Guideance on to use or not use a backup proxy

[eholz1]

Hello Members,
We will be transitioning to Veeam B&R ver 11 (or whatever the latest is)
We will be using a Dell Unity for backup storage.
We will be using a Windows 2019 server for the backup server.

I am wondering if in the new environment using a backup proxy would help.

Our current backup infrastructure is running Veeam ver 10, we backup virtual machines all hosted in the vmWare environment.
Our current repository is an Exagrid 10000E

We backup 13 vm's. Each vm has about 110GB disk size to about 300GB in size, depending on the function the vm fulfills.
We have no backup proxy at the present time. It takes about 1.5 hours when Veeam runs a "full" backup, but only a few minutes
if an incremental is run.

Our new environment will have a lower vm coujnt.

I see to use a proxy backup server it requirs a file share (we would use smb), a cache reposityr, etc, etc
Would attempting to use a backup proxy server be of any benefit in this case?

Thanks,
eholz1 -Veeam lover

[foggy]

With Unity you could take advantage of backup from storage snaphots, but I'm not sure you need it with the environment that small. What transport mode are you using now? If it is network (nbd), then switching to hotadd would give you a good performance boost. But you actually do not need a dedicated proxy for that - Veeam B&R is itself a proxy by default and in case it is a VM can utilize hotadd during backup.

[eholz1]

Hello Foggy,
Thanks for the reply. Well we are using network for transport, with the "default" proxy i.e. the VB&R server itself.
It is my understanding that you can only use storage snapshot backup with the Enterprise version of veeam - our license
is for the basic version.
Thanks for info,
eholz1

[veremin]

If we are talking about socket-based licenses, the required edition is higher: Backup from Storage Snapshots is available for Enterprise Plus edition only (or for all VUL-based offerings). Thanks!