You want to talk about having a virtually sound backup infrastructure running in the span of one hour? Well, Veeam made it happen for me today. I created a new VM and installed Veeam 4.0 Backup and Replication and it's partner, Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. 5 minutes later, with some configuration of vCenter and hosts, I was up and running. A true pain-free install because I only skimmed through the Installation PDFs.
A little background on the virtual setup for this demo. 2 IBM x3650 M2 servers and a NetApp FAS2020a SAN running all VMs on NFS datastores.
I haven't had a chance to mess around with the vStorage API & Veeam so that's what I initially wanted to accomplish today. I took a test VM for a spin using "SAN with failover" option to a CIFS share, just to see how it would compare with our current backup method. I received a weird error on the Veeam VM saying "Windows - No Disk error - Exception processing C0000013 parameters.... ". After some digging around on the tubes, I found an article that has nothing to do with Veeam, vSphere or virtualization but gave the solution http://bit.ly/8oPA0g. Turned off the VM, removed the floppy drive, restarted the backup job and this time it kicked off. This method was only getting a throughput of 9MB/sec. After talking to @gostev from Veeam, he suggested I try using the VMware vStorage API "Virtual Appliance" method because I am running NFS shares in my Sphere environment. He informed me the only way to get Veeam's "insane" speeds is to have a physical server tied into the Fiber Channel fabric of your SAN architecture. I guess if you have the means, go for it, but we're a small shop trying to take everything virtual. For the good news, the virtual appliance mode gave 3x performance increase over the standard network backup, and I peaked out around 29MB/sec. Which is almost 2x faster than our current backup solution that ranges in speeds of 6MB-22MB/sec over the network.
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see how the same VMs in an iSCSI environment would behave. I SvMotion'd the 2 VMs over to an iSCSI Lun. I used the Virtual Appliance method again to a new directory and performed a full backup, which maxed out the throughput at 35MB/sec. Perhaps just a fluke, but I wanted to test.
After seeing a tweet from Mr. Veeam himself, Doug Hazelman @VMDoug, "@KendrickColeman I think once you see how fast your incrementals go with Changed Block Tracking you'll stick with NFS for your dedup", I decided to go ahead and add 30 files, totaling 230MB and create an incremental. WHOA! 93MB/sec! Heck, why not just do another incremental without adding anything new, 135MB/sec! I'm guessing it would have gone much faster if I was using a VM with more substance than 8Gb worth of OS and files.
After a very short (3 hour) test time, I'm very pleased with the product and the support. The Backup and Recovery UI is very simple and easy to manage. I even took 20 seconds to see if anything has changed for file-level recovery and tested that successfully. A sure fire product to add to your vSphere Virtual Infrastructure. Thanks to Gostev and Doug and the official @Veeam twitter feed for helping me out today!
Up next is testing out replication to another data center over an IPSEC tunnel...