Type of Storage to hold Backups

[StoneEdge]

Hi all,

Today I request to the Storage guys some Storage to hold the backups, and ask some questions regarding what type of Storage(NFS, iSCSI and RAID).

Can anyone give some lights what is the best choice to add this Storage to my Backup Server? The backup server is a physical server.

Also I will use this post to ask a second question

We have in out vCenter around 30 hosts and 350 VMs, in 5 Datacenter and 10 Cluster. We will only acquire licenses for Veeam for 3 Clusters, the rest will be licensed in the second phase. How can I use this only for the 3 Cluster that I want?? Because I can only add vCenter, or a host to the Veeam Infrastructure.

Thank You

Stone

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Stone,

Let me start with your second question

License key is only assigned to the host when you start backing up/replicating VMs from that host. That said, if you do not attempt to backup VMs from hosts which will be licensed in phase two, you're good to go.

As to your first question, then it really depends on what options you have to choose from. Could you please give us more details on that?

Here is the existing topic with the same question: Recommended storage configuration

Thanks!

[StoneEdge]

Hi Vitaly,

Thank you for the reply.

The license issue, is ok.

Regarding Storage, the topic you add is for a Virtual Veeam, don't know if is the same configuration.

We have NetApp to hold this backups. Will I use NFS, or iSCSI?? What is the best choice?

Stone

[Gostev]

iSCSI

[StoneEdge]

iSCSI

Thank You Gostev.

Any recommendations?

Stone

[Vitaliy S.]

Just present your NetApp device to the backup repository server via iSCSI initiator, format it with NTFS, and start using it as the backup repository.

[Gostev]

Any recommendations?

Sorry, those were well explained in the above referenced topic, and I assumed that you read it.

Simply put, we also used sometimes virtualized Veeam servers, both proxies (that's easy, ok) and also some repositories, but we then used iscsi initiator in the guest mounting directly a storage LUN, formatted via NTFS. If something goes wrong and you loose VMware, you can connect via another physical server (even a pc if you want) via its iscsi initiator to the lun, mount ntfs and start recovering.

When you grow in terms of VMs/TB to be saved, I think better solution is to have physical repositories...

As always, it's not perfect anyway; like all design considerations, there are many pros and many cons in every design...

[StoneEdge]

Yes I have read it. But like I said this is a Veeam physical server, not a Virtual Server.

But if I do not need more recommendations other than is on that topic and the answer from Vitaliy, than is ok.

Thank You

Stone

[Gostev]

Yep, does not matter physical or virtual in this case. Just as Luca explains, you can connect this LUN to both virtual and physical server, or even to a desktop.