Veeam Best Practices

[robm82]

Hi all,

I am probably asking what is a very "general" question so I must apologise, as I cannot seem to find the information that I am looking for.

Is there any documentation or help guides that Veeam produce that explain what the Veeam best practices are in terms of setting up the physical Veeam environment and also any best practices in terms of setting up the backups jobs so that I can secure my VMware environment as best as I can (by that I mean setup the backup jobs in the best manner)? Also any best practices on backups being replicated to a secondary site would be good as I would like to shift my backups to a DR site; I noticed that for example there is an archival section within backup copy job which I am not 100% sure as to why you would use this.

Any documentation around best practices and the "why it is best practise" would be very useful.

Thanks.

[foggy]

Robert, did you have a chance to look at our Help Center and specifically User Guide?

[robm82]

Yes I had a look through that, but couldn't find anything specific on best practices. What is for example the best practice on setting up a Veeam proxy? That sort of information I cannot find within the User Guide...

[foggy]

Hard to judge on what's best for your environment without knowing it. You can definitely find some general considerations in the user guide (here's some specifically regarding proxy servers) and using search on this forum.

We also have the Best Practices doc for the previous version, basic recommendations still applicable to v8, though.

[robm82]

That best practices doc for the previous version is just what I am after. Is there any training videos that can help with this, or is it literally a case of reading the best practices doc having a go and noting any gotchas for next time?

[foggy]

There are probably some general training videos in the Veeam University course.

[hoFFy]

for me it was very helpful to attend the face2face training for the VMCE and to take the exams for the last versions to become a VMCE. The deeper you get into it, the better you understand which settings are the best for the given circumstances.
Every customer we administrate is a special in its own way... you will only get the best out of it, if you deeply understand whats going on in VBR and what will be the best for the given circumstances (VMs, software, network, server, storage, RPO / RTO...).
I must admit... I adminsitrate about 50 different customers, all with their own circumstances, and theirfore I work a lot with Veeam's products every day, but there are still some things I still have to ask in the forums. Sometimes I still need the documentation.
Veeam works out of the box. Not like many other products. But when you have to backup a lot of data in a given backup window and we are no longer talking about "start backup in the evening... it finishes somewhere around midnight and your 5 VMs are safe".. you need deeper knowledge!
Welcome to the forum, read the documentation, ask your questions when the problems persist, or if you need more /deeper information

[btmaus]

Hi robm82,

As a new customer to Veeam, I'm in the same boat as you. This is definitely an area that Veeam can improve on.

I read the User Guide and looked through the Help Center, as well as completing the free training on Veeam University. However, most of my questions were still answered. What I found useful was the Veeam product demo's, which are live, and you can ask a couple of questions: http://www.veeam.com/product-demo.html

If you log into the Veeam site and go to the Support section, you can search for KB articles and I found a couple there that had some useful info too. Probably the best thing I've done though is test the Veeam environment and try various settings etc.

Good luck!

[seadave]

I had a lot of the same problems. In my opinion, out of the box Veeam is configured too aggressively as it relates to the Max Concurrent Tasks option in the VeeamProxy. It saturated our SAN with multiple concurrent snapshots. I would start with that setting low (2 - 4) and watch your performance, increasing it as possible. If you have a super fast all SSD - 10Gb SAN, maybe not a problem, but for our 7.2K - 1K Equallogic is was not pleasant until we figured that out. Works fine with the lower settings.

I had a lot of problems getting my head around moving from an agent based solution that never had any contention problems (with inefficient storage and throughput), to a VADP, CBT, Snapshot based solution like Veeam that can put a tremendous load on your SAN if you allow it to. I think part of our issue is we purchased a brand new Dell 730XD and that system was able to demand way more from our vSphere Cloud than it could provide. Again after proper tuning it is working better.

This is the thread I created related to moving from agent based D2D2Tape to Veeam's agentless D2D2Tape.

http://forums.veeam.com/tape-f29/lookin ... 25360.html

Pay attention to the concept of scheduling jobs, nearly all at once vs the more traditional concept of chaining (which apparently is frowned upon by Veeam folks).

http://forums.veeam.com/vmware-vsphere- ... 30252.html