NAS recommendations for Veeam B&R

[omg]

We are planning to go with Veeam backup & replication software. We use VWWare esxi 5.5 as hypervisor.
We have 2 virtual host machines with around 9 VMs. Initial backup file size is around 600GB . Daily increments
might be around 10-40GB.

To store the veeam backups we are planning to buy some NAS devices. Preferably 2 of them.
One onsite and second one offsite,so they both can sync.

1) Which NAS device do you all recommend ?

2) I guess most of the NAS devices have built in Sync capability. Would you recommend using the NAS
built in sync capability (or) upgrade Veeam software to enterprise plus edition and use the WAN accelerator feature ?

Any other suggestions and recommendations is appreciated.

[Gostev]

We do not recommend using NAS as a backup target at all.

We also recommend that you "sync" offsite with Backup Copy jobs, as opposite to storage-based replication (which will sync corrupted data just as well as it syncs good data).

But if you absolutely have to go with a NAS, buy one that is able to run our data mover in a system partition, so that you could add it as a Linux server based backup repository. This requires x86 processor, and preferably 4GB RAM (2GB RAM at the very least).

[dellock6]

And in addition, be able to be connected via ssh, and with perl locally available in the system. Many NAS devices are running some linux distribution, so you should be able to run the Veeam datamover on it. Avoid low-end NAS, they run non x86 cpu and have poor performances usually.

[pawel]

There is a good thread here on using Synology as a Linux target:

http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-re ... t1961.html

I suggest you read through the entire thread as the initial posts become outdated with new Synology updates. I have a DS1815+ which I am currently copying to using iSCSI. Even though Gostev says NAS drives are not recommended I do believe that NAS drives with iSCSI don't fall in to that statement.

On your off-site target you will need to be able to install the agent (Linux or Windows, if using Synology obviously Linux) and have a tunnel to that target. If you are thinking of using the Synology I would highly recommend you try out the steps mentioned in the thread above to get the Linux agent installed on it before buying it for your off-site target. However, running a Linux or Windows server with a nice RAID array might be a better option especially since your costs don't increase all that much and you have hardware that's up-gradable. That's the way I'm leaning. Having a ESXi server offsite which will be replicated to using the WAN accelerator (through a VPN tunnel) and then backup copy jobs running to a VM server under that ESXi host. This way we have our production data, our backup data locally (hosted on the Synology), a production server ready to spin up off-site, and an off-site backup repository that backup copies are sent to (this can be Synology but since we already have a server off-site and our data isn't humongous I am leaning toward setting up a Server 2012 that will host the VPN, the WAN accelerator, and the RAID array for the off-site backups).

Gostev, please correct me if I am incorrect on the statement that iSCSI NAS is perfectly fine (that's my current setup which seems to work well).

Edit: I should add that the CIFS (shared folder) method of moving data to the NAS drive is absolutely horrid. So you don't want to use that.

[pawel]

One more thing, you mentioned using builtin software on the NAS to do replication. What I have found is unless you have a huge budget for very expensive storage devices most of the software on these NAS drives is not smart enough to transfer extremely large files (the size of your full backup file will be very close to the VM size) over a WAN connection (sometimes not even a LAN connection). They were just not built to do that (they are designed to replicate shared folders where you store documents directly on them). If someone has an affordable option I'd love to learn about it, but from my experience you will be much better off just using the WAN accelerator to move your backups.

[Gostev]

Pawel is correct, most of NAS devices use rsync for replication, which does not scale to large file sizes.

Pawel, while block-based protocols (iSCSI and FC) are certainly more reliable than file-based protocols (CIFS and NFS), they are still subject to questionable performance optimizations some NAS software features, which is what impact backup reliability in corner cases. This is why I generally advice against using low end NAS (considering there are much more reliable alternatives present). I cannot comment on specific NAS makes, models and firmware versions though.

[pawel]

Thanks for clearing that up, makes sense.

In my personal experience I've had good luck on the DS1815+ hooked up to my LAN through iSCSI. I read a lot of complaints about performance while doing my research but I can get between 50-100MB/s which I really can't complain about (I'm only using one 1Gb port for now and the bottleneck is at the source, not the target). For the $1K this unit cost (not including the drives) it's really not a bad deal, a server with a dedicated RAID array would have been similar in cost and taken a lot more time to get going. I don't have the same flexibility I would have had if I built the server myself but the amount of time it saves me in management is worth it in my personal case. For the off-site server I will be running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 essentials with a cheap hardware RAID, I'll see how the performance compares.

What does worry me a bit after reading the linked thread about storage recommendations is corruption issues when using appliances such as the Synolgy, so I'll keep a close eye on that especially since Synology uses a software RAID.

[JohnGG]

gday everyone, currently we have 6 terabyte of datastores in total and i have a separate server for replication but we are looking at a NAS box for backups in case the SAN died.
This will be part of the disaster recovery so the next question would be, whats a good NAS box to use for backing up and if needed be able to run exchange, sql and a file server until we purchased a new SAN.

I was looking at this one, https://www.pccasegear.com/products/309 ... otswap-nas wich may be over kill.
I was going to enable iSCI and then format to NTFS in Windows. Is this the way to go?
PS:I also have a smaller Qnap NAS in another branch which i enabled iSCI and formatted NTFS as a storage unit of 4 terabyte.

[veremin]

Check the recommendations provided above and ask for additional clarification, if needed. Thanks.

