Veeam and HPE SimpliVity best practice

[maol]

Hello Guys,
just trying to figure out the best way to handle the backup of a mid size HPE Simplivity environment with B&R.
Searching in the web the only doc I found is that one: https://www.veeam.com/backup-replicatio ... 80_wpp.pdf but is not completely clear for me.
About transport modes it says:

Unlike traditional server and storage infrastructure where each functionality is owned by dedicated hardware, HPE SimpliVity takes a
hyperconverged approach. HPE SimpliVity Data Virtualization Platform provides a single, shared resource pool across the entire IT stack,
eliminating point products and siloed IT architectures. With this new, modern approach, there does come specific guidelines that need to be
met when adding Veeam Backup & Replication to ensure optimum performance. Along with these guidelines, a standard Veeam setup and
installation procedure can be followed as outlined in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide for VMware vSphere.
• Configure HPE SimpliVity hardware to use 10GbE interfaces—Standard configurations often come with enough 10GbE interfaces to
handle the native data services in HPE SimpliVity 380 while management networks run on 1GbE adapters. Veeam will be leveraging
VMware ESXi™ host management networks to retrieve virtual machine backup data, so it is important that they also be configured with
high-speed interfaces.
• Veeam Backup & Replication on a physical server—While it is possible to make this server virtualized within the HPE SimpliVity
federation, it can result in a single HPE SimpliVity compute node network adapters being overutilized for backup processes. This is
because Veeam reads virtual machine data from other nodes in the federation through the NIC it has direct access to. A physical server
will offer a dedicated 10GbE HBA where no other services are running. A physical server can also optionally house Veeam backup data
locally or just process and send it to a purpose-built backup appliance such as HPE StoreOnce over Catalyst or an HPE Nimble Storage
Secondary Flash Array (SFA).
• Veeam Backup & Replication on a virtual server—If a virtual server is preferred, Configure HPE SimpliVity hardware to use 10GbE
interfaces is still very important by supplying 10GbE adapters for management networks. It is also important to have a dedicated 10GbE
port to send Veeam backup data to purpose-built backup appliances such as HPE StoreOnce over Catalyst or an HPE Nimble Storage
SFA. Veeam best practice is to never store its backups within a virtual machine in the HPE SimpliVity federation.
• Force data retrieval over Veeam “network mode” (NBD)—While a virtualized Veeam Server can use VMware Hot Add capability for
retrieving virtual machine backup data, it is not recommended for HPE SimpliVity due to possible performance and reliability concerns.
Due to this, Veeam network mode should be forced within Veeam backup proxies

So, If i correctly understood i should avoid the usage of hot-add transport mode and force the NBD - regardless of the nature (physicals or virtual) of the veeam proxy.
Am I interpreting correctly that document? just because in real environment i noticed that the performance of hot-add is still better than the NBD on my simplivity environment.
And, as long as I have physicals proxy available with 10GBE NIC should i do a try with direct NFS transport?

thanks
Lorenzo

[CLDonohoe]

Lorenzo, hot-add is not forbidden on SimpliVity. It's just not our stated best practice.

hot-add will work and it may give you better results. SimpliVity engineering was originally concerned about the ability of hot-add to perform at scale. They were concerned about overwhelming controllers on the SimpliVity nodes which could cause false positives for failures (and thus failovers). We never encountered these problems in our lab testing, but the best practice of using NBD mode was a strong recommendation of SimpliVity engineering.

So should you decide to use hot-add, it may very well give you better performance. It's just a matter of knowing this has not been tested at scale and you would need to monitor the ongoing health of your environment.

[athome]

Hi!

Why would the use of hot-add cause more load on the Simplivty controllers than the use of NBD?

A

[foggy]

As mentioned, this concern was expressed by HPE, cannot comment as we haven't observed such behavior in our lab. You could request some details from the Simplivity team.