of changing the whole setup every ~year.

Thanks