Best Setup for multiple ESXI Hosts

[CornFed]

So we have 3 esxi hosts(6.5) will probably be converting to Hyper-V in the near future.

Each host has their own VM (server2019) with 16gb/6cpu/600gb Thick Provisioned.
On each host they are configured to chain back up the VM on their host

Host 1 8 vms (including veeam host) starting at 9pm with each job starting when previous is finished
Host 2 9 vms (including veeam host) starting at 12am with each job starting when previous is finished
Host 3 9 vms (including veeam host) starting at 230am with each job starting when previous is finished

San is a Dell Compelent SC4020 with 24TB(16 of which is free) 15k drives(first on our upgrade list hopefully this summer)
iSCSI 1GB

The backup drives are buffalo TeraStations 12TB Each that are rotated on a weekly basis.
Offsite Synology that is full weekend backup for Longterm with synthetic created once per month.

i am keeping 7 restore points per vm.
When i swap into new drive on Monday morning and put current drive in safe i have to delete everything off the incoming drive or it will be full and all backups will fail. I know this is not the best setup and was looking for some advise to optimize this setup.

The daily backups are set to reverse incremental with create full backups perodically on mon,tue,wed,thurs,fri

I seem to average around 103 - 105 MB/s so not as slow as some people i have seen asking. I just feel that it is not setup the best way it should. I inherited this mess and am trying the best i can to make it work.

Thank you for your time.
 

[david.domask]

Hi CornFed, welcome to the forums!

A few items stand out to me right away that you may consider reviewing as you're planning your environment overhaul/update.

1. Reverse Incremental will be deprecated
> The daily backups are set to reverse incremental with create full backups perodically on mon,tue,wed,thurs,fri

post399618.html#p399618

Reverse incremental will be deprecated in a future release; if your goal is to have full backups on rotated drives every day, there is no need for Reverse Incremental. Switching to Forever Forward Incremental or Forward Incremental should be as simple as just changing the option.

2. Multiple VBRs not necessarily needed

> Each host has their own VM (server2019) with 16gb/6cpu/600gb Thick Provisioned.

If I get it right, there are 3 Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR) servers, one for each host; is vCenter not used in your environment or not possible? Typically if vCenter is in use, it's best to add the vCenter as the source for backups, not individual hosts; there is nothing wrong with using individual hosts, but it means if you migrate a VM between the hosts, the VBR server won't be aware of this migration and it will require a new backup chainfor that VM after migration.

Even without vCenter, I'm not confident there's a need for 3 VBR servers, this just sounds like it's adding a lot of extra management for you. One VBR server can control all your hosts, and you can restrict to a specific proxy/repository to keep the traffic local if the ESXi hosts are geographically distributed. VBR only needs to act as a control server in this case.

3. Rotated Drive and Retention strategy

Is the main question for that how to avoid the manual deletes? What was configured on this step for the rotated drive repository?

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Basically, Veeam can automatically handle this step for you automatically (the deletions), so that should save you a bit of manual work, but maybe you can elaborate on what would be your intended retention/rotation scheme and we can advise a bit more.