New environment advice

[mrpugster]

Totally new to Veeam so apologies if these questions have already been answered elsewhere, I've just not had the time to trawl through the documentation so your help is greatly appreciated.

Looking to use it for a medium to large VMware environment, currently 700VM's but will grow to around 1000 soon - iSCSI SAN is Equallogic, network is 10GB Cisco Nexus. Mix of Windows, Linux, Oracle, MS SQL etc. Sizes range from 20GB to 500GB so nothing too large. Environment is 24/7, however between 5pm & 7am usage is minimal.

I've got money to spend if need be, however I'm planning on reusing some kit I have, here's the spec:

Dell R805 (2cpu - 64GB RAM - 2 x 10GB Nics) with direct attached MD3200 (around 40TB usable in Raid 6) - I have around 3 setups if I need to use them. I'm thinking about running at least 2 of these setups in different parts of the Data Center so the backup can compete quicker.

Should I go with running Windows 2012 R2 physical on this server, running direct SAN access or build a FreeNAS / Linux storage server and run the Veeam Windows 2012 server on a VM?

I'm thinking towards the first option, keeps the solution contained and offers most CPU / RAM dedicated to Veeam.

Recently did a test where I ran Veeam as a VM with direct SAN access writing to some spare Equallogic iSCSI space. Here's the summary, settings are pretty much out of the box:

Processing rate was 100 MB/s
Bottleneck: Source

Many thanks
Pete

[Shestakov]

Hello Pete and welcome to the forums!

You are correct, direct SAN is the recommended transport mode.

I'm thinking towards the first option, keeps the solution contained and offers most CPU / RAM dedicated to Veeam.

VBR server itself is not resource consuming. It`s better to dedicate RAM/CPU to the backup proxy.

Environment is 24/7, however between 5pm & 7am usage is minimal.

You can set backup window to keep backup jobs processing out of the range.

Thanks!

[mrpugster]

thanks, I'll eventually be running around 40 - 50 ESXi hosts. Would you suggest a Veeam VM Proxy (Win2012 R2) for each host? Or best to run with a couple and see how performance goes? VM capacity isn't really a problem, plenty of CPU/RAM at present.

I've only installed Veeam as a single test deployment current on same server so figured I'll just run a few tests over the coming days.

One other question will I need to go full SQL Server or will the free version be ok for that many VM's?

Thanks

[PTide]

Hi

Would you suggest a Veeam VM Proxy (Win2012 R2) for each host?

Well, there is no point using VM as a proxy if you want to utilize direct-SAN - VM proxies are used for hot-add mode. It would be better to deploy a dedicated physical server for a direct SAN access.

One other question will I need to go full SQL Server or will the free version be ok for that many VM's?

Please see the requirements:

Due to its limitations, Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition can only be used for evaluation purposes or in case of a small-scale production environment. For environments with a lot of VMs, it is necessary to install a fully functional commercial version of Microsoft SQL Server.

700 VMs is quite a lot.

Thank you.

[foggy]

Our typical recommendation is going with full SQL if you have at least 500 VMs (however, depending on your environment, configuration, and backup load, you may be ok with Express even with 1000 VMS).

[mrpugster]

Thanks for the info, hardware went in today will get a chance to run some proper tests very soon.