DR Storage, VMWare recovery and Veeam.
Hello r/sysadmin I have a request for comments/suggestions in regard to storage for a "rapid DR"/Backup solution for our vmware farm. (we already have full file backups in place).
And Budgets are of course tight. We are looking at a max of probably around 50,000$ Total (I am not located in the US) The Veeam licensing would likely take up a good chunk of that though.
This is not something we can use the cloud for... I know, but its for regulatory reasons. ( I imagine someone with the cloud to butt addon had a chuckle there)
Its around 40-50TB of VmWare files Located on a HP EVA SAN, though this is growing.
We are exploring different options, presently we are looking at a NEXSAN E18V solution paired with Veeam. It would be running 18 (or more likely 36) 4TB Sata 7200rpm disks in raid 6+hotspare.
We have also talked about a NAS Solution. Management is pretty hard set against anything without enterprise level support. (Not that I necessarily disagree. Its just very likely to be part of the limitations in this case).
Anyone have comments, suggestions, experiences or questions ?
I will be happy for any input as well as to answer any questions I reasonably can.
Posted Jul 6, 2015, 7:15 AM UTC
What kinda IOPs do you need? You could look at a Synology RC18015xs+
Good question.
From my reading of Veeam it uses or can use on storage transforms to enable incremental forever. Which obviously would need a decent amount of iops though how many is beyond me at present.
On the other hand my understanding of the requirements for our use case is basically for something that can restore our vm's relatively quickly in case say our non redundant SAN ups and dies while being moved. Which is what I tried to say by using "DR Storage" instead of backup.
Raid 6 has crappy write speeds but decent read speeds. Even so it should have a decent-ish sequential write (I make it out to around 200-300MB/s using this: http://wintelguy.com/raidperf.pl )
And while Veeam would be nice for automating the whole shebang if its just for this specific DR case I could theoretically just clone the entire VMFarm to the storage using PowerCLI which should be sequential writes afaik.
TL;DR: Not technically certain, I'm guesstimating not a lot. But I am sufficiently unfamiliar with veeam that I am not sure. The NEXSAN Raid 6 Solution comes recommended by a vendor for use with Veeam and that's not exactly a speedy one.