New User to Veeam

[seandonnelly]

We are currently configuring the following in our environment.

VNX 5300 fully redundant with 7.2TB of storage space. 3 HP DL360p Gen8's with 96GB per server and 16 cores per server, initially running around 10 VMs. Total storage capacity from all these VMs is around 1.2TB. I have an HP Storageworks x1600 G2 with 12TB.

What is my best practice for backups in this case? With our current solution we use Backup Exec and DAS and have about a month worth's of data accessible to us at any time. If I do the image level backups am I correct that I can still use that backup image and recover individual files or databases if needed?

[ZachW]

It would be nice if you were a little bit more specific as to what you want best practices for. As for your second question, yes, with Veeam you will be able to perform restores at the granular level you would like to.

[seandonnelly]

I know some of the answers will be dictated by business needs and requirements. I guess I'm wondering (as I'm new to Veeam, VMware, and the EMC VNX) can I treat these like my old physical server backups? Do I need to do less often or more often? Is there an advantage to doing image level backups vs snapshots, etc? What do I need to look out for that might be different now that I'll be managing virtual machines?

[ZachW]

Yes, this will be entirely dependent upon your business needs. I mean the key this is to treat the backups for VMs just like you would treat your physical server backups. Just because the servers are virtual doesn't make backup really any less important nor does it necessarily make the backups more important.. Backups are backups and backups are important. They key is to have backups ( in my opinion ) on at least a daily basis of the VMs you want to be processing and have multiple copies of these backup files stored just in case. Doing an image-level backup in comparison to snapshots? Well snapshots are considered to be a short-term functionality of VMware, to be used for patches, updates etc. Anything beyond this is considered bad practice.

[seandonnelly]

Thanks mate. This gives me a starting point and I was reading earlier on the snapshots, which makes complete sense. I'll start off doing dailys and then fulls on the weekend and see where that takes me. Much appreciated!

[veremin]

Here you can find an article regarding pros and cons of using VMware snapshot in production environment. Might be useful for you.

Thanks.

[Yuki]

Zach,
With what you have - you can implement a backup that is light on the servers in terms of performance hits during backup and very fast to recover from. You will also be able to keep a lot more than a month of data