Single ESXI host Best Practice...

[bishoptf]

I have searched and read through the similar posts regarding single host installations but I am trying to make sure that I understand what is the preferred setup, here is my layout. Single esxi 5 essentials host, dell r310 quad core with hyperthreads, 24gmem, 2Tb DAS storage with a dell h700 raid 10. I have the following vm's, vcenter vapp, esxi vma, SBS 2011, server 2008r2 (spiceworks, anitvirus, vcenter client, etc), Centos 6.x Fog server. My backup target will be a readynas pro 2, with 2TB of storage, I can present nfs, smb, cifs etc. My question is in my environment should the veeam server be physical (uggh) or will it be ok to run in a vm? If I run in a virtual environment what are the recommendation for vcpu, disk space etc? The idea is once I backup to the NAS unit I will schedule a backup from it to usb attached disks which will be rotated offsite. My other question is for disaster recovery, if I have my backups on USB and I need to rebuild my ESXI box, what is the process for doing that? Does veeam backup the esxi host or do I need to do that separately? Soory for so many questions, but trying to do it the right way to start with...Thanks

[tfloor]

Is your "return" key broken?

[bishoptf]

Is your "return" key broken?

Ha, yeah should have broke it up, sorry about that...

[Jfmoots]

Veeam can run in a VM, without an issue. I'd put 2 to 4 CPUs on it. We recommend 2 CPUs per concurrently running job. Hard disk space in the VM does not neet to be much. We don't really store much of anything on the VM. From the release notes:

"Hard Disk Space: 300MB for product installation. 1 GB per 500 VM for guest file system catalog folder (persistent data). Sufficient free disk space for Instant VM Recovery cache (non-persistent data, at least 10GB recommended)."

Veeam does not back up your ESXi installation. I'm not sure I'd personally spend anytime doing that because I could probably install it as quickly as I could restore it. If you have the type of disaster you're talking about, you'd need to present that USB drive to Veeam (Likely a newly created VM with Veeam B&R installed) as a repository, rescan it, and your backups will be available to be restored from.

[Vitaliy S.]

Tom, all of your questions are already covered in sticky F.A.Q., please review: >>> READ FIRST : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS <<<

[bishoptf]

Tom, all of your questions are already covered in sticky F.A.Q., please review: >>> READ FIRST : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS <<<

Thanks, yes I have seen that and was one of the reasons I was asking..Lots of documentation, lots of ways of doing things

I was just trying to save more time by doing it the preferred way the first time and not having to repeat and do things multiple times since I support this all after hours, I was just looking for best practices that my setup would fall in then I would have a roadmap to go by...just trying to shorten the learning curve

[Vitaliy S.]

Actually not that many

For you I would recommend to go with virtual backup server (local proxy) with 4 vCPUs configured. As James told you we do not backup ESXi hosts, so you will need to re-deploy it manually, and then start the restore process via newly installed Veeam B&R server or a standalone restore extract.exe utility.

Hope this helps!