VM Backups on Production SAN

[brownfc]

Hi,

We currently have one vSphere 5 ESXi (Essentials Plus) host running 5 VMS connected to a HP 2000 SAN via iSCSI. We do not have a physical Server to run Veeam Backup & Replication v6 so we are looking to use a new VM instead. Going forward we will be purchasing another ESXi host and a NAS device to store the veeam backups. Does anyone currently store their backups on their production SAN?

thanks.

[Gostev]

Does anyone currently store their backups on their production SAN?

I highly doubt, as this makes no sense? What is the point of storing backups on the very storage that you are trying to protect?

[Cokovic]

I've got a customer where we have exactly this setup. A FC SAN with something about 4 TB space. One seperate LUN with 1TB for the Backupserver connected via FC. Rest of disk space as VMWare datastore. About 27 VMs running on two hosts. Storage is a SUN StorageTek ST2540 with two enclosures and a total of 17 300GB 15k SAS disks configured as RAID6 DP and a hotspare.

Forward incremental mode with weekly synthetic fulls and transform to rollbacks. 7 retention points. That way we got always only one fullbackup at a time and six incrementals.

BUT we are offloading the backups every day to tape (FC Tapeloader LTO Ultrium 4). Once per week a fullbackup of all Veeam files. Daily incrementals. Monthly full which supersedes weekly or daily backups. And as far as i can tell you it works like a charm. But i think it depends on your environment as you are going to put heavy IO load on your SAN

[brownfc]

This wouldn't be an ideal solution for me either but it's something we can try until the NAS turns up.

[homerjnick]

We backup our VM's to our Production SAN as the point of backing up VM's is to restore if they corrupt rather than if the storage fails.

We have a N3600 Netapp with 16TB across SATA & FC aggregates. About 8TB is ESX Datastore LUN's and our Veeam server is a physical Server that has a 3TB LUN on the same Production SAN.

At a weekend I transfer the Veeam backups from our Production SAN to tape via CommVault and I also replicate key VM's across our WAN to our DR site thus it doesn't really matter than our backups from Veeam are on our Production SAN.

SAN's should, in theory, never fail since they are designed to handle many failures like disks, controllers etc...but it is our single point of failure...our SAN goes then everything goes but then we pay for a support contract with IBM to get us going within 4 hours.

In this day and age we can't afford a second SAN.

I do secondary copies to NAS devices from Veeam as well, one onsite and one offsite. So we are well covered.

We still have a few critical physical servers and our CommVault server has an old 3TB IBM DS4300 SAN to handle those backups but I also use CommVault to backup the Veeam Repositry and then transfer to tape as I mentioned earlier.

So backing up your VM's to your Production SAN suits us since most restores are not for storage failure.