Help with VEEAM Design

[Ultra_VM]

All,

I have 2 ESXi hosts with 5.5 on them.
I have 6 2008 r2 VMs and 6 win 7 VMs.
A HP store Virtual 4330 connected to the hosts on 4 iSCSi gigabit Ethernet connections.

I have a physical server with FC attached HP LTO5 autoloader.

Typically in the past all my backups were physical servers with full backup to tape so its all different for me now and Im seeking advice.
I still need to have some backup on tape for Quality requirements. but can do primary backups to disk...

Any one any advice.

[foggy]

David, with your setup the most straightforward way would be to install Veeam B&R on the physical server, backup locally using direct SAN transport mode, and then offload backups to tape.

[Ultra_VM]

Foggy the iscsi datastore that stores the VMs is only connected to the Hosts by 4 x iscsi gigabit adapters..
The physical server for backups is connected to another switch which has 2 gigabit nics connected to and 2 nics from each host.
Will that mean that all the data from the iscsi storage will come through the host(s) and to the LAN NICs to the backup server ?
Or is there a way to backup the SAN by connecting the physical server to the switch the iSCSI stuff is on and backup directly from SAN.

Also Ive seen some using veeam backup storevirtual snapshots, is this better than backing up directly using VEEAM.

David, with your setup the most straightforward way would be to install Veeam B&R on the physical server, backup locally using direct SAN transport mode, and then offload backups to tape.

[foggy]

Or is there a way to backup the SAN by connecting the physical server to the switch the iSCSI stuff is on and backup directly from SAN.

Yes, you will get the highest performance by providing the backup server direct access to the LUNs.

Also Ive seen some using veeam backup storevirtual snapshots, is this better than backing up directly using VEEAM.

Backing up from the storage snapshot allows to significantly decrease RPO and load of the production VMs/datastores.