do we require veeam gateway ?

[dirkdigs]

i am backing up vmware virtual machines (storage is nimble)
Backup repo is QNAP and Type is "SMB"

Do i need ot create a dedicated Veeam gateway server? I'm a little confused on the role of this component and if it is required in my scenario?

[MarkBoothmaa]

Is the SMB share accessible from your VBR server?
If so it may actually be better mounting it as a iSCSI disk as you will get much better performance.

[Andreas Neufert]

Veeam has a source and target datamover concept. They can run on the same server or different servers depending on resources or dataflow. You can as well use multiple servers for load balancing for each role.

In a small environment your can use the Veeam Server as Proxy and Repository/Gateway Server.
In a bigger environment you can install the role on different servers or use multiple of them for load balancing.

Repository means access to a block disk (iSCSI/FC/SAS/local)
Gateway Server means that the same software is started there but the target is a SMB/NFS/Catalyst/DDBoost target.

As written above, always favor iSCSI over SMB it will be in general faster and is much more stable with non enterprise storage.