Upgrading our Veeam backup server
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.
We also offload the backup files to an external hard drive, weekly. The 1GB network connection in the server is going to be much slower than the USB 3.0 connection, I believe.
With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?
How would you connect the NAS directly to the server? USB? iSCSI? Using either of those solutions turns them into a SAN solution which would be much more fragile than a NAS solution, though might not matter substantially in this case - Scott would know better than I.
In this case, your NAS or DAS would nearly the same. Same hardware, you'd just be picking which protocol to use to communicate with the hardware. NAS would be using SMB, and DAS would be using iSCSI (it would be DAS only if you connect ethernet directly from the server to the ReadyNAS, otherwise it would be considered SAN, because you would be talking over the network.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?
It's true as a theory. You don't have a reasonable "pure DAS" option here with a SAS connection, though. No one makes a good one in the price and size range. Using the NAS as a "direct attack file server" is fine here.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.
RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.
You would care, but only up until it has enough IOPS then you wouldn't care further. Backups have a maximum potential write throughput, once you can accept it at full speed, you don't care that you could take more because there is no more to take (currently.)
Said so much better than I could.
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@Dashrender said:
How would you connect the NAS directly to the server? USB? iSCSI?
NFS as NAS. If he hooked up with iSCSI, it would be a traditional DAS.
USB isn't an option with the gear he is looking at.
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@Dashrender said:
How would you connect the NAS directly to the server?
Er, crossover cable. Is that right?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
How would you connect the NAS directly to the server?
Er, crossover cable. Is that right?
Why crossover? 1Gbit and faster doesn't require crossover anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Auto_MDI-X
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Oh, ok. I really have no idea. I was just getting info from here https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/198210-10gb-and-nas-direct-connect-or-need-a-switch
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Oh, ok. I really have no idea. I was just getting info from here https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/198210-10gb-and-nas-direct-connect-or-need-a-switch
You can always do direct. Should be fine with straight cable. Nothing requires a switch, a switch is supposed to be invisible on the network.
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My Veeam server is a VM and I use a Synology 1813+ with 8 4TB Seagate Constellation HDDs in OBR10 as a backup repository. With Veeam 9, you can create the scale-out backup repository that allows you to add several device types and combine them into a single repository. I would not run Veeam on a physical server.
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Furthermore, with several (maybe most) Synology models you can expand/add storage via optional enclosures that would be completely transparent to the devices you are presenting the volumes to. So it would not even need the Veeam scale-out feature to allow you to increase storage capacity.
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Is it ok to run Veeam server as a VM on the host that you want to backup, or should it always be on a separate host? Or can you install it on two hosts for redundancy? We only use local storage for VMs.
Is you repository part of a VM or just raw storage outside of any hypervisor?
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You can install Veeam where ever you want. Just keep in mind that if you install it as a VM on your one and only VM host, when that host is down, so is your ability to restore any data, So this means that you need to have a plan on who you are going to gain access to your backups so you can restore them to another VM Host.
As for the backup data - @wrx7m did mention that he is backing up his data to a Synology 1813+ which he called a backup repository. While he didn't specifically say it, we can only hope that his VMs aren't running from that same appliance. If that assumption is true, and he has a VM host failure, his recovery scenerio could be like the following:
install Veeam on a desktop in the office
import backups from Synology
install hypervisor on new VM host
restore VMs to new VM hostThis is a very top level view of steps, but as you can see it's really not that complicated.
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@Dashrender said:
You can install Veeam where ever you want.
Well, yeah. But just because I can doesn't mean I should.
My second question is basically asking if the repository is a CIFs share on the NAS, or storage on a Windows/Linux VM (with the VMs storage being a datastore on the NAS) . I'm inclined to use the latter, but don't know what's best.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
You can install Veeam where ever you want.
Well, yeah. But just because I can doesn't mean I should.
I suppose that's true. If you have a Windows license free to run Veeam on the VM host, I'd probably do that.
My second question is basically asking if the repository is a CIFs share on the NAS, or storage on a Windows/Linux VM (with the VMs storage being a datastore on the NAS) . I'm inclined to use the latter, but don't know what's best.
If the ultimate location of the data is on a NAS, I'd skip the intermediary step of the VM.
here's my setup:
VM running AppAssure Replay (it's like Veeam, mostly) attached to that I have DAS storage - a Drobo Pro that only works with either USB 2.0 or iSCSI. So I have the appliance mapped directly inside my Replay VM. In case of VM host failure, I can move the iSCSI connection to another host, install Replay, import the backups and be back in business. -
@Carnival-Boy You can run as a VM and Veeam will backup itself/its own VM. I only use local storage too. If you add the NAS in Veeam, you don't need it to be a VMware datastore.
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I am not running any VMs off of the NAS that I backup to. That would just be stupid.
I do have a file share for my Graphic design team on another NAS (older Synology 1812+) that does have a VMware datastore on it and a single VMDK for data. That VMDK is backed up during the normal Veeam backup to the normal backup repository.
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@Carnival-Boy Mine is a CFIS share on my NAS that is not shared via Windows but by Synology, itself.
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Another thing is that with Veeam you should also be backing up the config. This would allow you to install Veeam wherever and import/restore the config to another box. Access it by going to the Menu and selecting Configuration Backup.
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@wrx7m said:
@Carnival-Boy You can run as a VM and Veeam will backup itself/its own VM. I only use local storage too. If you add the NAS in Veeam, you don't need it to be a VMware datastore.
@wrx7m said:
@Carnival-Boy Mine is a CFIS share on my NAS that is not shared via Windows but by Synology, itself.
These two posts seem to contradict themselves. First you mention only using local storage, then mention using a NAS. Do you mean you only use local storage for the VMDKs? If so, that's contradicted by this post.
@wrx7m said:
I do have a file share for my Graphic design team on another NAS (older Synology 1812+) that does have a VMware datastore on it and a single VMDK for data. That VMDK is backed up during the normal Veeam backup to the normal backup repository.
where you mention that you have a VMDK on a different NAS.
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@Dashrender I mentioned that I only use local storage as it applied to the Veeam server itself. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I also specifically mentioned that a VM has a separate VMDK that is on the secondary NAS.
