Veeam - To NAS or not to NAS?

[kennysarmy]

Looking at various quotes for refreshing our backup infrastructure there appears to be two schools of thought regards using a NAS or a true server.

 

This thread on the Veeam forums suggest that a NAS is not their preferred method, but we'd be using a good quality Synology NAS connected via iSCSI.

https://forums.veeam.com/vmware-vsphere-f24/nas-recommendations-for-veeam-b-r-t25244.html

 

I wondered if anyone else had to make a similar decision to us regards a true Server or NAS for the initial snapshot repository?

 

Cheers.

[kidpressingbuttons]

Use a mix of readynas and synology here with veaam. Works great!

Full backup takes roughly 4 hours.

[Cache]

We backup to a NAS box (over the network, not iscsi) and then use the Veeam backup copy jobs to copy elsewhere, not had any issues with it.

[DavetheITguy]

We use veeam - ISCSI QNAP and a monthly Tape Archive.

[Davit2005]

A repository is a repository surely they would not give you many different options if it had to go on Locally attached storage i.e. SAS etc. From a performance perspective if you are backing up you want to have bottlenecks to an acceptable amount but you can see where the bottleneck is when a jobs run.

 

You could create a dedicated network for iSCSI or a NAS to keep away from other network traffic and think about encrypting the backup files.

[FragglePete]

We're backing up with Veeam to local drives (dedicated physical backup server), this then gets copied to Tape followed by a Copy Job to a NAS Box (Synology 1850+ attached to AD, Shared Folder).

 

I'm still baffled by the speed of it compared to BackUp Exec .

 

I did experiment using iSCSI with the Synology box but I was a bit disappointed in its performance - my current config works great.

 

Pete

[Davit2005]

Veeam is awesome, BackupExec jus became a PITA and too buggy. As soon as Veeam supported tape back in version 7 we dropped BackupExec like a hot stone :-), yes Veeam has taken a while to catch up on the tape side but they now do GrandFather > Father > Son Media sets so they are catching up.

 

We had locally attached SAS shelves at last place due to the 48GB of backups but configured a 2nd Repo on an old server with a direct FC SAN storage which used to be our production SAN.

 

Full backups of all 100+ VM's in about 10 hours total.

[Tefters]

2x Lenovo EMC PX12-400r with 16TB storage on WD red drives in a raid 5 over trunked network.

 

1 share on each mapped as SMB repositories to the Veeam Proxy, 1 for backup jobs and the other for backup copy jobs in 2 different locations around the school away from each other and the server room.

 

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/servers/network-storage/lenovoemc/px12-400r/

 

Setup using a reverse incremental backup job with a retention of 60 days. We use VSS on the file server setup as 30 days so theoretically I can go back 90 days on the file server by spinning it up as a lab VM with a DC and copy files out of the VSS.

 

Nightly backup job takes around 2 hours while the very first full backup takes around 24 hours.

 

This is with heavy compression too and houses all our crucial services AD, Exchange, Skype 4 Business, Sims etc...

 

Always follow the 1-2-3 DR rule.

Edited February 21, 2017 by Tefters

[Sylv3r]

We backup to a QNAP box with Veeam - no issues.

[mrnoisy]

2 disk boxes and to tape, we have more backups now than we know what to do with, we are also looking at going cloud via azure, love Veeam best product ever !

[PotNoodleTech]

For the actual Veeam server I use a physical server with local storage for optimum speed during the backup. Then use NAS's as secondary targets.

 

I wouldn't change this method, if I was replacing it I would do the same thing only with a bigger Veeam box with more local HDDs!