Building a Veeam Backup Server

[jcosta]

So I want to take a R430 or equivalent and use it as my main Veeam Backup Server.  My thought is to Virtualize Server 2012 and have Veeam installed on it and then have it backup my 3 hosts with about 5 vms on each one.

I am going to make the R430 pretty hefty so if any of the hosts die then I can restore the VMs to the backup server and get them back up and running while I repair the host that went down.

My only concern is storing all the backups on a vmdk file.  The thought of all backups being stored in one single file that could end up corrupt is very scary.  I would prefer if they were on a NTFS partition on the backup server.

What are my options for keeping the main backup server virtualized using vSphere but not storing the veeam backups in a single VMDK file?

Thanks!

[vfk]

Hello, Veeam does not store backups in vmdk bur rather in vbk file, also if you want a separate backup for each vm then you would have to create a policy for each vm, of course you can imagine there is a significant overhead doing this way, usually similar vms are grouped in the same policy.

I didn't understand what you were trying to do with R430, are you planning to use that purely for Veeam backup? Or will that be esxi host?

[jcosta]

Yes, I want to virtualize ESXI the main backup server.  So if I am running the Veeam backup software on a virtualized 2012 R2 operating system and point it to the virtuaized hard drive as the storage for the veeam backups then the vbk files will be stored on the vmdk hard drive which is what concerns me.

I would prefer to store the backups on a SAN or NAS device if possible.

Thanks for ht reply!

[cykVM]

Do you have a SAN/NAS available? It should support iSCSI, at least I would prefer iSCSI to CIFS/SMB shares for the backup destination.

[ch1ta]

Storing backups on VMFS is not considered the best practice, indeed. So, the question is - don't you happen to have any decommissioned server that can be stuffed with bunch of local disks and used afterwards as physical repository? Some NAS device might also be an option. Though, not only would the first proposed approach cost you less, but also the performance would be better in most cases.

Cheers.

[iiToby]

Hi Jcosta,

Your solution to not store all your Veeam backups in a single VMDK is to not use a single VMDK. You can attach multiple drives to the Windows 2012 VM, Veeam also supports a large number of destinations, such as CIFS and Tape.

With Windows 2012 you can create a number of storage spaces and have them mirrored if required. You can have 2 Windows 2012 Servers you use as "Backup Storage" and have them mirrored, to cut down on the space you can enable de-duplication you can cut down on backup space.

Please have a look at these resources

http://www.veeam.com/wp-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012-r2-in-depth.html

Deduplication best practices with MS Windows Server 2012 and Veeam Backup&Replication

Windows Server 2012: Deduplication for beginners

Cheers

@iiToby