Design of backup solution -VSphere, Veeam, FreeNAS/Openfiler

[Xysiu]

Hello to all Community Users (this is my first post),


We are small company and since our computing needs recently has growed we decided to virtualize our infrastructure. Our plan is to deploy one (for start) VSphere 5.1 host (2x 6C CPUs, 32GB+ RAM, 4.5TB internal SAS HDD space in RAID) as base for 3-4 production VMs. As a backup solution I planned to use new VSphere Data Protection (VDP) feature in VSphere 5.1 Essentials Plus but deeper analysis revealed some disadventages of VDP (fixed-size datastore, file level restoration does not support EXT4 partitions and so on). It made me think about another backup solution - currently I'm concerning Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 with VMware 5.1 Essentials (not Plus since VDP is not a need with VBR, vMotion is not necessary for us either). As a part of backup solution I'm planning to deploy another physical machine - 6.0 TB in RAID NAS based on FreeNAS/Openfiler with NFS share mounted as datastore in VSphere 5.1 host. On this NFS datastore I'm planning deploying Win2008/2012 VM with installed Veeam Backup & Replicaction (backup server) with 2 VMDKs: one smaller for Win2008/2012 and one huge for Veeam backup files (thin provisioned 5.5 TB NTFS VMDK). My qestion is if this planned solution is optimal and safe? Currently we have no budget to buy specialized SAN/NAS appliance, that's a reason I'm planning using FreeNAS/Openfiler with NFS. In the event of VSphere host failure I'm still having all VMs backed up on VBR backup server VM on NAS. After host is brought up I should be able to add VBR VM from NAS to new vCenter Server VM and recover production VMs to VSphere host's internal datastore.


PS. Downtime is accepted during Disaster Recovery/host failure.


Thanks in advance for comments and suggestions.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

My question is if this planned solution is optimal and safe?

Pretty much, though many customers end up with using iSCSI connection to present available capacity of the Openfiler to the Veeam backup repository.

Thank you!

[Xysiu]

Thank you for your reply!

Just one more question - Have anybody had problems with OpenFiler's/FreeNAS iSCSI implementation with VBR? My question is based on posts regarding issues with VMware VSphere and OpenFiler's iSCSI stack. No problems with VBR via iSCSi?

[Vitaliy S.]

Some customers have already shared their experience with this kind of setup, please check out our existing discussions > http://forums.veeam.com/search.php?keyw ... iler+iSCSI