[Najwa]

Hello everybody
I have a question on this topic.
Can you please tell me is it possible to use a Dell server to host the veeam software and store the VM on that server and then store a backup copy on the NAS server.
IS that a good solution ?

Thanks

[foggy]

Yes, you can store your backups on the Veeam B&R server as a primary repository and have them copied to a secondary location afterwards. Thanks.

[jamcool]

We tried NAS (some large Hitachi NAS that is used for file share and other video/imaging with I believe a PB of storage and 10 Gbps networking). We found the backup speed slow (topped out at about 250 MBps with "target" being the bottleneck) trying to backup once a day with 20 TB backup file (about 1 TB chang per day) initially but if you backup file is only 600 GB using a dedicated NAS may not be bad assuming your do not have some short back window requirement or doing multiple backups per day. You could even go with an inexpensive server with RAID capability (do not do RAID 6 as write speeds are horrible) as the repository that can hold a few drives if have some decent hardware not in use. If can do 10 Gbps networking. also definitely stay away from NAS with weak processors as mentioned. They can make a difference.

[araza1977]

We are going to buy Veeam Backup and Replication. According to your above messages. You don't recommend NAS at all. Can you please tell the reason behind this? We were planning to buy Dell NX430 for backup storage but stopped after your comments on NAS. PLease Suggest

[Gostev]

Did you read the post linked along with the recommendation?

[csydas]

We are going to buy Veeam Backup and Replication. According to your above messages. You don't recommend NAS at all. Can you please tell the reason behind this? We were planning to buy Dell NX430 for backup storage but stopped after your comments on NAS. PLease Suggest

Hi Muhammad,

In short, NAS devices for your primary storage is a bad idea simply because most of these devices do nothing to ensure the integrity of the data on them. They're usually consumer level backup devices, at best (very) small business. The hardware is often shoddy, the OS is a heavily modified (read: limited and neutered) Linux distro, and the NASes are often under-provisioned, meaning that restores will be terrible, as will any synthetic operation (stuff like Synthetic Fulls, Reverse Incremental, etc).

You can use a NAS, sure, but it's just more problems than its worth for your backups. The same money could be spent on tossing Linux on an old server and just making a ZFS repository or BTRFS or anything. The configuration overhead is not nearly as much as it may seem, and some quick searches on your favorite search engine will give you more step by step tutorials for Linux than you can shake a stick at. Both support storage snapshotting, and has saved my butt at least a few times. If cost is a concern, just dump the money into some good HDDs and let a proper OS (Debian, RHEL/CentOS, etc) do the hard work for you.

[araza1977]

Thanks a lot, csydas for guiding me briefly.

[jamcool]

We tried NAS (some large Hitachi NAS that is used for file share and other video/imaging with I believe a PB of storage and 10 Gbps networking). We found the backup speed slow (topped out at about 250 MBps with "target" being the bottleneck) trying to backup once a day with 20 TB backup file (about 1 TB change per day) initially but if you backup file is only 600 GB using a dedicated NAS may not be bad assuming your do not have some short back window requirement or doing multiple backups per day. You could even go with an inexpensive server with RAID capability (do not do RAID 6 as write speeds are horrible) as the repository that can hold a few drives if have some decent hardware not in use. If can do 10 Gbps networking. also definitely stay away from NAS with weak processors as mentioned. They can make a difference.

Just to update, we ended up going with two Window servers with each having a local DAS with HPE 6020 external cabinets, a bunch of 12 TB 7,200 RPM SAS drives and SAS SCSI controllers. We did RAID 5 but are considering redoing with RAID 6. The network is all 10 Gbps. As far as the performance goes, it has been great and our bottleneck is on the Source side not the Target side. With some large backups we are getting in the 1-2 GBps range but most run in the 400-600 MBps range as may have more than one job running. I believe the issues we were seeing with NAS and SAN storage is that it is all shared. The initial speeds with NAS and SAN were very good but within a few minutes would drop a lot and sometimes would be all over the place (slow, fast, slow, fast, stop, then fast, etc.). With DAS it is dedicated and seems to have none of the issues. Maybe a dedicated SAN or NAS may do better but for performance we are very happy with local DAS.

[Gostev]

Thanks a lot for coming back to share this with the community, Jason!

[andreas2012]

Hi,

Today we have the following configured backup environment

Backup up both VMware and physical servers
1 primary server with many disks that is the first backup repository
Then we have backup copy jobs that do a copy over to one NAS box with CIFS shares, and this NAS box is also mirrored with another NAS box in another physical location
We also have a tape station that we regular do a manual copy to from the primary server.

The NAS box is now out of warranty and we are looking into buying new equipment, so a question what should we buy ?
The NAS box is a deduplication appliance, but as I understand CIFS NAS appliance box is not recommended ?
Would it be smarter to buy a physical server with a lot of disk space, run Windows Server 2019 and use deduplication ? or is that good enough deduplication compared to a dedup appliance box

This is the NAS we where looking into
https://www.veeam.com/kb2882
https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publicat ... -ww-en.pdf

Thanks for comments.

/R
Andreas

[PetrM]

Hi Andreas!

I'd suggest to opt for a device with a lower price as long as it matches exactly your needs: for instance it might be performance or disk capacity.

By the way, this article might be helpful, it provides with deduplication appliances best practices and contains references to some of vendor specific guidelines.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Merging with another similar thread - please review for other hints/reviews/suggestions.