With V9 rollout, should my strategy change for larger sites?

[electricd7]

Hello,

I have been using Veeam for quite some time in my customer environments. We traditionally have used NFS for our VMware storage and that meant several (or hundreds) of NFS datastores presented to VMware depending on the site. We had always setup a single job for each datastore in 90% of the cases. We have since ditched the monolithic storage devices (iscsi included) and have move whole-hog into VMware vSAN for our storage. The biggest change as far as our Veeam strategy is concerned is that now we just have a single (or 2 or 3 in some cases) VERY LARGE datastores as opposed to a bunch of smaller NFS exports. Up until I started reading about v9, I had just assumed that we would move to the backup by folder or backup by tag method and still have lots of jobs to manage in Veeam. However I have seen bits and pieces in reading that suggests the ability to backup all VMs in a single job because of how the backup-chains have changed. I am not sure exactly that I understand this language, as I am not sure how the backup chain being per-vm instead of per-job would change my mind about how to backup the environment, but could someone shed some light on this feature so that I might make a more educated decision?

Also I LOVE the new scale-out respository feature! This is one I have been asking for for a long time as it will make managing storage so much easier. That being said, however, is there a way to migrate my 4 existing repositories into scale-out repositories (200TB in total) or am I stuck creating new scale-out repos from scratch to take advantage of this feature? Thanks in advance!

Chad

[foggy]

However I have seen bits and pieces in reading that suggests the ability to backup all VMs in a single job because of how the backup-chains have changed. I am not sure exactly that I understand this language, as I am not sure how the backup chain being per-vm instead of per-job would change my mind about how to backup the environment, but could someone shed some light on this feature so that I might make a more educated decision?

Hi Chad, those bits and pieces refer to the fact that per-VM backup chain allows to use multiple write streams to repository with just a single job. Previously, when all VMs data stored in a single backup file (hence single write stream to the storage), multiple streams (required to fully saturate the storage) were only possible with multiple jobs.

That being said, however, is there a way to migrate my 4 existing repositories into scale-out repositories (200TB in total) or am I stuck creating new scale-out repos from scratch to take advantage of this feature?

You can just add existing repositories as extents to the new scale-out one, Veeam B&R will suggest you to update existing jobs to target them at the scale-out backup repository.