New Physical Server questions

[ewatson]

Hi Everyone,

First, thanks for the incredible information in the other posts I've been looking at. It's been very helpful for me to get up to speed, however, I can't seem to find some more pertinent answers and just looking for a confirmation. So far, installation has been pretty straight forward thanks to Veeam University and the folks here on the forums.

We're moving our VBR to a physical server. Win2016, Intel XEON Gold 5218 (with 40 cores) and 94gb of useable RAM. We currently run 44 backup jobs, involving about 65-70 VMs managed by VMSphere.
Our new server 2 drives in RAID1 for its C: drive at 3.5 TB and another 15 drives in a RAID6 that make up one large volume of 261TB. This large volume is the home of the SOBR.

Questions are as follows:
1. I'm considering ReFS, but unsure if it's worth it...just keep things simple?
2. Should we keep the one large volume, or would it be better to repartition the large volume into smaller volumes of, say, 2x130TB? I was thinking of doing this to help manage the repositories. For example one volume for backup repositories and the second one for SOBR.

I hope this question makes sense, and hasn't been posted before. I've searched and learned a great deal (I'm new to this area), but am still wondering about the above.

Thanks for helping!!

[rennerstefan]

Hi,

let me try to answer your questions.
1. Yes use ReFS as it will give you benefits like block cloning free of charge. And there is no real downside to it.
2. Make it one large repo as it will allow you to keep it simple (as you said) and also you “only” have 15 disks so I’d try to get the most out of it. Even servers with 56 disks use a single or only two volume across them. So in your Case I’d go with a single one for sure

Hope that helps

Thanks

[Gostev]

Agree.

1. ReFS is worth it IF you want to keep things simple. Simply put, it helps to worry about performance and storage consumption much less in the long run.

2. Considering your relatively small drive size and quantity, a single RAID6 volume is the best choice.

[ewatson]

Thanks folks!!
Yep, that answers my questions. Appreciate you spending the time to help.

[matteu]

hello,

maybe you could also use this server as linux immutable repisitory and build a vm for veeam and proxy server.