Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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nunciate
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New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by nunciate »

Well, it is time to consider buying a new Veeam Repository server. We bought an HPE Apollo about 4 years ago. The thing has about 185Tb of usable space with SSD Raid Write Cache drives, all in a 4U high-density chassis. I really like it as the cost was reasonable considering the size. I think we paid around $60k for the thing and it came with a brocade FC switch as well.

Our posture is to retire old hardware to our DR facility so we took or original server which was just a DL380G7 with 6 disk arrays and put it in DR for backups there. That unit is about 8 years old and I have had bad drives every week for a couple of months. Yesterday I had 3 bad drives all at once and some of my data was corrupted. Therefore it is time to consider buying a new Production backup server and ship the old Apollo out to DR.

I just wanted to make a post and see what other folks are using these days? It looks like the Apollo is still a viable option so I'll be getting a new quote for that.
My requirements are that the unit is FC connected back to my production SAN and that it has a large amount of storage. Since I'll be upgrading I'd like to get more than the current 185Tb I have today. Even with that much space I still have to keep an eye on utilization from time to time. I am thinking of something over 200Tb, maybe 250Tb. Another thing I would like is better performance. Even with cache drives, this thing is pretty slow when a lot of backups are running. I am considering all Flash for maybe All 10k drives since my current setup is all 6Tb 7200RPM drives.

So what are you all using out there? Let's hear some recommendations.
PetrM
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by PetrM » 1 person likes this post

Hi Alan,

I'd suggest to see this thread, there are quite interesting recommendations and performance test results with all-in-one Apollo appliance. One more useful source of information is our best practices guide, for example you can find general recommendations for block repositories on this page.

Thanks!
nunciate
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by nunciate » 1 person likes this post

Thanks, yea I have a 4510 in production today. I posted a big write-up on it on here when we deployed it. It is a great server. I'll likely just buy another one with more capacity unless anyone has better recomendations.
TaylorB
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by TaylorB » 1 person likes this post

I just use 2U servers with 12x 7200RPM high capacity drives (HPE DL380, etc). It is very affordable and now with REFS we get great deduplication and synthetic backup performance. I don't see much reason to go with any high performance or expensive storage. We can get 700-800MB/s over 10GbE with a big RAID 6 and a good array controller. We also run a single 12-16 core chip and 32GB of RAM and it doubles as a busy proxy as well. We get about 110TB usable with 12x12TB drives in a RAID 6. For your capacity needs you could either buy 2, or 1 plus an expansion shelf that holds 12 more drives.

Buying any commercial NAS or deduplication appliance costs 5x as much for the same storage and offers little. Veeam already has built in solutions for Dedupe, compression and replication.
wa15
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by wa15 » 1 person likes this post

With a Dell R740xd2 server, you can have 26 x 3.5" drives in a 2U chassis; with 14TB drives that'll give you 364TB raw. There are even 16TB drives available for a max capacity of 416TB.

And you can throw in an FC HBA to tap into your production SAN. Great performance and relatively inexpensive. You can pack it with as much RAM and CPU as needed. Plus you have options for a DAS array if you ever need to scale out.
nunciate
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by nunciate »

Oh that Dell R740xd2 seems interesting. I'll get one quoted.

Was just working the numbers. One other concern I have is the write performance of a system with a lower number of drives. My Apollo has 60 total drives in it so you get quite a bit of performance writing across all of those drives.

What type of RAID would you all use on a system with say 26 drives or if I had a new Apollo with say 48 active drives. Not counting hot spare drives.

I used RAID-60 on my current setup because I was worried about drive failures but ultimately I think that was a big performance hit and I haven't had that many failures. I put half the drive in 1 RAID-60 and the other half in another and set them with 3 parity groups. Running the numbers if I did the same config with a total of 48 12Tb drives I'd end up with 2 volumes with 216Tb of usable space in each.
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by jamcool »

Do not forget array rebuild times.

I would stay with RAID 60 or worst case RAID 50. I have a HPE Proliant DL360G10 with external disk controller connected to an HPE D6020 External cabinet that holds two drawers or 35 x 12 TB 7,200 rpm drives each. We did 2 spares per drawer and RAID 6. It takes about a week to rebuild the array when loose a drive and performance is horrible during that time. I wish we had done RAID 60 to get better rebuild times. Also our backup bottleneck is VMWARE host as we are using NBD so having faster disk would buy us nothing for backup speed. Hoping the new multi-threading NBD in version 11 helps with backup times. We had done "hot add" originally but found NBD faster for large number of VMs backed up.
nunciate
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Re: New Veeam Repository Recomendations

Post by nunciate » 1 person likes this post

Finally, after all this time, my new Apollo 4510 G10 system showed up. I have 32 12Tb disks and 12 1.92Tb SSD for write caching. I got it in the rack and realized the power supplies require 220v and I only have 110v connections in my rack. Funny my older Apollo in that rack takes 110v. So I'll have to get new power pulled or figure out if HP can send me power supplies that will work with what I have.

Anyway, looking to put the 32 drives in a Raid-60 array with 2 parity groups to give me around 336Tb usable space.
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