Best Way to Approach Backing Up

[gerrim]

Hi,

We're about to embark on backing up our VM estate with Veeam, we're coming from a Netbackup environment.
To give a quick overview of our setup, we have 50.8 TB of storage spread across 55 datastores. These in turn are accessed by VMs running across 15 hosts.

Now, we where having a bit of a debate in the office yesterday about the best way to approach this.

Currently it's all being backed up by Netbackup, and it's being done from a datastore perspective. That is, Netbackup has jobs set for each datastore. Whatever is in the datastore at the time, is what's being backed up.
I proposed that with Veeam, we simply just group our VMs into roles. For example, File & print, SQL, Linux etc, let the jobs run and let Veeam sort itself out.

What's the method you experienced Veeam users go for ?

Apologies if my outline sounds a little vague. It's currently 1am here and it's been a long day.

[foggy]

Matt, I would say both approaches are viable with Veeam B&R and you should decide based on your own requirements. For example, backing up by datastore (or some other VM container like folder) would certainly be a better option in the environment with vMotion as newly added VMs would be automatically picked up by the corresponding job without the need to update it. The other factor is deduplication - grouping VMs with similar guest OS into the same job allows for better deduplication ratio.

Anyway, you can search the forum for what other customers do depending on their requirements. Probably, someone will chime in to share his experience.

Thanks.