USB Passthru Drive as Veeam Storage

[AndyR]

Hi,
Currently I have my Veeam backups going to my SAN and then these are backed up to tape each night. It works fine but for a number of reasons I need to get the Veeam backups out of the SAN and onto some other storage, so for quickness/cheapness sake I am thinking about putting a 2TB USB drive into the ESXi host which has the Veeam VM on. Would love a NAS but don't have the funds at the time.

I have never used USB passthru on ESXi before so I have no idea of the performance I can expect. I am thinking about getting one of the WD My Book 2TB USB3 drive as they are USB2 backwards compat so it should work on ESXi. I think these are 7200rpm drives too.

My nightly Veeam backups of about 70 Vms are all reverse incremental and take about 3hrs each night, generating around 30gb of changed data a day so nothing massive. My processing rates for my jobs are between 60MB/s and 144MB/s. Overall my backups are 800gb but that's only because I don't have space on the SAN so am limited to 2 restore points. With a 2TB drive I should be able to get a longer restore point.

Does anyone use Veeam (running in a VM on ESXi 5.1) and have the backup store on a passthru USB drive like this, and if so how do you find it? Also the supported USB list from VMware is very small but I guess most USB3 (back compatible to 2) should run OK?
Thanks,

Andy

[foggy]

Andy, previously our customers reported quite poor performance of USB passthrough targets (there is a couple of existing topics regarding that on this forum). I'm not sure whether this is still the case with ESXi 5.1, but most likely it is.

[AndyR]

Thanks. I tried to get approval for a proper NAS in its place but my company wont spend the $1500 for a NAS and a couple of 2TB drives, so I've managed to get them to approve just 2x 2TB drives and I am going to repurpose an old Core2Quad PC with OpenFiler and these 2 drives in a RAID1 and then get Veeam dumping them to that via iSCSI. I imagine that should be better performance than USB anyway and will hopefully tie me over until they approve the funding for a proper NAS.

Thanks!

[Tobias_Elfstrom]

I have tried USB Passthru on a smallscale two node vSpehere 5.1 cluster with just about 1 TB of VM's. It worked just fine. Sadly I have no numbers but depending on your network load it might not be slower than a NAS device per say, it would depend on the NAS, the network and the USB device that you compare so if you do in fact have a USB device today, go ahead and give it a try!

BR Tobias