Correct Number of Veeam Proxies?

[nmace]

We're now running almost 100% on our new Nutanix cluster. As such, the "SAN Mode" backup model no longer applies. I've deployed a single VM to the cluster to act as the proxy for backing up VMs. To get the best performance, how many Veeam Proxy VMs should I have? I do have times when I have more than one VM being backed up from the cluster @ once (multiple jobs). Should I have a Veeam Proxy for each host in the cluster?

[Vitaliy S.]

Can you please tell us how many VMs you're backing up? The more proxy servers you have, the more VMs you can process in parallel. If we talking about rough numbers, then single CPU core will be used to process one virtual disk of the VM. In order to say how many proxy servers you need, you should know how many VMs you're backing up and what is your backup window.

[nmace]

Roughly ~65 VMs a night.

[Gostev]

If you are meeting your backup window, then there are no reasons to have additional backup proxies. Otherwise, adding more proxies might help to shorten the overall time to backup your whole environment. Thanks!

[nmace]

Interesting. For some reason I was think because the proxy used SCSI commands to hot add the VMDK of them VM-thats-being-backed-up to itself, that you needed to have a proxy on each host. What happens if the proxy is being used to backup VM1 and the job for VM2 kicks off? The proxy isn't available, so does VM2 get backed up via Network mode in that case?

[Gostev]

As long as at least one backup proxy is available that can backup the given VM in processing mode other than network mode, the job will wait for said proxy to become available.

[foggy]

Interesting. For some reason I was think because the proxy used SCSI commands to hot add the VMDK of them VM-thats-being-backed-up to itself, that you needed to have a proxy on each host.

Not necessarily on each host. General requirement is: in order to use hotadd, proxy VM should have access to all datastores you're backing up VMs from.

What happens if the proxy is being used to backup VM1 and the job for VM2 kicks off? The proxy isn't available, so does VM2 get backed up via Network mode in that case?

Proxy availability depends on how many tasks (i.e. VM disks) it is capable to process simultaneously (keeping in mind that only single disk of a given VM can be hotadded by a given proxy at a time, which is essential for VM's with multiple disks).

[dellock6]

Adding a couple of suggestions for nutanix: when running on NFS, it's indeed the best possible design to have one proxy per ESXi server, and configure the advanced parameter EnableSameHostHotaddMode. With it you can avoid NFS locking problems that can happen with proxies not running on the same ESXi server of the saved VM.
Otherwise, since Nutanix has 10G connectivity, network mode can be in this scenario a really good alternative, especially for VMs with a small daily change rate.

Luca.