Thoughts on this setup?

[backupquestions]

I have a few different clients that I host VMs for on my datacenter and my one vcenter/vsphere/vsan cluster. These clients have 1gbps fiber connection to my datacenter.

I'm planning to put a physical windows server repo/proxy at their locations, and then they would take backups against my one vcenter/their vms.

Is there any issues with pulling backups from the same vcenter (different vms though) with multiple veeam servers so long as you stagger out your timings the best you can?

Furthermore, I need to understand the following... I was thinking of just sticking with NBD for transport mode for them, but I know it would be slowish since it is 1gbps network.

If I were to set up a VM proxy on my datacenter which can perform hotadd virtual appliance mode for them, I'm confused on how it would make it much faster on overall speed. It seems to me only the "read the data" part would be faster due to the VM being on the datastore of the backed up vms. Once data is read, it still has to travel over the 1gbps network to the physical veeam repository. On restore scenario, same deal, data must be transported to the proxy vm over 1gbps network first....

So is it just the read and then maybe final writes (if restoring instead of backing up) that gives the benefit? Would it be any real gain over NBD due to the bottleneck of network?

[HannesK]

Hi,
no problem from Veeam side to access one VCenter with multiple VBR servers.

The proxy VM would to the data reduction before the backup goes over the 1GBit link. That's why it is recommended.

Best regards,
Hannes

[backupquestions]

Makes sense, I will plan to do the proxy then on my side. Thank you!

[Murigar]

The backup proxy should live in the same datacenter with direct and fast access to the .vmdk volumes.
That way the compression / deduplication takes place before it traverses the wire back to the storage repository.